Thursday, October 15, 2015

David Codrea: Making Military Less Formidable to Enemy Endangers Lives

"(W)hile it’s not included in the 'Declaration of Orders We Will Not Obey,' active duty Oath Keepers might want to think about what they would say to a superior ordering them to take part in an activity they consider humiliatingly and dangerously subversive, and what their options for getting out of it might be."

1 comment:

Chiu ChunLing said...

I do think that these kinds of exercises in effeminacy hurt our credibility in the Muslim world, but for near-peer adversaries they are spit on the cake. The Russians will privately joke about it, the Chinese will be strictly forbidden from mentioning it at all, but neither will fear us less because of it...only because they can't possibly fear us any less at this point, with more than adequate reason.

Muslims underestimating the U.S. costs lives, but mainly those of their nation's residents. Which is still a bad thing, but not actually a worse thing than a lack of strategic resolve to use our forces effectively.

Putin and Xi are both evidently still working out the degree to which they've overestimated us. Neither is letting superficialities like the silliness of our politics affect their judgment, they didn't get where they are by being totally fooled by appearances. I still don't know what Xi is waiting for, but so far it's always turned out to be something that works against us. I'm not ready to believe that the U.S. is actually going to outright surrender and appeal to become a tributary client of China...but that outcome is starting to look less impossible every day. Putin, on the other hand, seems positively impatient to provoke a full-blown war.

If I were still recommending military service to my relatives, this would dissuade me. But we're so far past that point that this is not even relevant.