Ever since our top leadership lost the war in Afghanistan I've lost confidence in our senior military leadership. The senior officers demonstrated a lack of integrity by failing to resign in protest before the skedaddle debacle and failing to resign since the defeat they helped engineer.
America reduced our troop strength after the Cold War. This caused a problem:
The U.S. always had a large number of NCOs but the rising number of officers relative to enlisted troops has become a problem that defies solution.
Do we have a military leadership problem because too many officers had too much time on their hands and became woke?
Our flag officers who seemingly blow with the left-wing political winds need to be purged after the Afghanistan debacle with an old fashioned Roman "decimation". There is hope from the ranks of the military leaders who actually fight.
The military needs to solve this problem because the American people--whose support is necessary to maintain our military--have noticed:
For a long time, the American military was the most respected and trusted government institution. In the past the military realized when it was having problems and corrected them. In the last two decades there has been another cycle of bad leadership at the top and despite surveys of departing officers pointing out a loss of confidence in their superiors, the problems continued. The public noticed, after all it was their sons and daughters who provided the officers and enlisted personnel and the kids were not all right with how their senior commanders were operating.
The public noticing this failure is relatively recent. In 2018 70 percent of Americans had a great deal of trust and confidence in the military. That has since declined to 45 percent and is apparently continuing to fall.
Losing captains was the canary in the coal mine for flag officer leadership problems. I was wrong to dismiss the issue many years ago.
In my defense, I was right that the Iraq War was not breaking our Army. My purpose was to reject that charge, which turned out to be a red herring that distracted me from the real problem.
Our senior leadership was--and remains--the problem. And now we have to worry about fighting great powers in conventional combat where the price of even winning--let alone failure--is far greater.
Have a super sparkly day.
I'll say it again. Purge 'em all. Let God sort them out.
