Misusing Our Military and Our Tax Dollars

 I need to get something out of my system: just being able to blow things up does not win wars.

The opposite I have heard often enough since Trump began his Iran War. I suspect inside President Trump's head there has been on a loop a monlogoue of “Blow up everything! Smash, smash, smash! They'll get down on their kness!”

I do not think Jonathan V. Last's headline of Very Low-IQ Trump Too Stoopid to Win War because under the vitrolic headline is a very intriguing take on the change in modern warfare.

It is true that Trump and the Military-Industrial Complex have been very stupid, but then so were Xerxes, Philip II of Spain, the Zulus at Roarke's Drift, and the French at Agincourt. If you don't get the references, then follow the links before reading any further here.

I could probably make a longer list of the larger military built along the then best practices lost to the smaller military with a new technology. There is money being made in the standard practice, there is prestige in commanding the standard order military, and both create the inertia that leads to defeat.

For us, that started in Vietnam; albeit there was never a clear military defeat there. 

American admirals with prestige were those commanding battleships. Another example of big explosions blinding their adherents to the damage done by one bomb from one airplane. Now, the same inertia exists with aircraft carriers.

English longbows destroyed the armored French nobility.

Smaller, faster English ships sent the Spanish Armada to the bottom.

Drones are doing all of that now. 

If bombs were enough, England would have folded under The Blitz, Nazi Germany would have surrendered during the Allied bombing campaign, and the Vietnamese would have quit at the sight of our B-52s. Even after the Tokyo firebombing and two atomic bombs, Japan almost made us invade them.

Our war plans have been for big wars against the Russians and Chinese. Big armies with plenty of expensive weapons, with the potential of becoming generals and admirals, were sold to us for that kind of war. Iraq was a small-scale version of that sort of war. Vietnam and then Afghanistan were oddities, soon to be discounted by the upper echelons. Only now, as we're seeing in Ukraine, they were the forerunners; the American Civil War's technology and tactics to the First World War's.

Donald J. Trump followed Philip II's into exposing the hollowness of our military's preparedness by misusing our soldiers's and sailors's lives and skills.

Smart, fast, and hard always beats the dull and plodding.

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