From the perspective of an American military veteran with apostle 3 decades of service:

Excellent job! I was impressed with the content and see the analysis as being on point also. Of course, that may be because it underscores a point i hav noted for approximately 20 years (I’ve been retired almost half that time).

The key here, is that our American military is led by cowards and incompetents. This is systemically trained into them and started as early as the Clinton administration. The “don’t ask-don’t tell” compromise started a massive attack by the civilian leadership (congress is as guilty as the executive branch), that decided to use the military as a social experiment for liberal/leftist ideology.

As they continued their massive attack against the military, they decided the generals that didn’t fully support the agenda would have to go. They methodically dismantled the system of training good leadership that had made us the most powerful military machine that had ever existed. They started by seeking the heads of generals that didn’t accept their destructive interference, using as an excuse every tactical mistake done by captains learning to lead. This led generals to abandon the “centralized command and decentralized execution” strategy that had worked so well for so long.

By the time 9/11 attacks were underway, I remember the general who had the final say on shooting down the attacking aircrafts (General Arnold) telling out comms personnel, I want to see everything the pilot sees while he sees it so I can tell him when to fire and how to do it. Give me this capability now”. He also wanted the ability to pull the trigger himself from the ops floor. His fear of being fired for the mistake of a pilot was palpable.

When I went through a year long masters degree granting military leadership course at Air War College in 2005, we studied 300 books on history of war and went through war gaming and development of different levels of war planning among many other things. I was among the top of the class and spent an average of 15 hrs each day studying to really learn all they had to offer. The top 10% of the class were the only ones that were ever allowed to attend an advanced course from which top generals would select their advisors. When I chose not to spend another year attend that course my previous commander contacted me and said they had asked her to talk me into taking the course (something that I guess was unheard of). During this experience I developed an understanding of how they were degrading the military rather than building it up. One tactic was to protect poor leadership decisions by sacrificing a lower level, more brave leader who dared to stand out from the crowd. It became clear that in order to survive and progress, you must keep your head down and put in enough time to outlast bad leadership, but never question that leadership or do anything that outshines that leader. It was clear through their game of whack-a-mole that we still see today.

American military has great potential with many heroic and competent tacticians and may wise and well trained strategic thinkers at the operational level. They will continue to be weeded out until the civilian leadership stops seeing the military as a pool of social experiment lab rats.

I hope some of our wiser, conservative executives will seek out those leaders (like the battalion marine commander that was fired and imprisoned for daring to ask generals for accountability for the way they failed the past 2 decades of Americans who sacrificed all to make the world safe against terrorism). If these governors would hire leaders like this as their AGs and send them through the regular active duty War colleges and general officer courses, they could begin the culture change within the guard which could spread to the regular active duty military. This would only work if the federal executive and legislative branch were barred from using the military for their own pet projects that have nothing to do with protecting American and allied lives and winning wars.