U.S. Military in Shambles
BY Herschel Smith
7 months, 1 week ago
Leaders of Marine units can let their service members wear nonstandard uniform items amid a long-term shortage of the regular camouflage uniform.
The Marine Corps says it won’t have a full stock of the woodland-pattern camouflage combat utility uniform ― the everyday outfit for most Marines ― until summer or fall 2024. The shortage has prompted the top Marine leader to authorize unit commanders to allow the desert-colored camouflage combat utility uniform or the flame-resistant organizational gear, known as FROGs.
Ridiculous. This is because of lack of planning, lack of logistics, lack of vision, lack of foresight, and lack of funding, along with worrying about the wrong things like gender and race studies.
U.S. Army from Glenn Reynolds.
NEGLECTING THE TROOPS: Congress blasts Pentagon for ‘dreadful’ barracks conditions. “In a scathing letter addressed to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, lawmakers accused the Pentagon of failing to ‘provide the most basic oversight and care’ of barracks at 10 installations cited in a recent report and called it a ‘failure of leadership’ by Austin ‘that cannot be ignored.’”
I have a nephew in the Army and have heard a number of stories along these lines — no food, no toilet paper, filthy barracks, etc.
If living quarters – whether barracks or tent – aren’t squared away, that’s the fault of leadership. If the troops are filthy or live in filthy conditions, there is a lack of discipline.
Either way, there is a general lacking that deeply affects the U.S. military.
And it’s all by design, you understand?
What do you want to bet this lack of discipline doesn’t affect the Mexican cartels or the army of Communist China?
On October 1, 2023 at 10:25 pm, Georgiaboy61 said:
The enormous damage inflicted upon the services by ‘woke’ ideology, as toxic as it is, comprises only one small part of this fiasco. The annual budget of the DOD/Pentagon and the armed forces has dwarfed those of the rest of the world for decades, and this pathetic state of affairs is all the public – the taxpayers – have to show for it?
Most of us who follow military affairs and national defense are familiar with the allegations of waste and cost-overruns in the armed forces and in the Pentagon procurement process. But clearly, this is way beyond garden-variety graft and corruption. Here have those billions of dollars gone, the ones which were supposed to be buying us a military capable of defending the country?
I read that we have seven hundred fifty military bases around the world, in some eighty nations. Yet, it has recently come to light that we cannot produce even close to enough 155mm artillery shells to fight the conflict in Ukraine, let alone prosecute a wider, larger war with a peer opponent.
Nor does it end there: The ship-building capacity of the People’s Republic of China outstrips that of the United States by a factor of 20:1!
The quote from Frederick the Great comes to mind: “He who defends everything defends nothing…”
A second aphorism comes to mind as well, namely: “Amateurs discuss tactics, professionals discuss logistics…”
Logistical strength – by which is meant the ability to supply your forces and war effort – is absolutely critical to attrition warfare, and it cannot be successfully prosecuted unless one has the industrial base upon which to wage the conflict. The cold hard fact is that the U.S. no longer possesses such an industrial capacity, whereas our likely adversaries – Russia and China – do to a significantly greater extent.
Great nations and empires, like people, have finite lifespans. They are born, grow, mature and prosper for a time, and then age into decline and perhaps ruin, as some other power ascends to dominance for a time, and the cycle repeats over and over again throughout history. Just as Rome and Great Britain before us fell, so we will fall.
Although the decline of great nations/empires is inevitable, there is a choice about how to deal with this new reality.
Consider an aging starlet – a movie star or celebrity who was a great beauty in her youthful prime but who is now faced with advancing age: She can choose to age gracefully and in an age-appropriate fashion, or she can fight tooth-and-nail to hang on to her looks with make-up, plastic surgery, and so on.
Britain, for all of her manifest flaws, has by and large chosen to age gracefully as an empire. There was a period after the Second World War when the imperialists of that island nation struggled mightily to hold on to India, Kenya, and all of the other colonial possessions, but once the inevitability of her decline was made manifest and obvious to all, the grand old lady took the sensible course and decided to abdicate while it was still possible. Of course, bankruptcy will tend to do that for a nation…
British historian Niall Ferguson has written/spoken widely on this phenomenon – and his words have import since he is himself British and intimately familiar with the pattern of historical events taking place. And he has repeatedly warned that the U.S. is going to fall off of its perch. The only choice is in how tough the landing is going to be: hard or soft.
U.S. primacy during the post-war Bretton Woods era has rested upon many things, but over the last fifty or so years, chiefly two factors stand out: The petrodollar regime, and the might of the U.S. military.
The petrodollar assured that the U.S. dollar (USD) would remain the unquestioned and unchallenged reserve currency of international trade, while the largess provided by it would fund the enforcement mechanism behind it – the globe spanning U.S. military.
Now that both of these long-standing institutions are showing signs of weakness and decrepitude, it is likely that the long-reign of U.S. dominance is coming to an end.
Returning to the subject at hand, the U.S. military itself, the time would seem to be ripe for a total reassessment of U.S. foreign policy and our military posture, both internationally and in terms of defense of our homeland. As a wise old campaigner might say, it is sometimes wise to “shorten your lines,” but if there is anything we know that the so-called ruling class lacks it is wisdom.
Meaning, that if we were smart – and wise – we’d learn how to “right-size” our armed forces and learn how to distinguish the essential missions from the non-essential or obsolete ones. It isn’t 1960 anymore, and we live in a multi-lateral world now, and not in one where we can dictate terms to others as we once did.
We are going to lose our position of primacy; it is already happening. It is not a question of “if,” but of “when” at this point. We still have some autonomy, agency and control over our own affairs – would it not be best to take action while we can still influence the outcomes in a manner at least somewhat favorable to us? Our policy-makers had better figure out that the longer they wait to make these hard choices, the tougher they are going to be to make when that time finally comes.
But that brings us back to their lack of wisdom and discernment, doesn’t it?
On October 1, 2023 at 10:32 pm, PGF said:
Communists have shortages of material supply because nobody works. I know you don’t think that’s what’s happening to America, but it is. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
On October 1, 2023 at 10:41 pm, Dan said:
All part of the communist lefts plan to emasculate the military so it poses no threat to their agenda. Can’t be an effective fighting force when all your leaders harp on is “woke”.
On October 2, 2023 at 6:24 am, MN Steel said:
Supply is same as it ever was, with the usual shysters selling what the troopies need out the backdoor as “surplus” before it ever reaches the unit.
I’m surprised there aren’t gang battles on post yet, or maybe that news is easily suppressed. In 2000 we had a fresh private frog-marched out in front of the company for stealing stereos in the batallion parking lot, I can’t see things improving during these two decades…
On October 2, 2023 at 9:21 am, blake said:
@PGF, it’s not just people deciding they do not need to work, government is also actively moving against those who provide jobs for those those who are willing to work.
On October 2, 2023 at 10:28 am, scott s. said:
The top brass love fooling around with uniforms, so what was supplied today is obsolete tomorrow. Then, you can’t have female uniforms any more, the same uniform has to to work for both sexes.
As far as barracks, I don’t know how Army manages those. If the primary custodian is the garrison / IMCON and not the unit occupying I can see finger pointing and “not my job to fund”.
As far as overseas bases, kind of a meaningless metric as it says nothing about the combat power represented.
Agree that our national security strategy needs to be rethought — the current world hegemon that could work after WWII just doesn’t make sense now.
On October 3, 2023 at 6:09 am, Frank Clarke said:
“lack of funding”??? Every year, the Pentagon budget jumps whether it needs to or not.
There is no “lack of funding”.
On October 3, 2023 at 12:11 pm, Latigo Morgan said:
It was in ’85 or ’86, there was a toilet paper shortage for some reason and we had to go out and buy our own if we wanted any in the barracks at Ft. Carson.
We went to NTC at Ft. Irwin without 2 qt. desert canteens because our platoon Sgt. sold ours to the local military surplus store. He wound up busted from E-7 to E4 and dishonorably discharged after the resulting investigation turned up that he’d been stealing and selling lots of other things, too. The canteen thing was too obvious, since the rest of the company had them except us.
On October 3, 2023 at 1:14 pm, Georgiaboy61 said:
@ PGF
Re: “Communists have shortages of material supply because nobody works. I know you don’t think that’s what’s happening to America, but it is. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
Oh, that’s correct all right…. but there’s a twist or two. Heritage Americans, the kind that propelled this nation to greatness once-upon-a-time, are now awake to the fact that the powers-that-be despise them and theirs… and these people are opting out in increasingly large numbers. Those that can’t opt out are feeding the beast as little as possible.
In the old USSR, the workers used to quip: “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us…” but in the end, most workers at least had to appear to work since someone would drag them off and imprison them otherwise for disobeying the party’s commands. But that did nothing to assure quality, which is why factories making shoes would churn out all L or R shoes in a given size/style w/o regard to making matching ones. Why? Because no one told them to make pairs of shoes and they didn’t care about quality unless/until someone in authority told them to do it.
Of course, all of this is complicated in present-day America by the fact that the populace is armed to the teeth, a situation communists most-assuredly do not like.
Strikes helped to bring down the communists in Poland during the end-stages of the regime in the late 1970s and 1980s. Maybe those will be seen in the present as well. Time will tell.
The countermove by the authorities would be to nationalize the industries in question and order people to work – if necessary at gunpoint. But given the 2A they will have to find some other means of tightening the screws, which is where social controls like CBDC and social credit scores come into play.