The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Military Reform: A Key @GOP 2016 Issue

Posted on | December 22, 2014 | 41 Comments

by Smitty

I left Active Duty, inter alia, because I was disgusted by seeing uniformed officers held to a higher standard of conduct than their Commander-in-Chief, Monica Lewinsky’s ex-boyfriend.

Contempt for #OccupyResoluteDesk, while not as great a driver, did not enhance my interest in supporting the Reserves past the bare minimum.

Obama is an unpopular president in the eyes of the men and women in uniform. Yet his two-term administration is etching a deep imprint on the culture inside the armed forces. As commander in chief, he will leave behind a legacy that will shape the Pentagon’s personnel policies and the social customs of rank-and-file troops for decades to come.

There is a massive opportunity for the GOP in 2016 to:

  1. Define a coherent foreign policy
  2. Restore the country to a regular budgeting process
  3. Review the force structure requirements of the foreign policy
  4. Offload all the idiotic social engineering stierscheisse, and instead hone our military based upon the organizing principle of lethality.

I’m confident that our military culture will recover from the cloud of Progressive flatus with amazing speed.

via Hot Air headlines

Category: Military

Comments

41 Responses to “Military Reform: A Key @GOP 2016 Issue”

  1. Adobe_Walls
    December 22nd, 2014 @ 3:37 pm

    There’s a great deal of superfluous political correctness that must shoveled out of that stable.

  2. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    December 22nd, 2014 @ 4:00 pm

    Where is Hercules when you need him?

  3. Quartermaster
    December 22nd, 2014 @ 4:04 pm

    It will be hard to recover from the damage inflicted by the regressives if the GOP doesn’t off load its regressives. The GOPe has gone along with the social engineering as well, and they have done little to end any of it when they had the chance.

  4. Adobe_Walls
    December 22nd, 2014 @ 4:11 pm

    Which begs the question ”to what purpose” if the GOP nominates yet another squish.

  5. Neo
    December 22nd, 2014 @ 4:32 pm

    … but he’s trying to find them work …

    The Pentagon has announced that up to 1,300 U.S. troops would be sent to Iraq in the New Year, despite promises by President Barack Obama that there would be “no boots on the ground” in Iraq or Syria.

    … wearing sneakers, I assume.

  6. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    December 22nd, 2014 @ 5:15 pm

    The GOP needs to nominate the most conservative candidate who can win

  7. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    December 22nd, 2014 @ 5:15 pm

    But really cool ones…

  8. Wombat_socho
    December 22nd, 2014 @ 5:42 pm

    Something like this, perhaps.
    Because SAFETY.

    http://images.sneakernews.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/new-balance-night-rainbow-26-1.jpg

  9. Adjoran
    December 22nd, 2014 @ 6:15 pm

    The biggest tasks will be rebuilding a) the Navy, and b) the officer corps, which is being depleted of good, experienced officers.

    One source for funding would be the idiotic ‘biofuels initiative’ that costs billions, and all the diversity programs. Everyone associated with either of those programs should be immediately cashiered in favor of bringing back real soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines.

  10. Quartermaster
    December 22nd, 2014 @ 7:05 pm

    The Regressives think that’s a squish.

  11. Quartermaster
    December 22nd, 2014 @ 7:06 pm

    Does that have safety lights for night ops?

  12. HMSLion
    December 22nd, 2014 @ 7:20 pm

    One of the bigger problems will be that the military desperately needs to be rebalanced for the modern world. What we’ve got now is a pint-sized version of the force structure we had in 1990…and that force was designed to fight a land war in Europe. Big Army, Big Air Force (with lots of tactical jets), medium-sized Navy. The modern world is less predictable and far more maritime, which means that the Navy needs a bigger piece of a bigger pie.

  13. Wombat_socho
    December 22nd, 2014 @ 7:37 pm

    Navy and Marines, yes.

  14. Wombat_socho
    December 22nd, 2014 @ 7:38 pm

    It glows in the dark.

  15. Adobe_Walls
    December 22nd, 2014 @ 9:56 pm

    Quartermaster is correct that’s exactly how they characterized Romney last time. While some might argue (not very persuasively) he is a conservative, that he did not in fact get elected is pretty conclusive.

  16. M. Thompson
    December 22nd, 2014 @ 10:44 pm

    Step One: End Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute and all racial classifications in the military.

  17. M. Thompson
    December 22nd, 2014 @ 10:45 pm

    Hey, I got issued New Balances at Great Mistakes!

  18. Jim R
    December 23rd, 2014 @ 12:48 am

    Color me paranoid, but I’m all in favor of maintaining a Reagan-sized military: BIG Army, BIG Navy, BIG Air Force (which explicitly includes SAC and not this p!ss-weak Global Strike Command or whatever it’s called these days), BIG Marine Corps. It goes without saying that we’ve got to have the technological edge, too.

    The BIG Military can handle all the little wars that we seem to get into* and has a good chance of deterring the Big One (China? Russia? Norkies?) that would be catastrophic for everybody. If, for example, China made a grab for Taiwan or Putin decided to go all-in on Ukraine or Lil Kim decided to visit Seoul, could we really stop them? How many CVBG’s, armored divisions, and tactical fighter wings could we get into action, and how soon? I think the answer is… not very many and not in a hurry.

    Let’s also recall that it was the tech-heavy conventional forces with LOTS of M-1’s, F-15’s, CVBG’s, stealth fighters, &c. designed to whip the Soviets that polished off Saddam without much trouble.

    I would also say that our nuclear forces need a thorough overhaul. Not only are we still relying on systems designed when many of us were children (or even when our parents were children!), I have little confidence that those systems are maintained with the sort of readiness that is required to make them a viable deterrent. That’s an invitation for big trouble. There’s got to be a Curt Lemay or Tommy Power out there somewhere; we need him (or her, for that matter) now as much as we did in ’49.

    Finally, I agree with Adjoran: we’ve got to get away from these idiot New Age programs that make the military into some sort of a king-sized freshman psych / sociology experiment. I don’t have a problem with gays or women in the services so long as they can cut the mustard and don’t cause trouble, but they don’t need to be there (and we don’t need to lower standards) just to satisfy some whacko desire for “diversity”.

    =====

    (*) The biggest drawback to the Big Military is not the cost, but rather that it makes it too damned tempting for whatever clown is in the White House to look tough by swatting some little country or otherwise sticking our nose in where it isn’t wanted and doesn’t belong (Vietnam, Lebanon, Bosnia, Libya, take your pick). The big military made war too easy for us, with the result that we seem to have more of it.

  19. Dave R
    December 23rd, 2014 @ 1:07 am

    Though Romeny’s failure to get elected is not evidence that anyone else that was actually running could win. Mitt was easily the most electable candidate seeking the GOP nomination. Which wasn’t saying much but it’s very hard (despite our host’s inclinations) to make a credible argument otherwise.

  20. Adobe_Walls
    December 23rd, 2014 @ 2:15 am

    if Mitt was electable he’d have been elected. Which doesn’t prove that anyone in the rest of the field was electable either. Being nearly electable is still no cigar. We should be extremely leery of any candidate touting his electability. That’s merely denigrating the opposition not making a case for themselves. Furthermore that claim is almost always an attempt to divert attention from that candidates serious flaws. In Romney’s case that flaw was ObamaCare. It was never satisfactorily explained how the Republican who invented Ocare was going to run against Ocare, which was one of the Republican’s strongest issues. In point of fact he didn’t though he occasionally paid lip-service. Further more Romney, McCain and Dole all lacked the essential killer instinct. Who ever the eventual nominee is, he or she cannot how care what the MSM thinks about how they treat of talk about their opponent. While it would not have been effective or good tactics for McCain to refer to His opponent as Barrack Hussein Obama, he should not have condemned it when others did, any more than required for appearances. Presidential politics stopped being a gentlemen’s game before the end of the 18th century.

  21. bobbymike34
    December 23rd, 2014 @ 2:46 am

    Next President must embark on a total renewal of the Triad and nuclear enterprise. Recently both the LA Times and AP have printed depressing stories (when the MSM starts to discuss it you know the situation is dire) that bring into question whether the US can even produce a new nuke given the state of the industrial base.

  22. Daniel Freeman
    December 23rd, 2014 @ 3:15 am

    I didn’t even know that the military had a biofuels initiative, but because of the Iowa caucuses, it could only be ended by a second-term President — and then every Comgressperson with even a hint of Presidential ambitions would instantly make it bulletproof, cast-iron law, to curry favor with corn farmers.

  23. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    December 23rd, 2014 @ 5:46 am

    Mitt’s problems were not being too conservative, Mitt’s problems were being Mitt.

  24. BobSykes
    December 23rd, 2014 @ 8:40 am

    The Democrats are a socialist party with a dominant communist wing, and the Republicans are a center/left party with a dominant liberal wing. There is no chance they will ever nominate a conservative. It’s going to be Romney’s all the way down.

    As to the military, anything that weakens Leviathan is good.

  25. Quartermaster
    December 23rd, 2014 @ 11:16 am

    Won’t work. They need the bright red lights so snipers don’t accidentally shoot them.

  26. Quartermaster
    December 23rd, 2014 @ 11:21 am

    If Pootie makes a massive move in Ukraine, we can’t do much about it. The geography is seriously against us.

    We’d stand more of a chance in helping the real Republic of China, but only if we can get reasonable basing out of the reach of China, and that’s becoming more problematic. Help after the fact would involve simply telling China that no ship flying their flag will make any port other than Davy Jone’s Locker. Their trade is heavily dependent on shipping, and their Navy has little chance of stopping us after we start unrestricted Submarine warfare against their ships.

  27. Quartermaster
    December 23rd, 2014 @ 1:01 pm

    The GOP has always been a leftist party. It is statist to the core, and conservatism is an invader. The Dims used to be the conservative party, but that ended with Wilson.

  28. richard mcenroe
    December 23rd, 2014 @ 1:30 pm

    Well, I don’t see why we can’t at least try to shoot people in a more caring and sensitive manner…

  29. richard mcenroe
    December 23rd, 2014 @ 1:31 pm

    Deadlined in the hangar, waiting for backordered parts…

  30. Jim R
    December 23rd, 2014 @ 4:54 pm

    Given what I’ve read here and there about the deprable state of our ASW, that’s a game they could play, too.

    And do we really want to sink, for example, a ship carrying Chinese goods to Canada or Austalia? Unrestricted sub warfare didn’t work out so hot for Kaiser Bill, and I don’t think it would do us much good, either.

    God grant we never have to find out.

  31. Art Deco
    December 23rd, 2014 @ 6:01 pm

    McConnell had best be willing and able to eliminate the filibuster if those Bullwinkles are going to accomplish anything.

  32. M. Thompson
    December 23rd, 2014 @ 7:03 pm

    The question on their side is how much do their CO’s and boats get out and play?

    We’d end up pulling from the Retired Reserve on the ASW game, though.

  33. Wombat_socho
    December 23rd, 2014 @ 7:44 pm

    Compassionate fascism?

  34. Quartermaster
    December 23rd, 2014 @ 8:43 pm

    It worked rather well for Nimitz. And, if you are going to declare unrestricted Sub Warfare, all that will matter is the flag it flies.

  35. richard mcenroe
    December 23rd, 2014 @ 11:45 pm

    Pink bullets, none of these harsh threatening steel and brass tones…

  36. Jim R
    December 24th, 2014 @ 12:10 am

    Well, I suggest that it worked for Nimitz because, with the exception of the rare Soviet freighter in the northern Pacific, anything on the waters that wasn’t Allied was a fair target. Assuming a war between us and China that didn’t involve everybody else, the seas would be covered with ships that our guys could NOT shoot without risking the ire (!) of various neutral countries, just as Kaiser Bill’s U-boats sinking neutral (i.e. US) ships helped bring us in against him during World War I.

  37. Jim R
    December 24th, 2014 @ 12:17 am

    My guess is “not enough”… for now. I gather that the PLA Navy is rapidly expanding not only in numbers of ships and in quality of ships, but also in reach. I get the idea that they want very much to be a blue water navy with a routine presence all through the western Pacific / Indian Ocean. Could be major trouble for us.

  38. M. Thompson
    December 24th, 2014 @ 1:02 am

    The other issue is if their political establishment trusts the military enough. A few years ago, it was revealed their SSBN did not make deterrent patrols.

    With seafaring skills, simulators only go so far. You have to eat, breathe, and sleep it.

  39. Quartermaster
    December 24th, 2014 @ 11:04 am

    It worked for Nimitz because the Japs weren’t very good at ASW. While the Germans were accused of sinking US shipping, it needs to be pointed out that the Brits were flagging their ships with US flags. Wilson had his own reasons for bringing us into the war and the media was more than happy to help him spread his lies.

    The idea is to sink anything flying the Red Chinese flag. That is not at all hard to do.

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    […] Military Reform: A Key @GOP 2016 Issue I left Active Duty, inter alia, because I was disgusted by seeing uniformed officers held to a higher standard of conduct than their Commander-in-Chief, Monica Lewinsky’s ex-boyfriend. […]