Eating Soup with a Sieve

Robert Farley has a new article up at World Politics Review about his thoughts on the coming Department of Defense budget circus:

"Perhaps the most important takeaway from the white paper is the official recognition that the size of the defense budget itself represents a threat to U.S. national security."

says Farley,

"In theory, this should not be such a remarkable insight; one common narrative explaining the end of the Cold War is that the United States drove the Soviet Union to economic ruin by forcing it to maintain an unsustainable military budget. As Bernard Finel suggests, the United States has now committed itself to a degree of dominance over potential rivals that may be unsustainable in the long run, and that in and of itself poses risks."

Well enough. But I don't know if he has thought this through far enough.

Specifically:

First, I think he's giving the flacks too much credit - simply saying this will happen is far from a guarantee that it WILL happen. Military overstretch is nearly universal in the decline phase of imperia; almost the first symptom of post-vitality in a large or imperial polity is an excessive amount of revenue devoted into military forces and a decreasing return from that "investment".

That is; as empires first grow they often find that war "pays for itself". Imperial troops extend the borders, bringing home slaves and tribute, incorporating rich lands and peoples into the empire. This wealth then translates into more, better-equipped forces, which are more effective against the barbarians, bringing more people and more wealth into the empire. Wash, rinse, repeat.

But over time the combination of imperial social and political arteriosclerosis, bloated elites devoted to their own interests at the expense of the common good, and the vicious effects - on both imperials and colonials - of ruling the subject populations reduces the gains and expands the costs. Subsequent rulers desperately try and find ways to reduce these costs, only to find that in armies, in in every organization, what begins as a relatively lean, cost-effective organization over time becomes overstuffed with useless dunnage that contributes little, if anything, to the actual business of warfighting.

But, second, it is difficult or even impossible to reverse this without immense outlays of political prestige and will. I cannot think of a historical example of an empire that voluntarily restructured its armed forces, in a short time, as the result of a deliberate serious analysis of its geopolitical interests. The Marian Reforms? Except they were more-or-less purely organizational. The conversion of the U.S. to a global superpower in 1945? Helped that just at the moment we had the world's largest army, navy, air force, and a nuke or three lying around.

I'm not sating it can't be done - just that it's damn deadly difficult and the successful examples are so few I can't think of any, And throw in the toxic political environment of the 201s United States? It seems beyond unlikely; it is likely to be absolutely impossible.

Overall I tend to agree wholeheartedly with his conclusion:

"Defense budget politics has increasingly become a field of narrow contestation between experts, elites and interested actors, rather than a field in which different visions of the political good engage with one another. This has resulted in a prioritization of bureaucratic interest and parochial concern, both of which are enemies of real grand strategy."

...but tend to see this not as a bug but as a feature. In my opinion throughout MOST of U.S. history our military budgets have been decided this way.

For most of U.S. history that's been fine. We didn't need much in the way of geopolitical strategy to lick the natives of North America; some smallpox and a railroad or two would work just swell. Ad-hoc assemblies of forces would do to swat the Mexicans, Spanish, and Filipinos. You can sum up our geopolitical plans during the period 1918-1940 as "have a big Navy and don't fight anyone worth shit".

WW2? I'll give you that - well done, FDR, George Marshall. and Congresscritters all.

The Cold War was sort of a no-brainer, too. The Soviets were big so we had to be big, and we were already big. They had a blue-water navy and so did we. They had ICBMs and intercontinental bombers and so did we, or we developed them. It wasn't as big a no-brainer as giving smallpox-blankets to the Sioux, but, still...

So we're down to this particular time in history; post-Cold-War, 1991-2012.

And here's where our historical traditions; lack-of-planning, empire-in-a-fit-of-absence-of-mind, foreign-policy-as-an-outgrowth-of-domestic-policy are biting us on the ass. We are suddenly faced with a non-binary choice and an undefined future, a cloud of potential problems rather than a simple "threat". Teasing sense out of the chaotic multipolar world of the 21st Century and translating that sense into some sort of intelligent military policy is the sort of things that asks for a Talleyrand, or a George Marshall.

And instead we're awash with Rick Santorums.

So it occurs to me is that if reducing the U.S. defense budget growth in a sensible, strategically-planned, geopolitically coherent way relies on the sorts of gentlefolk of the sort much found in the U.S. Congress or in charge of the various executive agencies today making some sort of rational choices based on national interests and the cold calculation of economic and political realities we would be better off hoping for a pink magical pony to appear in a cloud of pixie dust, soar overhead and crap out lemon-verbena-scented golden nuggets of budgetary savings.

Infamy II: Electric Boogaloo

Apropos of the last post, here's a nice article in Naval History Magazine about the problem that governments and militaries have, not just in assessing threat capabilities, but in assessing their own.

As Parshall and Wenger (2011) point out;

"In the case of the Pearl Harbor attack, the U.S. Navy had no real inkling of Japanese carrier warfare capabilities and therefore could not accurately assess likely operational targets. Not only that, but Japan’s carrier force—known as Kido Butai—was evolving so quickly on the eve of the Pacific war that almost no naval intelligence organ would have been able to track, internalize, and gauge those capabilities."

Even the Japanese Navy wasn't really able to understand their own strength.The article correctly notes that

"Indeed, the Japanese themselves did not seem to understand clearly the nature of the weapon they had created, or how best to wield it. Within six months of the opening of the war, poor strategy on the Imperial Japanese Navy’s part would end up committing Kido Butai’s component carrier divisions piecemeal, first at the Battle of Coral Sea and then at the Battle of Midway. During the latter, Kido Butai was decisively defeated—with four of its carriers sunk. Japan’s overwhelming early war numerical advantage was thus erased. Shortly thereafter, America’s superiority in production began asserting itself."

My friend seydlitz likes to talk about how the lack of strategic vision in the 2011 U.S. has contributed decisively to our frittering away our blood and treasure pursuing impossibilities in Central Asia. But I think one of the important lessons of Pearl Harbor, as well-discussed in Parshall and Wenger (2011), is how extraordinarily difficult trying to understand even one's own military and geopolitical strengths and weaknesses is.

How much more so trying to integrate all that into an overall assessment of potential threat capabilities, friendly political and military capacity, national interests, and geopolitical variables.Especially in a domestic U.S. political climate of increasing polarization and magical thinking.

Not saying that this shouldn't happen, or can't happen. But just pointing out that all our historical examples show how extraordinarily difficult it is.

With Their Shields or On Them

I'm sitting in front of the computer whilst the kiddos indulge in some truly reprehensible Saturday morning TV - a ritual as old as MY childhood, at least - and came across this Krugman column that ends with a comment that I thought went right to the heart of the discussions we had around here about what I considered the unfortunate narrowing of the social arc of military service in the U.S. circa 2011:

"If people can’t comprehend what it means to work for larger goals than their own interest, if they actually consider any deviation from self-service somehow a sign of phoniness, we, as a nation, are lost."

The Krugman essay is in reference to the apparent difference between "conservatives" - who seem willing to shove any sort of public-figure misbehavior down the memory hole so long as the offending politician continues to vote for their regressive policies - and liberals, who immediately defenestrate their own "leaders" if the personal lives of those leaders vary from the public positions.But in the course of his post Krugman brings up someone I had forgotten; Ed Luttwak, who wrote back in 1995 that any hope the U.S. (and other Western societies) had of returning to a widespread national service was doomed by the replacement-level birth rates of their peoples. Luttwak's "post-heroic" societies had developed such an attachment to their children "...(b)ecause most couples have only one or two children, the loss of any in warfare becomes intolerable, and conscription becomes unthinkable..."(and)"...child-centered Americans (and Europeans and Japanese) will be forced to rely in the future on allies, mercenaries, and maybe robots to fight on their behalf."So; here I am, looking at my own precious offspring (one inert on the couch, the other somewhere in the back of the house - I can hear her chatting to herself there, anyway...) and wondering - would I give them up if my country demanded it not for existential defense, but for some abtruse foreign policy objective? Would I be "convincible" that burying my son or daughter for some transient geopolitical advantage in part of my country's imperial corona was worth the end of my own personal immortality?And I honestly don't know the answer.

But it certainly raises some difficult questions for me.

Buzz cuts, longhairs, and the bouffant puff

The last post got me thinking; why should I, or any sane citizen of a democracy, want to use the full majesty of the law to force his or her fellow citizens into the armed service of our nation?

I mean, isn't the whole point of a republican form of government - and isn't the definitive point of the United States form of democracy - that the individual citizen should have the broadest individual liberty consistent with the function and survival of the community and/or the nation?

And what is a military draft, if not the very lowest form of coercion? You and I in the form of our government are saying "You, other citizen, will place yourself under the military authorities of the nation (and in so doing be subject to a military law vastly more dictatorial, abrupt, and draconian than any possible under the civilian federal Constitution or any state legal system) and continue as such, hazard to injury or death, until such time as we may choose to release you" and if that other refuses we permit ourselves the authority to seize him/her by force and inflict punishment on him or her.

A draft is perhaps the antithesis of patriotism. It forces a citizen who may have vitally sound reasons for refusing to join a fighting service to do so, and in so doing forces others, who might have joined on their own terms, to join will-they-nil-they on the terms our government sets for them.

And commentor Ael pointed out on the comments or the previous thread: traditionally a draft has been used to build up a large standing Army, perhaps among the most reviled of the aspects of British rule rejected by the Founders and Framers. It was for this reason more than any other that drafting citizens was generally rejected during our wars prior to 1917. Only in the Civil War did the federal government finally accede to a draft and then only after all other methods of enlistment were tried and failed.So not just the intent of the nation's creators, not just the legal and philosophical arguments against it, but the weight of U.S. history weighs against the idea of a draft.

Why recommend it?

To explain myself, I need to...well, explain myself.

I'm a pretty white-bred sort of guy. Father a corporate type, mother a classic Fifties stay-at-home housewife. Raised in nice little suburbs, went to nice little suburban public schools with nice little suburban kids. Went to a nice-little-suburban-sort-of-college - actually a very small, very spendy, very private Eastern liberal-arts school known as a "safety school" for the Ivies with lots of people who were and are my intellectual and social superiors.

And then I enlisted in the Army.

I had a nice couple of hitches of nice little semi-peacetime active service and then got out and spent another nice little decade-and-a-half or so in the Reserve Component back when the RC really WAS a "reserve component".Here's the thing.

I've noticed that at my college reunions I'm one of a tiny handful of graduates with service time. When I go to professional meetings, or spend time with others in my social peer group; middle- to upper-middle-class white guys with college degrees - I'm often the ONLY one who spent any time as an enlisted soldier or a noncommissioned officer.

There's usually a smattering of commissioned types - though my college alums tend to have the "courtesy commissions" of JAG and medical corps officers. But I'm often the only one in a group of 200 or so with any first-hand experience as a private soldier, a dogface G.I.Think about how odd that is.

Look back, for instance, at the so-called Greatest Generation. My father - who was and is as solidly upper-middle-class as a brushcut American could and can be - was an officer-cadet, a V-7 pilot trainee in 1945. But he was called up as a draftee in 1944. His uncle died as a draftee battalion runner in the Argonne the generation earlier, and his brother was a draftee sailor in WW2 before going career as a pilot (they like to fly, my family; dunno why it passed me by. The only use I had for the contraptions was as a taxi I jumped out of when I got to where I was going...)

This sort of stuff makes me thing that the Americans of the Forties and to some extent the Fifties had less elitist notions than we have today. The idea of young men of "good families" going into the fighting services was accepted as part of being an American. Everything I've seen, everything my parents' generation says, makes me think that the idea of a well-bred young man serving as a private soldier or a foremast sailor was considered perfectly acceptable after WW2 made it acceptable.

Take, just as an example, the servicemen in William Wyler's 1946 movie "The Best Years Of Our Lives". It's a movie, yes, but it wasn't wartime propaganda or a feel-good morale-boosting fairytale; it was intended as serious postwar drama and therefore had to be recognizably realistic enough for Forties audiences, familiar to sickness with war and soldiers and soldiering, to accept with no more than moderate suspension of disbelief.

The story revolves around three men; an Army Air Corps pilot, an Army sergeant, and an enlisted sailor.The commissioned pilot was a soda jerk before the war. Okay, we're on familiar "Officer and a Gentleman" ground here. But here's where it gets interesting; the sergeant - an E-7 platoon sergeant - was a minor executive, a loan officer in the local bank.

Can you imagine that today? A banker going to war as an enlisted troop? My friend Lisa has mentioned someone she's met who was doing Wall Street-type financial work and got called up with his Guard unit. And certainly there are still a handful of unusual "social" Guard outfits like the "First City Troop" of the Pennsylvania ARNG.

But in general the guys I served with were, and the studies I've read suggest that most U.S. soldiers still are, from small towns or the rougher parts of cities. A lot of them are from the South and interior West, with a fair number from the big cities of the West. Midwest, and Northeast. Most of them are from middle- and lower-middle-class families. Even the officers are not from the sort of place I went to college - though Franklin & Marshall had a sizeable V-12 training program in the Forties it has no ROTC today - but from ag schools, Southern and Western state colleges, and places like Brigham Young University.No bankers. None of the kids I went to college with. No congressmen's kids, or senators' daughters. No doctor's sons, no lawyer's. None.

So when I think of the benefits of a draftee versus a self-selecting Army I think of the benefit more to the country than to the Army, or to the people drafted. Of having bankers serving with soda-jerks, urban tough kids with suburban mall rats, of spreading the franchise, as it were, to a wider spectrum of Americans than we take in today.Anything that forces young people into a uniformed service, or to fight, is an evil thing. But we do "evil" things all the time to keep our republic working. We force people to serve on juries. We force them to pay taxes, to submit to regulations that deny them things they want or need to do. We don't force them to vote and as a result find ourselves at the mercy of the small percentage - almost always less the half, often WAY less than half - that do vote. And now we no longer require people to serve regardless of their social class.

Which has led to the better outcome?

I honestly am not sure I'm right about this.

But when I look around me at all the other well-bred, well-fed, well-paid, white men who, like me, have to be considered the "well-born and able" who have a hell of a lot to do with running my country and don't see anyone else with a Good Conduct ribbon on their lapel...

I wonder. I really do.

Without the buzz cuts

Generally speaking I try to avoid the sorts of situations I lump under the general heading of "Support Our Troops".

Ever since my country decided that the drawbacks of having a substantial portion of its citizenry with skin in the armed-foreign-policy game exceeded the value of cheap military manpower I've watched the average U.S. citizen become about as familiar with the realities of soldiers and soldiering as a milk cow with the details of the deliberations of the Council of Trent.

But in what I have always considered a perfect slice of savage irony as those people have become less and less cognisant of what their now-professional troops are doing in their name they have developed an absurdly exaggerated veneration and adulation of those troops. And I recently ran across one of these on my "Facebook" page which pitchforked me into the question of what my country has become since it no longer requires random lots of its young people to serve in its military.

Here's a perfect example, something titled the "anxiety of a military mom" written by someone who presents herself as a military wife (I'm not saying she isn't - just that I have no way of knowing one way or the other).Her money graf sums up her attitude towards her husband's service in Afghanistan in particular and soldiers and soldiering in general;

"I for one cannot think of a better ambassador for the United States than my husband...I love knowing he’s the face of my nation on the other side of the planet. He has honor. He has valor. He’s brave. He’s an officer and a gentleman. He’s always in a freakishly good mood. Having him in Afghanistan is my small way of saying, See, world? Not all Americans are over-medicated, McDonalds-eating channel surfers with entitlement issues! We still make a few like we used to! So to this mom..."(the article is in reference to another woman who is frantic that her son wishes to join as a Marine officer) "...I say, be proud. Be ecstatic. Be blown away by your son’s determination and character. The fact is, we need more men and women like that. A lot more. A nation full. But without the buzz cuts."

I have a hard time with all the illusions summed up here, but perhaps the most perplexing to me is the notion that this woman has about how the majority of the nation feels about her husband and his comrades.

"There is a lingering perception in our society..."

she writes,

"...that the military is for those who seek a way out of a dead end life, that the only people crazy enough to enlist are those who have nowhere else to go and nothing else to do, and want to beat their chest in the process. That combined with the very real threat of death is why so many parents cringe at the idea of a child enlisting. They seek a “better life” for their sons and daughters."

Lingering perception of... In the "thank you for your service " America of 2011? Has this gal been out in public lately..?

What I would tend to agree with is that for anyone who has economic alternatives (which is to say anyone making more than $50,000 or so a year) the notion of giving a child to an expeditionary army fighting neo-colonial wars in the global hustings - which is the reality of military service circa 2011 - is not an appetizing one. The downsides of woundings, death, psychological damage and emotional distress far outweigh any possible return, given that the visible lack of an Afghan Taliban Navy or Air Force make the ridiculous canard that the enemy we're fighting in central Asia is a genuine threat to the nation.

So for a rational parent, diverting a child from a life of semi-permanent low-grade expeditionary warfare for fairly murky geopolitical objectives isn't a bug, it's a feature.Troops are dying in central Asia, true (though not many and not often) but what they are dying for is as far removed from "their country" as a Frenchman killed at Salamanca was dying for the principles of the Revolution of 1789. National interest? Geopolitical advantage? Perhaps, sure; the same reason that professional soldiers fight and die and have fought and died since Rome. But getting blown away chasing muj outside Kandahar is a very different proposition than getting shot down storming the beaches of Normandy or defending the barricades on Long Island or the ramparts of Fort McHenry. And the choice for a parent, or a spouse - to give a loved one for geopolitical advantage - is to me a hell of a lot more fraught than if the choice was one of death in defense of their home and family.

And the troops themselves understand this. They also understand that the bulk of the American public - like the poor woman quoted above - do NOT understand; "A vast majority..."(of the U.S. public) "...expressed pride in the troops and three-quarters say they thanked someone in the military. But a 45 percent plurality say neither of the post-9/11 wars has been worth the cost and only a quarter say they are following news of the wars closely. Half of the public said the wars have made little difference in their lives."

I understand that neither the military nor the U.S. government wishes to return to a draftee military. I understand the military difficulties with that concept. But when I look around me and see the vast disconnection between the public and the military forces...when I watch the public make foolish and uninformed choices based on fantasy and propaganda rather than painfully-won experience...I really wonder if we're sacrificing the public good for military expedience. I wonder if we're placing the wants of the military service over the needs of an involved and informed public.

And mind you, I'm not saying that the public needs to have a wider experience with war. I'm saying it needs to get to know what happens in armies.

Because without that we have become a nation in awe of our own military. Poll after poll reaffirms that the U.S. armed services are the best respected institution in the nation - ahead of the Presidency, ahead of the Congress, ahead of agencies great and small. Not having any real experience or understanding we loves us some GIs and tend to credit them with intelligence, diligence, and moral standing above any of the civilian institutions in our country.

Which, as any GI could tell you, is nonsense.

Soldiers are generally fitter than most people, somewhat better organized, and with a less-complicated world to understand. But no private who has spent hours standing around some worthless patch of dirt doing fuck-all only to be told that the original point of the clusterfuck was mistaken will continue in the mistaken belief that soldiers know better than civilians what should be done and how to do it. No one better than an enlisted troop - especially a draftee troop, who has no vested interest in making the Army look good - knows the meaning of the terms "SNAFU", "SUSFU", and "TARFU". No one can spend more than a couple of days in the service without experiencing some appalling clusterfuck and then hearing it described in the post paper as a brilliant success.The draftees of the French Army in Napoleon's day had a saying: "Pour se trouver comme un Bulletin"...meaning that there was fibbing and untruth and then there was the Big Lie as expressed in the official Army Bulletins. When you lied "like a Bulletin" you were really bringing the bullshit.

A democracy needs a middle course; neither adulation nor contempt for its military forces. Right now we're all in on the former. That's not sensible and it's not healthy; it encourages a militaristic way of thinking, and, if pursued to its logical endpoint, will eventually encourage both people and soldiers to contemplate praetorian treason.

And behind the larger, public, difficulties are the small individual tragedies typified by the sort of person who will read the "military mom's" account and really believe that patriotism, love, and hope will overcome the brutal effect of sending young men to fight in foreign rebellions and civil wars.Thirty years ago she would probably have seen three generations of young men go off to fight in straighter wars in simpler times and return different men with wounds both external and internal that would often twist them for the remainder of their lives.

Today she writes only what she knows. And while I understand it is her truth, as a soldier I also understand that behind that truth lies another, sterner, iron-shod truth, the truth of the heart of war. And that for many another woman - and perhaps even the writer herself, as the effects of her husband's deployments work their way inward over the years - the collision between her truth and the Truth of War is likely to become fragments that will tear into their lives like mortar shrapnel.

I wish that my country could gain the wisdom to understand this without having to bind itself into forced soldiering, the stupefyingly blunt instrument of a military draft. But it does not appear to and does not seem to wish to.

I do not love the idea of a draft, of forcing citizens to serve the state. I do not wish to give my son or daughter to one. But I do not love what I see as the lack of a draft having done to my nation, and my people. I do not like what I see of my nation when a woman whose husband is overseas enforcing the national will on an unwilling foreign land can say that her nation should be proud and ecstatic to be a nation full of soldiers.A democracy should go to war sternly, reluctantly. It should be proud and ecstatic to see its sons and daughters inventors, steelwrights, poets, and athletes. It should see its soldiers as it does its weaponry; necessary instruments of policy, good for destruction that is valuable only in that it preserves or returns the peace needed for those peaceful professions to thrive.

It should glory in its power for creation and should give its young people over to soldiering with reluctance and regret, with the stern resolve not to "support the troops" but to return them to the benefits of peace as quickly as it can.

And if a draft is needed for us to find that resolve within ourselves then by all means let us return there, and soon.

The Lament of the Frontier Guard

By the North Gate, the wind blows full of sand,

Lonely from the beginning of time until now!

Trees fall, the grass goes yellow with autumn.

I climb the towers and towers

to watch out the barbarous land:



My friend jim recently posted an extended rumination about the combat loss of a CH-47 and the embarked team of Navy SEALs. In this post he uses President Obama's term "sacrifice" to compare the way these men died to the offerings presented to the gods; in this case, the twin gods of War and Hubris that have ruled lately in the East. He asks "How can a nation sacrifice the best that we have to offer in such a blithe manner?" and suggests that these dead men were sacrifices for our national sins of arrogance and foolishness.Now I have no end of respect for jim's opinions on things military. He's been there and done that and got the O.D. T-shirt. He's probably forgotten more about soldiering than I'll ever know.



But in this case, I think he's looking at this as an American and a citizen-soldier, and that's the wrong way to look at this.



Desolate castle, the sky, the wide desert.

There is no wall left to this village.

Bones white with a thousand frosts,

High heaps, covered with trees and grass;

Who brought this to pass?

Who has brought the flaming imperial anger?

Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle-drums?

Barbarous kings.



For most of these guys the Saturday in Wardak Province was just another day at work. They are long-service professionals - imperial troops in all but name - and they are doing what imperial troops have done since Augustus' day; carrying our imperial policy in the far reaches of the imperial frontiers.



This was no army of liberation storming ashore on the beaches of Normandy or Italy, no army of vengeance pouring gasoline into the caves of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. This wasn't even "Lafayette, we are here" or "Remember the Maine". While I'm sure that one or two of the guys who augered in somewhere in the Tangi Valley comforted themselves with the fiction that they were avenging 9/11 I'll bet most of them thought about their mission as imperials have always thought about the mission of civilizing the savages with a rifle.Long, tiring work, typically boring, occasionally terrifying, often fruitless. Pitied and ignored by the civilians safe at home, feared or swindled by the natives nearby, tasked by the uninformed higher-ups to perform everything from the pointless to the dangerous, taking successes wherever and however possible, accepting failures as part of the game.



A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn,

A turmoil of wars - men, spread over the middle kingdom,

Three hundred and sixty thousand,

And sorrow, sorrow like rain.

Sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow returning,

Desolate, desolate fields,

And no children of warfare upon them,

No longer the men for offence and defence.



And I believe we do them a disservice when we use the language of popular mass wars for what they do and how they die. The President, of course, well, it's his job to drape the charred bits of meat and bone - all that remain after JP-4 and airframe aluminum combine to combust human bodies - in patriotic bunting. He is, after all, both our national mourner and national cheerleader, saying the correct and solemn words over the caskets filled with sand, fanning the fire in the faint hearts to continue the fight that will bring more dead men home to more bereft hearts.



But we should be big enough to overlook these public platitudes and see these men for what they are; imperial legionaries of a most unimperial empire, manning the milecastles we build for them with our taxes, our reflexive rage, our incurious sloth, and our ignorance of the world and the people in it.



Those dead men, could they reassemble themselves, could they pull the poncho-liner of whole flesh back on so as not to frighten us with the gibbering horror of their deaths in a rage of fire and metal, might tell us of the people in those far places who killed them and whom they killed, the broken places and the broken tribes within them, whose ferocities and griefs they and we will never understand. They might tell us about the meaningless strobing of parachute flares in the night sky, of little villages with yesterday's bulletholes in walls that Alexander's troops passed by, of walking over the same ground they walked yesterday and finding new death buried by the roadside.



But, then again, they might not.



Because there is no way we in the soft lands and the quiet places could understand what it means to try and defeat the 14th Century with the weapons of the 20th.



Ah, how shall you know the dreary sorrow at the North Gate,

With Rihoku's name forgotten,

And we guardsmen fed to the tigers.



Because they are atop the milecastles, peering out to the barbarous lands, and we are peacefully asleep in the fat lands within the walls. Because they know war and we do not. Because they are not our sacrifices; they are our proxies. Because, although we have never seen a tiger or know what it does...



...we feed them to the tigers.And then go home to our dinners.

Operation Whatzit

James Wolcott finds the name of our Wings Over Libya adventure pretty funny:

"Isn't Odyssey Dawn part of the fab Carnival Cruises fleet?" tweets Tom Watson.

To me, Odyssey Dawn suggests the name of a Seventies porn star, one of those spacier ones who made a couple of films until the prospect of working again with Ron Jeremy sent her back into the soap bubble from whence she came, and off she floated.

Yes, I can almost hear it now, the voice of coming attractions announcing: "Odyssey Dawn in Harold Lime's Hot Dog Girls II, starring Leslee Bovee, Desiree Cousteau, and introducing Sandy Melons as the Surfer Chick..."

Other talking heads had other ideas, including "a Carnival cruise ship", "a Yes album", "a stripper", "a Stephenie Meyer novel", "a Tom Clancy novel", "a Philip K Dick novel", (that's a lot of novels!), "a Cabbage Patch kid", "The name of one of Frank Zappa's kids", and "a straight-to-video movie with Jean-Claude Van Damme".

Personally, I kind of like the idea that the name the DoD has tagged this thing with is just two random words. The fakey "code names" that had been ginned up to make the little wars they designated sound cooler and funn-er than they really were, like "Just Cause", "Desert Storm", "Iraqi Freedom" were making me throw up a little in the back of my mouth.

But either way, we've come a long way from the days of "Operation Killer" and "Operation Ripper".

I'm still not sure whether that's good, bad, or just...different.

Desert Rats

It appears that the Allies are fighting for Tobruk again.The interventionists - neocons and liberal "humanitarians" - have won the internal debate that has United States airpower now fighting the Gaddafi regime on the ground in Libya.

What first thing I want to emphasize is the degree that the U.S. really does not, and will not, have a dog in this fight.Libya is really strategically insignificant to the U.S. No matter who runs it, it controls no transportation choke point needed for U.S. trade or movement. Its petroleum, what there is of it, goes almost entirely to Europe. It has not presented a military threat to the United States since O'Bannion's day. It is a geopolitical nullity.

Yes, Gaddafi is a madman, but we have backed madmen and dictators before when they served our purposes. The "rebels" in eastern Libya are, many of them, strongmen who not long ago were doing the government's dirty work. There is no evidence that the rebel cabal, whatever and whoever they represent, are any long-term improvement on the Libyan government that is headed by Gaddafi.

Yes, there are harmless people at risk, but there are harmless people being beaten and killed in the Gulf States and the Ivory Coast without so much as a pilotless drone with USAF markings flying overhead.

And the second is that the real problem with sending American military power into Libya, just as there was in Afghanistan and Iraq (and Kosovo, Somali, Panama, and most of the other late 20th Century U.S. military expeditions) is the problem illustrated by a look back at our own First Civil War.

In 1781 the nascent U.S. field forces were led by Washington, a man who regardless of his other qualities was supremely aware of the realities of power.

He knew perfectly well that France was providing a massive infusion of land and sea power, and cash, without which the rebellion would have probably been driven to the brink of defeat. But he also knew that allowing the French to take over field operations was opening the door to a destructively powerful French influence over Continental politics. He never allowed Rochambeau, or de Grasse, to forget that he was the coalition commander. He insisted on equality (at least on land; he was smart enough not to pretend that the United States had any seapower at all) in tactical operations between the Continental and French troops.I have no idea what the hell the Libyan rebels are fielding on the ground. They appear to have been unable to produce any significant success against the ragged mess of thug-"soldiers" and mercenaries the Gaddafi regime has fielded up to this point. They do not appear to really have any sort of central command and control at all, instead consisting of a tattered congeries of warlord-militias fighting every which way. The air attacks do not seem to have been coordinated with whoever is "commanding" the rebel forces on the ground, instead concentrating on Gaddafi troops in bivouac and on SEAD. We will see whether this changes in the coming days. But given the recent trends of "coalition" warfare in which U.S. forces have taken a part I would be shocked as hell to see a Libyan commander in the role of Washington, directing the U.S. and European warplanes where and when to attack.

The outcome of the Franco-American alliance of 1781 was successful for the U.S. because the U.S. had a powerful influence on, and in parts and at times actually controlled, the military actions of their allies. The modern Libyans do not appear to have any such control, or even influence, and they do not seem likely to.When you invite someone to help you defend your home and determine what he does and how much force he employs, you are still the master of your house.

If a stranger breaks in your door and starts attacking your enemies you aren't the master of anything. You are at the mercy, literally, of that stranger. If he chooses to outstay his welcome, if he chooses to push you around, you are in no position to demand anything. You are not Washington, leading your country's defense; you are just another sad-sack Italian count whose condottiere have the power to unseat you any time they choose.

They hold the whip hand. You are their bitch, regardless of what you think, or how much you pretend otherwise.

Because you can make your throne on others' bayonets.

But in the long run you will probably not like the way your ass feels about it.

And as for the U.S., I see no point in our becoming the leather queen of the Gulf of Sidra. As with most of these sorts of unequal relationships, the pleasure is transient, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable.

The commander of the coalition of 1781 had the word for us; nations that expend treasure for things not in their interests risk gaining nothing but trouble for their expense. Why we seem to persist in believing otherwise I have no idea. But it seems to me to say something very scathing about the state of political discourse and geopolitical thinking in my country.

Blue Screen of Death

One thing we seem to keep returning to at MilPub, as a dog returneth to his vomit, is the apparent inability of the United States - both its people and its governing classes - to either formulate, or even discuss intelligently, any sort of geopolitical or military strategy.

A formula or discussion, that is, that doesn't involve someone shrieking "911! Scary! Brown! People!" at some point, usually early in the process after which all ratiocination flies out the window.

I am one of those who suspects that this is a feature, not a bug, of American society. And pat, like the Fairy Queen in pantomime, comes David Ignatius on the front page of my daily newspaper's editorial section, to remind me of why I think this.

The point of Ignatius' little screed seems to be to whip up worry about the nefarious plans of the Yellow Reds, who seem to be intent on developing a Chinese Commie Space Death Ray (read "...space weapons, lasers, pulses and other directed-energy beams") along with cunningly oriental "cyberattacks" and electromagnetic disruption aimed at knocking out our precious bodily fluids PCs and related digital command and control systems.According to Ignatius

"The nature of warfare is nearing another "hinge point," due to the advance of technology. Just as gunpowder, cannons, airplanes, rockets and nuclear power changed the face of combat, so too will a new generation of weapons that are on the drawing boards -- not just in America, but in China, India and other advanced technological nations."

Um. Well. Gee.

In a sense this is nothing new. Every generation of wonder weapons is supposed to "change the face of combat"; the arquebus, the machinegun, the aircraft, the nuclear weapons, the tank, the freeze-dried combat ration...all were supposed to do some magical thing that would make warfare...different. Replace infantrymen with tanks. Replace tanks with aircraft. Make war at sea a hidden duel of submarines.

But in another sort of sense this is depressing. Ignatius, while certainly an idiot about militaria, is a well-respected idiot, a fully-paid-up idiot member of the Beltway punditocracy. If Ignatius is saying stuff like this, then it goes a long way to suggesting that this sort of thinking is not an aberration amongst the political classes in our nation.

And this is nonsense, of course. A "beam weapon" is a gun. A cool, high-speed, low-drag, Buck-Rogers-space-ranger-slicky-boy gun, yes, but a gun. It exists at Point A and it's task is to project destruction to Point B, which is essentially the same function as the first gunpowder weapon.

It has one significant advantage; it's "projectile" can move from A to B at the speed of light, obviating the need for complex ballistic computation and negating the target's evasive maneuvers. But it has several offsetting disadvantages. The old-school ballistic projo carries a self-contained source of energy that is used and expended at the beginning of the fire mission; the beam weapon requires an external power source that must be both several orders of magnitude more powerful and must be kept online for the entire mission. Unlike the ballistic projectile, the beam weapon can be dissipated by smoke, fog, or particulates, or reflected by a simple mirror.But the bottom line is; it's a gun. It has no more chance of "changing the face of war" than the rifled musket, the machinegun, or the mortar. Possession will remain 9/10ths of the Law of War, and a man or woman with a gun, standing there, will remain the bailiff's process servers.

He has a minor point, and a point I've talked about previously, in his comment about "...aircraft-carrier battle groups -- that will soon be vulnerable to the new weapons." But he misses the point that we're already several generations into an OLD weapon - the supersonic sea-skimming missile - that proved highly dangerous to large conventional hulls in the Falklands almost thirty years ago and may pose a significant threat to our carrier decks. Unlike Ignatius' silly Star Wars scenario with the Red Chinese Death Stars beaming destruction on our fleet carriers from space, all these nefarious Asian rascals may need is better stealth technology for their submarine fleet.

If they can feel confident about their ability to get inside the ASW screen to launch a massive volley of antiship missiles they won't need some ginormous low-orbit satellite system that would be almost certainly immediately knocked down by USAF antisatellite systems within minutes or seconds of the first faint click of war drumsticks.

And EMP? Christ, we've been dealing with this stuff since the first radios died at Bikini Atoll, Dave. We harden our digital systems. They develop new means to scramble them. We harden them again. Wash, rinse, repeat. Making this into a major point of defense policy is like getting hysterical because of reports of Al Qaeda developing a giant mutant clothes moth to devour our troops' uniforms and make them fight naked.

Honestly!
The entire article is like this. No questions about the global geopolitical strategies, goals, needs, or wants that might dictate the allocation of military funds or the composition and capability of military forces, but lots of bloviating about "legacy systems", "innovation" and silly formulations like the U.S. as "IBM, running big, clunky mainframes, at the same it's trying to be an Apple-like innovator. We can't afford to do both."

Of course we can, Dave. That's what armies have done throughout history. You don't think that the Europeans threw away their swords when the first handgunner showed up on the battlefield, do you? Or the invention of the automatic rifle caused every trooper to throw away his pistol? Gah.

I have no idea how many people inside the Beltway are reading Ignatius and pulling their chins sagely. I hope it's no more than a handful. Because if there's any clearer evidence that this ridiculous piece that, at least in Ignatius' case, on the questions of military policy the entire CPU is toast, I have yet to see it.Makes you want to do a hard boot on Ignatius' brain and see it the damn thing makes more sense afterwards.

(Crossposted to MilPub)

Airland Battle

For your consideration I refer you to scan Robert Farley's column at World Politics Review "A User's Guide to Inter-Service Conflict". As an article it's really just a stub. But I want to use it to suggest an idea.

Here's Farley on the the impact of two typical inter-service conflicts: "Whereas resource conflicts (emphasis mine) can shift a nation's strategic orientation, they typically leave a military organization with a set of tools appropriate to the solving of certain defense problems. They can even produce genuine moments of strategic decision-making. By contrast, mission conflicts hamstring the ability of military organizations to do the jobs that are asked of them, especially when civilians use the disputes to cut procurement."

In the article he gives an outline of several of these mission conflicts between the air forces and the army and navy of the U.S. and Great Britain. Most of us here are familiar at least in brief with these conflicts and the problems they generated.

Now the UK is in the position of having to make hard choices about military budgets, and I would argue that the U.S. will soon - or should now - have to think about the same sorts of cost/benefit analysis in reducing its military spending.

I want to consider returning the Air Force to the status of a Corps within the Army and Navy.

The Air Force has five overall or general missions:

1. Tactical support of land and sea operations; close air support, or CAS.
2. Local through theatre-level air defense and deep-attack missions in support of ground or naval operations. This would include interdiction and theatre air defense, air superiority, SEAD, interdiction, and deep tactical strike sorties.
3. Continental air defense, including aerial and satellite surveillance, and interception.
4. Strategic deep attack, to include nuclear attack.
5. Air transportation and air movement, from the tactical (theatre) to the strategic (intercontinental) levels

Of these five, it would seem to me that at least four could be done by a sub-service level Army Air Corps or Naval Air Arm. And I'd argue that one - strategic deep attack - is problematic as a mission at all.

Let's review.

1. CAS has always been a problem for the Air Force. It's not cool, it doesn't encourage wearing scarves or sunglasses, and, my dear, the people! I've often thought that one genuine innovation the USMC ever came up with was holding on to its own air arm. Marines tend to get pretty good air cover because their wing wipers are often Marines, or Navy pilots who train and fly with Marines. I can't see how returning these missions to the Army and Navy would be a problem.

2. The theatre-level missions are a little more dicey, in that they call for fighter and medium bomber aircraft that don't really intermesh directly with the ground or sea missions. They would require an Army theatre commander, or a Navy task force- or fleet-level commander to broaden their mental horizon beyond the grand tactical to the local strategic level. But I think this could be done. Difficult, but do-able.

3. I don't see how this can't become a naval mission. The USN was our continental defense prior to Kitty Hawk; I don't see how a naval officer couldn't be taught to think of the defense of North America in three dimensions rather than two.

4. The USN is already in control of a third or more of our ballistic missile defenses; putting squids in silos in North Dakota doesn't seem beyond the realm of possibility. And I would argue that "deep strategic attack" - the sort of thing that reached its apogee in 1944-1945 over Germany and Japan - is really questionable. What does a manned strategic bomber really give you at this point, other than target practice for enemy air defenses and the chance of a POW? I would like you to consider that deep penetration bombing, like mass tactical airborne operations over defended airspace, is really a relict of WW2 whose utility in the 21st Century is not just unproven but unlikely.

So give the missiles and the AWACS and the DEW line to the Navy. And mothball the heavy bombers.

5. Military airlift is also a mission that does seem too "aerial" for the land and sea services. Yet the USN flies large four-engine patrol aircraft, and it would seem like an Army Air Corps could fly and maintain tactical transports of the C-130/C-17 variety, leaving intercontinental transport of the C-5 sort and aerial refueling the only thing I would consider a truly "aerial" sort of mission.

I realize that this is truly woolgathering; the lobbying power of the USAF, and the vested interests of the Air Force community, will prevent any serious attempt at distributing the USAF's capabilities between the other two major services.

But the problems, costs, and difficulties incurred by "mission conflicts" are real, and in time where the demand for the specialized "air" sorts of missions seem to be declining and likely to continue as such, and the costs of the specialized air force seem to be rising, I would consider we might want to at least give the idea enough thought to formulate reasons why it shouldn't go further.I wonder - if the SecDef, Army and Navy chiefs had known in 1947 what they know now...might they have had second thoughts?

(Disclaimer: for the record, my father was a naval aviator (V-12) 1944-1945, while I have never really forgiven the USAF for trying to bag the A-10 - beyond that I have no animus beyond the usual contempt for lower military life forms common to the Artillery, which as a branch lends tone to what would otherwise be a Vulgar Brawl)

Kamisori Stanzō

And speaking of General McChrystal...Since the man got the top job in Afghanistan, we've been slathered with accolades to his manly manliness and his warriorish intellectuality:

"...the ascetic workaholic seems to have modelled himself on a classical ideal of the warrior straight out of Herodotus or Thucydides. Eating once a day, it is said, and often sleeping little, he was noted during his time as a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations for running 12 miles a day, part of his rigorous fitness programme conducted while listening to audio books on his iPod."

"Mastermind the hunt for Al Qaeda in Iraq and plot stealth raids on Taliban strongholds in the Hindu Kush while getting just a few hours of sleep a night, exercising enough to exhaust a gym rat and eating one meal a day to avoid sluggishness. One meal. Who was it who said an army runs on its stomach?"

“He’s lanky, smart, tough, a sneaky stealth soldier,” said Maj. Gen. William Nash, a retired officer. “He’s got all the Special Ops attributes, plus an intellect.”

"The friendship (between McChrystal and GEN Petraeus) that ensued stands at the heart of the transformation of the U.S. Army in recent years, from the world's most fearsome conventional-warfare force to the world's most sophisticated counterinsurgency force."

An uncompromisingly innovative, ruthless and manly man among men? Terror of terrorists and brilliant warrior-ascetic. It took me a while, but I suddenly realized who GEN McChrystal really was.Hanzo the Razor.
I wonder if he had a bale of rice with a hole in it stashed somewhere in the ISAF HQ CONEX?

As my old first shirt would say; there's some good training.

Hey, Omar, what the fuck is Arabic for "tiger, tiger, tiger"?

Quote of the day on the Three Days In June (a.k.a the McChrystal Affair) from "DoD Buzz":

"A former Republican Pentagon official who knows McChrystal well and helped select him for the Joint Special Operations Command, said that the president’s decision was, “understandable because civilian control of the military must be maintained and not be denigrated. But,” said Marshall Billingslea, who headed the Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict office, “the nation nevertheless owes Stan McChrystal a tremendous debt of gratitude. The nation is safer today because of Stan.”

Safer.

Oh, yeah, right, safer. Sorry.

I almost forgot that it was only Stan's hard, indomitable missiony-ness or something that foiled the Taliban High Seas Fleet and the Al Qaeda Luftwaffe strike on the naval base at Pearl Harbor.I know he's a Republican and required to say shit like this, but, really! WTF are these people smoking?

(h/t to Jason at Armchair Generalist, and cross-posted to MilPub)

Bite Me

The latest pearls of military wisdom from Our Man in Bananastan:

"One aide as saying McChrystal seized control of the war "by never taking his eye off the real enemy: The wimps in the White House."

"One aide called White House National Security Adviser Jim Jones, a retired four star general, a "clown" who was "stuck in 1985."

"On Holbrooke, an aide is quoted saying: "The Boss says he's like a wounded animal. Holbrooke keeps hearing rumors that he's going to be fired, so that makes him dangerous." McChrystal is also described as exasperated on receiving an e-mail from Holbrooke. "Oh, not another e-mail from Holbrooke. I don’t even want to open it."

Obama agreed to dispatch an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan only after months of study that many in the military found frustrating. And the White House's troop commitment was coupled with a pledge to begin bringing them home in July 2011, in what counterinsurgency strategists advising McChrystal regarded as an arbitrary deadline.

McChrystal's team disapproves of the Obama administration, with the exception of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who backed McCrystal's request for additional troops in Afghanistan.

A member of McChrystal's team making jokes about Biden, who was seen as critical of the general's efforts to escalate the conflict and who had favored a more limited counter-terrorism approach. "Biden?" the aide was quoted as saying. "Did you say: Bite me?" Biden initially opposed McChrystal's proposal for additional forces last year. He favored a narrower focus on hunting terrorists."

That's it. I'm now officially sick of my Army's general officer corps. From Ray "The Desert Ox" Odiernio, Abizaid, Sanchez, Slick Dave Petraeus, and now this idiot McChrystal - and remember, though none of these quotes come from the Man Who Wears The Stars these are his dogrobbers, selected for their enthusiastic syncophancy and utterly craven lickspittality...if they had an independent thought somewhere in their bullet heads they would be out leading a presence patrol in West Buttfuckistan - I swear, I can't find one of these douchenozzles I'd consider capable of leading four privates to a latrine.The quality of American general officers has never, in my opinion, been truly high. The officer selection process has always seemed to follow the old Japanese adage "The nail that sticks up will be hammered down". And we've had eight years of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld ideal of the big-R Republican general, committed not to the safety of the small-r republic but the geopolitical fantasies of the red-meat wing of the Grand Old Party.

And here is the result.

I have no doubt that Holbrooke is a paranoid dick and Biden an interfering old nanny goat. But;

1. Our entire system is built around civilian control of the military. No doubt that George Washington and Ulysses Grant thought that their civilian masters were dicks and nannies, too. But they got it, and kept their fucking mouths shut.

2. And this entire clusterfuck in central Asia is all about civilian political objectives. Killing raggedy-assed Afghan hillmen is utterly meaningless, and if McChrystal doesn't get this - and these quotes suggest that he and his dogrobbers don't - then he's not just a problem but THE problem and needs to go, like, yesterday.

3. And the final word on this comes from my old First Sergeant Holmes, uttered when he caught me mouthing off about the political situation in Panama, circa 1986."Who da fuck elected you, sergeant?" he snarled.

"Nobody, First Sergeant." I replied.

"You gots a whole bunch of politicians folks in CONUS done elected they ass and they job to tell yo ass what the fuck you gotta do. It you job to shut yo piehole and get the fuckin' job done they tells you to do. You gots a problem with that, you can tell yo momma. But you shut the fuck up around the troops, and around the civilians. Are we Airborne?"

"Airborne, First Sergeant!"

It seems that if we're going to keep him around we need to recall First Sergeant Holmes from his well-deserved retirement to adminster some Old Army wall-to-wall counseling to the good general and his aides.

The sooner the better.

(cross-posted to MilPub)

Removing the Teat

Interesting post over at Spenser Ackerman's place here.

Jason at Armchair Generalist discusses it - and the Cordesman piece that set the discussion in motion - here, and he is somewhat skeptical of Cordesman's unwillingness to come out and flat say "this isn't do-able with the resources we're willing to commit and the political capital we have to spend".I'll go further than that. The problem with the way Western nations, or at least the U.S., does foreign internal defense and rebellion suppression (which is all this is - it's trying to gut a slave revolt, same-same as in Cicero's time.) is that by our very nature we infantilize and marginalize the local proxies we adopt. We make them into little local copies of ourselves, or as close as we can. I don't know why, but it probably has a lot to do with our incapability to imagine a better way to fight war than the American way - lots of firepower and mechanization, lots of dead stuff, the liberation-of-Metz kind of war.

But this kind of war - and this kind of government, since we tend to do the same thing to the local political elites - takes an obscene amount of jack, cash which these crappy little countries don't have. So essentially these supposed foreign proxies get locked on to our military and economic teat and neither want nor try to let go. We end up with a crippled proxy run by a kleptocratic parasitic elite whose "army" is a little Mini-ME, a U.S. Army minus the air, armor, and artillery support, minus the trustworthy officer corps, a brutally incompetent bayonet-prop for the Quisling throne.We've been here before, remember?

The U.S. Army has always sucked at this. You could trace it back to George Washington's day, when the "lesson" he learned from Braddock's defeat wasn't that low-tech irregular soldiers do better in low-intensity guerrilla wars than expensive, foreign regulars, but that you just have to be more...regular. The last chance we might have had to produce genuinely effective foreign proxy armies - the sort of thing that people like "Chinese" Gordon used to do for the British - vanished some time in the middle Nineties when the Charlie Beckwith/SAS/Ranger faction captured the U.S. Army Special Forces and turned them into a glorified SWAT team. We haven't managed to create an effective foreign armed force - particularly one that can stand on its own for more than the time it takes to load the swag into the trunk of the Lexus, huck the door keys at the maid, and grab a hat - since the fucking Apache Scouts.

And they were pretty much "trained" when we got'em.

Think about it. The Americas? Africa? Asia? Where has a large American maneuver MAC produced a local military that successfully resisted a truly popular local guerrilla movement - none of this crappy fake-ass MRLA stuff like in Malaya - serious, hard-core G's like the Shining Path or the Tamil Tigers?

We just don't have the right stuff. We're shitty colonialists.

Look at what we're doing now in Afghanistan in "going after corruption". Think about that. Let's say that American culture was permeated with a tradition that put family loyalty first, that rewarded compliant and sycophantic servitude with largesse and the dibs of the public purse, where bribery and kickbacks were an accepted part of doing business.

Yeah, right, like the Bush family, right, you get it.

So along comes the foreigner with a poker up his ass and says "No more fucking baksheesh, Ali, get it? No more mordida. Get you fucking hand out of the till and get your fucking cousins off the payroll most rikki-tik."

Would that make you happy? Would you want to be like the foreigner - even if the defenestration of the insiders made it easier for you, the outsider? Or would you be irked because it meant that when you got a shot at being the insider you'd miss out on on the lovely lush?

Thought so.

So it's even simpler than Ackerman or Exum or Cordesman lay out. After eight years we've done nothing but created a self-licking ice cream cone. Every "victory" we shoot out over the locals makes our local "allies" weaker, more dependent on us. We can't "win" because the longer we stay the worse we'll be for our Afghan proxies.

We've given them eight years of "breathing space" and so far they've sucking in Sammy's teat and are giving it all the tongue love they can manage.

It's time to wean this monstrous infant.Before its habits of sucking cash out of the government teat begin to spread even further.

(Cross-posted to MilPub)