King Donald's War, Part 13. A Second Rate Military lead by a Third Rate Clown College with a Secretary of War who should be impeached.

As we noted yesterday, Thomas Massie has introduced articles of impeachment upon Pete Hegseth.

They actually stand a chance of passing.

They provide, in relevant part:

Massie needs a simple majority in the House to pass the resolution.  It would require 2/3ds in the Senate to impeach and remove Hegseth.

Massie is nothing if not independent.  I don't agree with him on everything, but he's been one of the few Republicans in Congress, as opposed to the pack of willing sycophantic cowards that claim to be Republicans.  When the history of this era is written, he'll be a hero, whereas people like Mike Johnson will be pathetic weirdos, and people like John Barrasso spineless wimps.

Everything in this bill is correct.

One thing that isn't is incompetence, which this administration has shown itself to be on military matters.  The US Military has been revealed to be, frankly, pathetically bad, or at least its Navy has has been.  We're losing the war against a power that has outfought us, and out thought us.

Hegseth promised a renewal, of sorts, in the U.S. Military. Frankly, it needs one, and has for a long time.

Hegseth seems to have imagined a military that was pre 1948 in some ways.  All white, and mostly men.  The date we really need to look back to is this one:

Today In Wyoming's History: September 16, 1940. Conscription starts and the National Guard mobilized.

September 16, 1940 is the day the US went from a peacetime establishment and peacetime military to a wartime establishment and a wartime military.  We've been there ever since.  To at least some degree, we've kept a huge military with a huge military establishment, massive arms requirement, and a very large professional military class.

That needs to end.

What Hegseth got right, sort of, is that the Military began to be used for odd social experiments and it never stopped.  People look back to the 1948 integration of the military as being when that started, but that really misses the point. Segregation of the Army (not the Navy) started during the Civil War when the Army took in large number of black troops for the first time. With the inherent racism of the country, it simply would not have been possible to integrate black soldiers into regular units.  They would have been killed.  Establishing black units in and of themselves was a major accomplishment, and one only the war could have brought about.

Some efforts to integrate the military more fully occured in the 19th Century, but inherent racism in American society really just didn't make it possible until World War Two when it started to occur on a smaller and localized scale.  American reaction to German racism reflected back in the face of Americans and made integration of the military not only fully possible, but inevitable, after the war.

Minorities have always been a huge success story in the military, and that's been the case all along.  It simply provided opportunities to them that didn't exist elsewhere.  That lesson was learned but started to be misapplied in the 1970s when the Carter Administration saw the military as a way to advance the cause of women in society.  That evolved into allowing women into combat MOS's which was a huge mistake. Women and men are different. And then the Obama Administration allowed "transgendered" individuals into the military starting in 2016, which was turning a blind eye to a medically enhanced mental illness.

Women in combat units did create an internal reaction in military units that went unnoticed to some degree.  Male combat troops didn't and don't like it, and react accordingly whereas the influence of young women had a feminizing and softening, even cutsey, impact on the military.  Look up "Battle Boo" on Youtube and you'll see what I mean.  

Having troops set against their political leaders is a bad thing. But that has occured.  This created the perfect situation for a sort of Curragh Mutiny, and it's happened.

The thing here is that this all needed correction, but competent correction, which would have required a an actually conservative administration to bring about.  We don't have one of those.  In stead we have a demented megalomaniac octogenarian who is surrounded by sycophants, weirdos, and dimwits. Pete Hegseth is a good example.  A Evangelical Protestant Zealot with tattoos recalling the Crusades, which weren't done by Evangelical Protestants, a record of hard drinking and philandering, he presents himself like an insecure frat boy trying to hang out with college football players.  He also, as noted, not only claims to want to restore the "warrior" ethos to the military, he seems to have something against minorities and a bias against women that extend to their just being women.  

Like much of the overgrown bloated U.S. Military, he doesn't seem to have grasped that its not 1941 any longer either.  The war in Ukraine has shown that the age of drones is here.  Iran and the Houthis have shown an ability to launch missile strikes that would have made Peenemunde pound.  Believing that the US could take on Iran with Naval air alone, something GMT Games had already shown you could not, US forces were left heavily exposed in Middle Eastern bases which were wiped out by Iran nearly immediately.  Logistical tails were stepped on and the USS Abraham Lincoln became a symbol for the entire country, a rusting psychologically stressed hulk.

There doesn't seem to have been a lot of clear thinking going on.

Speaking of not thinking, and related to this war:

But with your money.  

What the crap?

President Trump’s administration is planning to sell to Israel a munitions package worth $2.8 including 2,000-pound bombs which will be funded by a Foreign Military Financing (FMF) grant.

That's right.  The heavily indebted United States will be spending money it doesn't have for Israel's military.

One thing that this war has caused and is causing is a rethinking of the US relationship with Israel.  It's long overdue.

The common line is that "Israel is our only ally in the Middle East".  Israel isn't a formal US ally at all.  Indeed, in terms of formal allies, the only Middle Eastern one we have is Turkey, not Israel.  

The US has a close relationship to Israel for historic and demographic reasons.  The US was horrified to a greater extent than any other nation to what happened to Jews during World War Two and reacted by giving its strong support to the establishment of Israel, ignoring the fact that importing thousands of immigrants into a land already occupied by somebody else would result in problems.

Put another way, if Europe demanded that thousands of Mexican immigrants be allowed into Texas to create a new country, we'd freak out.

Added to that, the US has a substantial Jewish minority, although it has not been and has never been huge.  It's about 2.4% of the population today.  Somewhat ignored in this is that the US also has notable population of Middle Eastern immigrants, most of whom up until a couple of decades ago were Lebanese and Syrian Christians and Armenians.  Perhaps because they were all members of Apostolic Christian faiths, that was just easy to ignore in some ways.  It's France, for instance, that has traditionally defended the rights of the Lebanese.  The US once concerned itself with the plight of Armenians, but that's been a long time ago.  To some extent, perhaps because they were a more distinct minority, Jewish populations in the US have tended to be relatively better organized.

Anyhow, almost from day 1 Americans really bought off on the concept of the establishment of Israel being a really noble cause.  In my household growing up I remember my mother feeling that way, although my father had a much more nuanced opinion.  The plight of Arabs in the same region was generally ignored by Americans up until relatively recently, and only because populations of Palestinian and other Arabs have immigrated into the US. They're still a much smaller percentage of the population than Jewish Americans are.

Added to that, Islam has tended to really freak Americans out, and for good reason.  

Israel has very divided politics and is going through something akin to what the US is, with the current Israeli government being, in my view, extreme.  Nobody has ever stated it, but it seems relatively clear that there are those in Israel who would outright force Palestinians out of what had been Mandatory Palestine.  There are Americans who have equally extreme views about modern Israel and its place in the world from a religious perspective.

Whatever brought the current Israeli government to power, it's also clear that there are huge numbers of Israelis who are horrified by recent events and would take Israel in another direction.

At this point, I'm with those who, like my father so many decades ago, take a much more nuanced view on Israel.  Like Ukrainian born Argentinian-Israeli author Jacobo Timerman, I view Israel as a Middle Eastern state that has to learn to live in that neighborhood.  It also, at this point, has to learn to get by on its own.  It can build its own weapons and pay for them itself.

For that matter, while its a topic for another thread, the US wasn't a serious supplier of arms around the world until World War Two.  It needs to stop being one now.  Selling arms to some countries is, okay, in my view, but not to as many as we do, and for cash, not best wishes.

I'll note that it is interesting that a lot of our former arms client states have stepped out on its own in recent years.  South Korea, for example, manufactures its own armored vehicles, artillery and small arms.  Israel does produce some weapons of its own, but not all that many.  I'm not for selling them arms anymore.

When people are killed by American arms, no matter who uses them, we're implicated.

Back to the illegal war in the Middle East that Israel got us into.

A resolution requiring the US to get out of that war passed the House yesterday.

H. CON. RES. 93

Directing the President, pursuant to section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution, to remove United States Armed Forces from hostilities with Iran.

---

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

April 28, 2026

Mr. Moulton (for himself, Mr. Crow, Mr. Ryan, Ms. Houlahan, Mr. Panetta, Mr. Auchincloss, Ms. Goodlander, Mr. Vindman, and Mr. Scott of Virginia) submitted the following concurrent resolution; which was referred to the Committee on Foreign Affairs

---

CONCURRENT RESOLUTION

Directing the President, pursuant to section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution, to remove United States Armed Forces from hostilities with Iran.

Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That, pursuant to section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution (50 U.S.C. 1544(c)), Congress directs the President to remove United States Armed Forces from hostilities against the Islamic Republic of Iran, other than those elements of the Armed Forces that may be necessary to defend the United States or an ally or partner of the United States from imminent attack provided that the President complies fully with the requirements of section 5(b) the War Powers Resolution (50 U.S.C. 1544(b)) with respect to any such use of the Armed Forces, unless explicitly authorized by a declaration of war or a specific congressional authorization for use of military force against Iran.

It's not going to go anywhere, but it's not irrelevant.  At least some are speaking up and standing out.

And some who claim to adhere to certain values should take note.  In the Particular Judgement Mike Johnson is going to have to explain supporting all this killing and standing with Israel isn't going to excuse it.  But then Johnson will have a lot to answer for.

cont:

The Houthis shot down a Saudi F-15 with a domestically produced missile today.

cont:

And Mike Johnson sent the House home early to avoid the impeachment vote.

That'd suggest either there were enough votes to pass it, or there were Republican Congressmen afraid to go on record.

They won't be back until November 9. They'd only been working for seven days since they came back from their last recess.

September 17, 2026

So it turns out the administration sent representatives to meet with the Houthis.

The same man who betrayed the Afghanis and surrendered their country to the Taliban is now negotiating with the Houthis while refusing support to Saudi Arabia.

Figures.

cont:

Apparently a deal was reached:

Yemen’s Houthis have agreed to allow US shipping unfettered Red Sea access if Washington refrains from direct military involvement in the Saudi-led war. That’s according to US reports which say the two sides struck the deal amid a Houthi offensive along Yemen’s Red Sea coast.

Al Jazeera.   

So King Donny stabbed Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the back, not that he is a nice guy.

Not that the Houthis are either.

The Houthis (Ansar Allah) are a Zaydi revivalist and Shia Islamist organization allied with Iran, which supports them.  They've been a player in the Israel/Hezbollah War, as was Iran, and are attempting to gain control of all of Yemen.  

Their emblem:

The phrase on it translates as "God is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse be upon the Jews, Victory to Islam".

Some deluded sots who supported the Trump participation in the ongoing war against Iran maintained early on that it was sort of a Protestant crusade. The US had a Divine mission, some argued who were in the military, or the Department of Defense, to take on Shi'a Islam.

Well, apparently not so much.

For the second time, Trump has surrendered to an Islamist organization and betrayed somebody we supported.

Anyone relying on Trump  for support is a fool.

And with this stab in the back, we will conclude this edition.

Last edition:

King Donald's War, Part 12. The "Economic D-Day" edition. CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 152nd Edition, the irony edition.

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 149th Edition. Abandoning Ship.

The first significant administration departure.

Karoline Leavitt is leaving her post as White House Press Secretary.

There's going to be a lot of speculation as to why she did this, but let's credit what she said. She's 28 years old, and just had a baby.

Her second.

Her husband is 32 years her senior.

Leavitt is a Catholic, as am I, but she's completely ignored the Catholic injunction against lying.  Lying on serious matters is a serious sin.  Personally, while I can not know her mind, I think she knows she's a liar.

I think she likely knows at this point, at age 28, that she needs to reform and repent.  Her first child was born out of wedlock with her current husband, Nicholas Riccio.  The second was born within the union.  Her affiliation with Trump has locked her into a web of lies for which she'll always be remembered.  Indeed, while this blog entry is somewhat forgiving, most pundits will not be, witness:

Karoline Leavitt Will Soon Lie Somewhere Else

From The New Republic.

I bet she knows that, and that it's time to get out while she can.  Get out, confess, and get clear.  Even at that, the burden she has of repenting from such a public life of outright lying is a heavy one.

I bet she tackles that.  A tell all book will be forthcoming. . . it'll be out before Trump leaves office at the end of this term, if old age doesn't take him to his reward, or lack of one, before that.

Well, may she find a path to peace. She needs it. 

So do her two children.

It won't be easy, overall, we might note.  Lots of people eventually confront their sins and reform, but very few have to confront the public record of it, which in the modern age lasts forever.  Leavitt is, as The New Republic notes, an outrageous liar and that will follower her the rest of her life.

Indeed, if you look at people who had really vile roles serving really vile people, and Leavitt's role has been vile and Donald Trump is a vile person, it's really hard to find anyone who overcomes it.  Albert Speer probably came as close to it as anyone, but even he, as charming as he was, never really did.  Georgy Malenkov, part of Stalin's government, completely fell after Stalin and eventually became a Russian Orthodox Lector, a sort of clerical position in the Eastern Rite churches.

The American things, of course, is to try to convert your infamy into a sort of fame, which is always sort of pathetic.  Monica Lewinsky is the prime example.

Well, as noted, my guess is that Leavitt, while home raising her children, will start working on a tell all book.  By the time its released she's  reveal, I'm guessing, how she never loved Donald Trump.

I also bet that Trump, right now, lives in fear of what that book will reveal.

Mini Mutinies.

Sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln have been trying to jump overboard to their deaths.  

At least those are the reports, confirmed in at least one case by the spouse of a sailor who tried to do just that.  "Big T" Pete Hegseth called the reports "fake news", with the Trump administration branding anything that is actually true as fake.

The ship, launched in 1988, has experienced food shortages, moldy showers, broken toilets, dead laundry facilities, and a lack of basics necessities such as soap and toothpaste during its ninth month deployment.

It's interesting in part because such conditions, while appalling, would not have been that much out of the norm in earlier eras.  Sailors just endured it.  But then, they endured a lot of similar conditions in daily life.  People were, in fact, tougher than they are now.

But it's also interesting as it might reveal something else going on.

The lats time the US Navy had really serious shipboard problems of this type was during the late stages of the Vietnam War, when the USS Kitty Hawk and the USS Constellation endured mutinies the Navy has refused to acknowledge as mutinies. These were serious events and they came at a point in time at which US military morale was at its lowest point since the Mexican War, during which time it had such low morale in some quarters that troops had deserted to join the Mexican Army.

The problem had expressed itself first in the Army, with the Army starting to experience everything from quiet disobedience in Vietnam to some outright revolts in the US.  The Kitty Hawk incident occured in 1972 with the Constellation event happening the following year.  Nothing like that has happened since.

The Kitty Hawk had a hard Vietnam War deployment of eight months before it was ordered back into combat and the event began.  That's notable, as the Abraham Lincoln has been out nine months.

Also notable for the 1972 and 1973 events is that everyone had completely lost faith in the Vietnam War by that time, and frankly in the military itself.  Rarely noted during the revision of the history of the war, the Vietnam War had destroyed the American Army as a combat effective force.  The US was lucky that none of our adversaries attempted any sort of additional war at the time. We likely could not have successfully contested one.

Servicemen who served in peacetime Navy before the Second World War were sort of their own breed.  A lot of them were tough careerist for whom the Navy itself was their home.  Set in that era, the movie The Sand Pebbles does a good job of showing what their view was like, and of course it came from a novel by a veteran who had served in that time.  A sort of oddly nostalgic look at the same thing, but set in 1973, is Cinderella Liberty, one of two sort of cynical Navy movies released that year, the other being The Last Detail.

During World War Two sailors, most of whom were wartime volunteers, knew what they were fighting for.  In the Cold War, for the most part, they did too.  Mutinies came when that was no longer clear.

It sure isn't clear now.  American servicemen aren't serving in a just cause and all of the military actions during the Second Trump Administration have been illegal, with one, the boat destruction off of South America, constituting murder of the targets.  The current war shows ever sign of being endless and pointless, and the men know it.

Some honorable commanders have simply resigned.  Enlisted men can't do that.  Serving in an illegal war on a ship that's a craphole, they're serving an administration in which many of them are not the right kind of people, as the administration sees it.  US resources are now really stretched on top of it.  All in all, what's going on board on the USS Abraham Lincoln isn't a good sign.

Toy boats

Part of what's not very honorable is the insane playing along which amounts to marking time until Trump is out of office. The Navy is doing that with the Trump Class of big missile cruisers which King Donny wants built.  Termed "battleships", because Trump knowns nothing about this topic and apparently thinks that battleships are nifty, rather than rendered obsolete decades ago, the CBO estimates that if built they'll cost the country $275B over 30 years.

They won't be built.

They are already costing the country money however.

Like the ballroom, this will keep dragging along until Trump is retired or falls face first in a Big Mac, at which time it'll be terminated.

Monuments to failure

On costs, it's now estimated that all of Trump's D.C. projects will cost nearly 1B.

The country doesn't have this kind of money and we know it.

Had Joe Biden proposed spending 1B on D.C. renovations, Republicans would be howling around the city crying "fiscal responsibility!" and people like Gray, Ranser, and Friess would be warning about the republic being on the verge of ending.  The Wyoming Freedom Caucus would be howling.

Not one Republican is going to say a word about this.

Part of the outrageous nature of the expense is what the administration is planning on.  Building is expensive and tearing down is expensive also.

The Democrats can be planned on to have angst about the expense of tearing things down as its expensive.  They already are.  Additionally, the Democrats remain dedicated to the law, whereas the GOP does not.  The GOP knows that as well and is no doubt planning that the process of tearing crap down will be tied up by worries about the expense and legalities of it.

Well, on this one, the next President should in fact take a page out of Trump's book.  Within an  hour after the inauguration the Corps of Engineers should be ordered to remove whatever has been constructed of the ballroom with in 24 hours, tear down what ever has been built of an arch within the same time frame, and de-guild the bronze statues, even if it means their destruction, with in six hours.  By the end of the 24 hours all the gold or gold appearing nicknacks in the White House ought to be removed to the bunker and the entire thing filled with cement. The reflecting pool should be drained and the Rhino Lining torn up.

Contracts with anyone who contributed to these atrocities should be cancelled and the entities barred from future government contracts.  

Radical reconstruction.

Replacement?

People are already wondering who will replace Leavitt as Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda.  Fortunately, Wyoming offers the perfect solution.

By Tony Webster - Flickr, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=169386648

Chuck Gray.

Chuck loves Donald Trump more than Karline Leavitt ever did.  Chuck would never leave.  And he already as experience as a spoken media figure, having had a radio show on his daddy's radio station, and he is a really experienced liar.

Leavitt said some really outrageous stuff while she was spokesman, but they don't hold a candle to the sting of accusations that Chuck retouinely hurls out. Why he'd be calling people communists, Marxist, fascist, abiogenist,dogmatist,lutist, prologistableist, dramatist, in no time.

His only disadvantage would be that he's not a woman.  Most of the recent ones have been.  On the other hand, he's not married and he can't get pregnant (shoot, he's never even seen with women, or men, or mammals) so he won't be going anywhere.

And this gets him out of having to pretend that he's a Wyomingite nad having to buy all that Westerware.

Last edition:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 148th Edition. The Aerodrome: Substitute. The C-32A and Donald Trump.

Everyone getting their own toys. Absurd military specialization.

Oh geez, here we go again:

Special Operations Command wants a 10-pound 5.56mm machine gun

The command that oversees U.S. special operators expects the Flyweight Assault Machine Gun to begin field testing in 2028, a spokesperson said.

Just recently I wrote a piece here about how it's really time for major reform in the U.S. Military, including a major scaling back of its size.  This is more evidence of that.

Military funding is so thick that we've reached the point where about every two weeks some branch or command of the military requests a new small arm.  It's frankly absurd.

The Army just recently adopted the M7 rifle and now is already looking at a M8 carbine based on the rifle. At the same time, it adopted a new machine gun. The M250.  Both are in a new cartridge.  The M7 was supposed to replace every variant of the AR15 (the M4 Carbine and the M16).  The M250 was supposed to replace the M249 and the M240, thereby also getting everyone on to a new 6.5 cartridge.

Special Operations was supposed to get the new SIG M338, which shoots a variant of the .338 Win Mag.  They are using the Mk 46, their own lightweight version of the M249.

Now they want a lightweight 5.56 machine gun.

The Marine Corps, for its part, has been so/so with the M7, and is using the 5.56 M27, a piston variant of the AR.  The M27 takes the place of both the M4/M16 and the M249 in the Marines.  It looked at the M7 and has rejected it.

The USAF uses the M4.  There are airmen who depend on a longarm, but they're relatively few in number so it really doesn't matter what the USAF uses.

Anyhow, this is nonsense.

The AR platform rifles have always been problematic. At this point the ARs share the same distinction occupied by the late 19th Century "trapdoor" Springfields in being a weapon that was never very good, got people killed early on, but which has lingered on forever.  Replacing it was a good idea.

The Army uses more longarms than anyone else and anything suitable for a soldier is suitable for a Marine.  The Marine Corps should be made to get with the program.  

Nobody needs a carbine. That's just stupid.

Nobody needs a 5.56 caliber weapon anymore. That's just stupid.

It's also a stupid waste of money.

For that matter, there being a M17 and M18 pistol is as well.

US military pistols tend to give me  heartburn to start with, as the post Vietnam War history of them has been dumb.  The M1911 never needed to be replaced, new ones just needed to be ordered.  Congress forced the 9mm and that's how we ended up with the M9.

Having said that, the oddly unloved M9 is a good 9mm pistol.  It really doesn't need to be replaced at all.  Just as the M16 was never able to replace the M14 fully, the M9 was never able to fully replace the M1911, which started a late in the day comeback even seeing the Marines re adopt it for special use as the M45.

Because everyone now loves striker fired pistols, we decided we needed one and adopted the SIG in the form of the M18 and M17.  That was bound to make Glock heads upset even though the Glock isn't that great of pistol, frankly.  The myth of the misfires started but apparently that is now over.

I guess I can tolerate there being a M18 compact variant of the full size M17, but frankly that's a little stupid for the most part.  I can see some use for it, but only some. Still, the USAF handguns are all M18s.  The Navy and Marine Corps also use the M18, rather than the M17.

Anyhow, during the Cold War, Congress at one time had enough and required the services to use uniform equipment.  After the Vietnam War that started to erode away.

It needs to come back.

Related threads:

The United States needs military reform. Der Fibber's Bunker and our outdated Cold War Military. This needs to go, and go back to the future.

Labels: 1940s, 1948., 2020s, 2026, Army, Military, Military Industrial Complex, The Second Trump Administration, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Navy, U.S. Space Force, United States Marine Corps

The United States needs military reform. Der Fibber's Bunker and our outdated Cold War Military. This needs to go, and go back to the future.

Before World War One the size of the Regular Army was 127,000 men, up from 100,000 in 1914.  In 1939, before the start of World War Two, the Regular Army had 174,000 men.

It's time to go back to that.

Donald Trump this week:

Let's be clear.

We aren't being served well by a professional military class at all, and if most of the fighting strength of the nation was in the National Guard and Navy Reserve, we wouldn't be in a mess like Iran now.  If we did that, having a fortress at the White House would be pointless.

And frankly, it's pointless anyhow...

The ballroom is completely pointless.  There's another large Washington facility that can fit this purpose.  In short, the next President needs to scrape this monstrosity and fill the bunker in with concrete.

But let's take a little deeper dive into this.

Trump's building a bunker.

Just like Hitler did.

By Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-V04744 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5437633

Am I saying Trump is Hitler?  No, he's more like Idi Amin.  Idi Amin was a nutjob who stood mostly for his fat self, and that sums up Donald Trump pretty well.  

But building a bunker underneath the White House shows a mentality, and not just in Trump, but in the military, that it's 1964 and the Soviet Union is going to start a Third World War today.

Dwight Eisenhower's nightmare of the dangers of the military industrial complex have come true. And not only have them come true, our military sucks.

Not on the troops level.  On the troop level, say E-1 through O-6, it's really good.  But the problem is evident.  We have a Cold War legacy military and its a danger to the country itself.

Prior to June 24, 1948 the United States had a completely different defense model, and it worked very well.  It defended the nation and it never constituted a threat to the republic itself.  It also didn't work great for assaulting other countries.  It didn't, accordingly, do great in the offensive War of 1812, but it did suffice to keep the British counter invasion from succeeding, if only barely, and in part due to British morale and logistical problems.  It won the war against Mexico and because of its structure it necessitated the US coming to terms with Mexico.  It defeated the racist Southern rebellion of the 1860s, albeit at great costs as the South had the same military structure.  It slowly won the long asymmetric war against the Native population.  It beat Spain and then prevailed in the Philippine Insurrection.  It performed brilliantly in World War One and World War Two.

Since then, with the new structure?  M'eh.

We didn't lose in Korea, but we didn't win either.  Interestingly, in that "conflict", the old model was still partially in place, and without it we couldn't have fought the war.  We turned around with hte new model and lost completely in Vietnam.  Since Vietnam we've fought Iraq twice, the first time, with limited objectives, we did okay, and the second time resulted in us getting bogged down for years.  We also got bogged down in Afghanistan and ultimately surrendered to the Taliban.  We're losing now and are going to lose to Iran.

So what's the structural problem here?

Before 1948 the US defense model was based on the following:

• Large professional Navy (which the Marine Corps was a tiny part of).
• Very small professional Army. As in very, very small.
• Large state controlled, in peacetime, reserves, which started being called the National Guard with the New York State Militia adopting that name in 1824.
• A small Coast Guard (originally the Revenue Cutter Service) that was in the control of the  Treasury Department.

That was it.

There was no standing Army at all . The founders thought standing armies were likely to take over the country, sooner or later.  A professional navy was different as it would always be busy sailing around the globe and therefore couldn't stage a coup.

The thought was that if the US was actually attacked, and the number of suspects who might attack it were quite small, the state militias could be called into active duty service to defend the huge country.  A very small standing Army was formed in 1784 for frontier duty, and expanded after the US was badly beaten up in a frontier Indian war in 1786.  It seemed to have been proven that if the country was going to engage in frontier Indian Wars, it needed some sort of Army.  It was also frankly felt that sort of Army was not a danger to the Republic, as it was like the Navy.  While the Navy was busy off of Gibraltar (no joke) or Chile (no joke), like everyone else's navy, the Army would be off in the wilderness were it would be on the edge of extinction and busy.  If a real war came, the state's would muster their militia and the Federal Government call them into Federal service.

Really optimistic painting of the First American Rgt as party of a U.S. Army series.  Painted in 1976, this depicts a 1976 view of this.  In real life frontier soldiers wouldn't have been wearing white wigs, probably would have been semi shaven, and a lot of the enlisted men wouldn't be wearing uniforms  Nobody can keep white trousers clean.

Frankly, some of this acknowledged that being a soldier requires training, but overall isn't that hard.  It wasn't that hard then, and it isn't now.  The Regular U.S. Army has always looked down on state militias, but the evidence doesn't support the disdain.  In this period, likely the only branch of the Army that really required training were engineers and artillerymen, which the Army did provide, and which did require a professional service to sustain.

It was Canadian militia that basically won the War of 1812, and had the British Regular Army not performed up to expectations, Ohio would be a Canadian province today, as would most of the Rocky Mountain West.

The Mexican War was also fought largely with wartime volunteers and state militiamen.  The Army branch that really shined with the artillery, which was made of troops in the Regular Army, again pointing out what I've noted above.  Much of the early western soldiering was done by the Corps of Topographical Engineers, which again demonstrates it. For regular grunt fighting, volunteers and militiamen worked just fine.

This was all proven again during the Civil War.  Almost all the troops on both sides were wartime servicemen.  Lots of notable officer in the war came right out of peacetime civilian careers.  And notably a really large and bloody war was fought for the long-haul by men who had only state service before the war.

The National Guard's contribution to World War One was so large that the US would not have been able to fight the war without it.  For that matter, the Mexican Border War coming right before it completely relied on National Guardsmen defending the border when the Pershing's Regulars went into Mexico. And again, in World War Two, it was the Regular Army and the National Guard that really kept things going until mid 1943.  A lot of early U.S. Army commitments relied on the Guard well into Operation Torch.  Frankly, the Guard was sacrificed to some degree as they were available and trained.  As late as the Korean War, and only two years into the new defense structure, the entire service relied upon Guardsmen and Reservists to a significant degree.

So that establishment has worked.

After 1948, and more particularly after 1950, the US started to assume that it needed to be on a wartime footing all the time, and that lead to the massive Cold War military. The Cold War was the reason for that.  The assumption was that if war broke out with the Soviet Union there wouldn't be time to mobilize, so the US had to be ready to go from day one.

The Cold War has been over since 1990.  The current size of the Army is 453,000, down from 700,000 during the colder parts of the Cold War, but way up from what it was prior to the Second World War.  The British Army, in comparison, is 109,410.  The French Army, which has commitments all over the globe, is 264,000 men in size.

And I'm not including the Air Force, which didn't exist until 1947.  Prior to that it was part of the Army.  It has another 321,848 active duty personnel.  Into that you have to add the Space Farce, the comical absurdity that has 14,000 personnel.

The Navy, before World War Two, had 160,000 personnel serving 790 active ships.  It has 344,600 serving 480 ships now.  That size is about right.

The active duty Army's and Air Force's is not.  It's entirely too large.

And the structure is wrong.  The Joint Chiefs of Staff, formed in 1942, cover every service including sub services of the services.  It currently has eight members for what ought to be two services.  Having a large body like that risks turning it into a sort of German General Staff.

Complete with the incompetency such large bodies have.  Note how well the German General Staff did in World War One and World War Two.

It's the kind of body that thinks it should build bunkers. And its the kind of body that has the problem noted here:

The U.S. Army’s Dangerous Obsession with WWII Europe

The Second World War, which is now over 80 years ago, is the last really successful war the US fought.  You can't say we've lost ever war since, although I've seen that claim made, but like a large colonial power, which aren't, or aren't fully, our professional military gets involved in a lot of smaller wars with dubious results. A lot of those bad results is that, at the end of the day, we look back upon the Second World War in Europe.  We've been preparing to restage it ever since 1948.

Now, there was some real reason to prepare for that war, really, and it darned near actually occurred. There's still reason to prepare for it, even though Donald Trump has a titanic crush on Putin and loves him dearly, making him the least reliable ally of all time, but we're preparing for it like it's 1941 and not 2026, which also makes us unprepared for anything else.  It also puts us in the mindset of a country that feels it needs to have a gigantic bunker at the White House.

Now, the contrary thread of thought here has been in place since the Militia Act of 1903, which formally committed the various state militias into being the official reserve of the Army.  The Army hated that at the time, but after World War Two, and during the Cold War, it brought the National Guard up to speed.  By the 80s the Guard was every bit as combat capable as the Regular Army is, and that's still the case.  Today, the US really can't fight a big war without the Guard, and truth be known it can't even make its overextended foreign commitments without it.

It's time to take that one step further.

And by that, I mean back to the future.  

The current size of the Army National Guard is 328,084. That ought to be brought up to an even 500,000, and the strength of the Army down to 175,000 active personnel.  The Air National Guard has 106,000 personnel.  The Air Force should be scaled down to about that size, and the Air National Guard up to about 400,000. Following that, the Army National Guard, the Air Force, and the Air National Guard ought to be folded into the Army establishment so there's no longer a seperate Air Force (or Space Force). The Marine Corps should fully go back into the Navy and the Coast Guard back to the Department of the Treasury.

The Air Force Academy ought to be closed and so should West Point. College ROTC programs can take care of training officers, and in an environment that doesn't lead to a military class.  I'd leave the Naval Academy, and the Coast Guard Academy, there, as sea related stuff is unique.  Being a soldier, frankly, isn't all that unique.  I've been one.

With this, the Joint Chiefs should be scaled down to three, one Chief from the Army, one Chief from the Navy, and one Chief from the National Guard.  The Chairman ought to always be a Guardsman.

Why all this?

Well, it's a lot harder to launch illegal foreign wars with a defense posture that's designed for actual defense, and not offensive warfare.  We aren't going to attack another country if we have to call up a bunch of Guardsmen to do it.  And we have less of a chance of becoming an imperial nation if we don't have an imperial military structure.

Thursday, July 25, 1946. Crossroads Baker.

 

The first underwater nuclear explosion.

George W. and Mae Murray Dorsey, and Roger and Dorothy Dorsey Malcom were lynched (shot) in Georgia.  They were two married couples, the men were sharecroppers.  Roger Malcom was a World War Two Army veteran who had just returned home after five years of service.

Martin and Lewis commenced their duo act at the 500 Club in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Humor is transitory and perhaps its just because I'm not from that era, but I never found either one of them funny.  Frankly, I can hardly stand to watch film clips of Lewis.  I can of Martin, but I don't find him funny.

Last edition:

Tuesday, July 23, 1946. Last of the POWs sent home.

Labels: 1940s, 1946, 1950s, 1953, actors and actresses, Aircraft, Economics, Industry, Irgun, Japan, Jewish insurgency in Mandatory Palestine, Occupation of Japan, Palestine, Prisoners of War, Transportation, War Assets Administration

Sunday, July 21, 1946. Rationing bread.

The British Ministry of Food, with the approval of the House of Commons, put bread rationing in effect in the United Kingdom.  It was the first time that had occured in the country's history.

Britain continued to deal with food shortages for quite some time after the Second World War.  Bread rationing, which had not occurred during the war, would last until July 1948.  Other types of wartime rationing would continue on and be phased out, with the last rationing ending in 1954.

An oddity of this is that British health was noted to have improved due to rationing.  We don't often think of this occurring, but it did.  Likewise, it was noted that German soldiers in Allied hospitals, who had been getting by on thin rations, recovered from their wounds more quickly than well fed American ones.

Lieutenant Commander James J. Davidson landed a FH-1 Phantom on the deck of the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt, becoming the first American to land a jet aircraft on a carrier.

President Gualberto Villarroel of Bolivia was murdered by a mob that stormed the presidential palace.

Last edition:

Saturday, July 10, 1946. "Report of the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack".

Labels: 1940s, 1941, 1946, 79th Congress, Army, China, Chinese Civil War, Imperial Japanese Navy, Nationalist Chinese Army, Pearl Harbor Hawaii, People's Liberation Army, U.S. Navy, World War Two

Saturday, July 10, 1946. "Report of the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack".

The "Report of the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack" was released.  The report absolved the administration from conspiring to bring about the Japanese attack and assigned blame to  Admiral Husband E. Kimmel and Lt. Gen. Walter C. Short. 

U.S. Senators Homer Ferguson and Owen Brewster dissented, taking the position that President Roosevelt and his military advisors "were just as responsible for the nation's worst military disaster".

Red Chinese forces reached the region of Zhao Family's River (Zhao Jia Chuan, 赵家川) with little in the way of Nationalist forces to impede their further advance.

Last edition:

Friday, July 19, 1946. The Equal Rights Amendment fails to pass.

Labels: 1940s, 1946, 79th Congress, law, The roles of men and women, Unidentified Flying Objects, Weapons, Women

Sunday, July 16, 1876. Getting a Confederate view of Custer

 

And a Medal of Honor.

On board the U.S.S. Hartford, Philadelphia, Pa., 16 July 1876. Showing gallantry, Costello rescued from drowning a landsman of that vessel.

Born in 1850, Costello would live until 1887, dying at age 37, maybe.  Or he may have remained in the Navy until 1902,  have become a Warrant Officer, and died in 1908.  I hope it's the latter.

Last edition:

Saturday, July 15, 1876. First no hitter.

Labels: 1870s, 1876, 1890s, baseball, Personalities