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Comment by psunavy03 | Hacker News Reader

The military as an institution has its flaws, sometimes serious ones. And one could make a serious argument that an up-or-out stack-ranked promotion system is toxic, inefficient, and ineffective at promoting true talent.

But the US military has also not been "losing wars for 70+ years," and the overall tone of this post screams "disgruntled junior enlisted who thinks they have all the answers." It's something I'd frankly expect to see on Reddit.

And with 20 years of active and reserve service, if I had to put one group of military leadership under the microscope as most in need of an institutional course correction, it wouldn't be the O-4s and O-5s. It'd be the E-7+.

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Fuckin' get 'em! Agreed with your general sentiment. The navy probably does have a bigger problem with the cult of the chiefs, but the Army less so with its senior enlisted. But the problem is the JBSA post commander LTG Jones told Vice literally on Friday that "I don't have a mold problem, I have a discipline problem." And it's just a gross lie at this point.

https://12ft.io/proxy?&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vice.com%2Fen%2Fa...

Well that's a public faceplant on line with the Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy telling the GW Sailors "at least you're not in a foxhole" after a rash of suicides during a yard period.

Spoken like an officer indeed (inferring here, could be wrong).

1. Ignores the core subject of the post and the GP's response claiming it is indicative of continued failure of leadership.

2. Generically tries to seem like there is some level of agreement without being concrete in admitting problems in any way.

3. Tries to defend Wilsonionism foreign policy (a root cause evil) by ad-homineming GP as a "disgruntled junior enlisted", and in a later post using the old-faithful "civilian leadership" excuse.

4. Defends officers generally while attacking senior enlisted (who are subject to said officers).

I think you just about made the GP's point.

We have billions for Ukraine and Israel and the military industrial complex (or the better put MICIMATT, by Ray McGovern), but when it comes to taking care of our junior enlisted leadership can't be bothered. Despite your generic denials it is indeed indicative of a repeated failure of leadership pattern. There is a reason recruiting is suffering massively right now... the internet makes it much harder to cover up these sort of things that got swept under the rug in the past, and a completely disconnected from the constitution foreign policy that is plain for all to see exacerbates the problem.

How about we remove the plank from our own eye before we move to take the splinter out of our brothers?

You just saved me a ton of retort'ing, TYFYS!

> the US military has also not been "losing wars for 70+ years,"

Maybe you don't consider Korea a loss (many do, and not just on Reddit), but Vietnam is a lot less debatable.

And then in recent years you have the 8 trillion dollars (so far) spent in the ME. It's a staggering, unfathomable loss.

The military ultimately executes the policies of the Presidential administration which commands it and the Congress that funds it, under the laws the latter put in place. Especially in the Middle East and Vietnam, while there is blame to be put on theater commanders, the US military was also hamstrung by incoherent policy decisions of the civilian leadership.

And frankly I don't care whether or not "many" armchair generals and admirals do or don't consider Korea a "loss." War is not a sports game. The details of the geopolitical and economic fallout of a stalemate like that matter a whole hell of a lot more than who "won."

Sounds a lot like "Just following orders" and "You weren't there".

> And frankly I don't care

That's just it though. This isn't about you.

Sports game or not, there are losers in war; and it's been us, a lot, for decades. Whoever you try to blame, whatever you call people who point this out, that fact remains true.

You are very much missing the point. If you read the one thousand page postmortem on the invasion of Iraq - lots of blame to be placed on civilian leadership and intelligence.

A few: The core reasoning (WMD) was the CIA misinterpreting Saddam grandstanding to his generals as a serious WMD program. This was due to the CIA having an insufficient grasp of the local situation, largely due to the fact that we had only infiltrated isolated parts of the regime and couldn't corroborate.

Slightly before Obama's election, the US forces were effectively ordered to stop patrolling and attempting to take and hold territory in order to reduce the American bodycount for political reasons - this allowed forces outside the green zone to maintain continuity of operations and simply wait for us to get bored and leave.

Similarly, lack of a clear set of objectives, and lack of frank expectations setting with the US population lowered the ability of the DoD to prosecute the war in a winnable fashion.

These aren't small nitpicks, these are core reasons why the GWOT didn't go so well - and almost none of them have anything to do with defense procurement or military mismanagement.

You are missing the point; none of what you said refutes what you were replying to. While the civilian leadership does have the authority to order the military to stand around, get shot for a while, and go home having achieved nothing, presumably that's not what they actually asked for or wanted. Getting into the situation where you go to war that you're not going to be able to win absolutely represents a failure on the part of the military; perhaps not a failure of procurement or management, but very much a failure of leadership, which is exactly what OP originally said.

> Getting into the situation where you go to war that you're not going to be able to win absolutely represents a failure on the part of the military; perhaps not a failure of procurement or management, but very much a failure of leadership, which is exactly what OP originally said.

Good God, what are you on? The military literally does not get to make these decisions. Only the civilian leadership in the form of the President and Congress gets to decide when and where the military goes to war. And as much as US military officers learn from Day 1 that it's their duty to refuse illegal orders (and it is), the day a combatant commander or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs tells the President or Secretary of Defense "no, this war is illegal" is the day we have ourselves a constitutional crisis, for good or ill.

> The military literally does not get to make these decisions. Only the civilian leadership in the form of the President and Congress gets to decide when and where the military goes to war.

Sure, but it's the responsibility of the military to be clear to them about what they can and can't do (or, more likely, what it's going to cost, in money and casualties, to achieve x). Obviously yes if the President actually orders you to fart around and get shot then you do it. But if the President thinks sending three brigades to $country is going to keep the civilians there safe in the current crisis, it's the responsibility of the military leadership to know and advise whether that's a three-brigade job or not.

Right. A recurring theme in successful military campaigns (though by no means enough to ensure success) is a very clear objective. Civilian politicians decide those objectives. If the objectives are vague that's their fault. If the objectives are unachievable, that's their fault. Only when there were clear, achievable objectives is there any opportunity for it to matter whether military leadership, tactics, training, equipment etc. were adequate.

After all, if we don't know what success even looks like, what chance do we have?

Compare "Corporate" (the British operation to re-take control of the Falkland Islands) with "Iraqi Freedom" (US invading Iraq for nebulous reasons)

Even if you're not sure that Corporate was a good idea, or that the UK "should" own these islands, the objective was very simple and easy to understand. If we kill a whole bunch of Argentinians but have to retreat and they keep the islands, that's a failure. If they just walk away without a (further) shot fired and we get the islands back, that's a success. Easy.

But what chance did US troops have for "Iraqi Freedom" ? Can they find the imaginary Weapons Of Mass Destruction in Iraq? No. Hopeless.

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I'd say Korea counts as a US win or stalemate, but Vietnam ended with the US achieving none of its objectives, having wasted tons of lives and leaving in a humiliating fashion. Is it so weird to call that a defeat? In that case it's 50 years, given that Afghanistan ended in '21 in similar fashion.

Are you just taking issue with 70 years being hyperbole? If not, I have to say this idea that the US didn't lose a lot starting with Vietnam is weird. In fact, it seems like exactly the kind of delusional self-talk among the leadership that would lead to such situations reoccurring. I mean, suppose I get in a fistfight and get knocked down then don't get up. Can I really say I chose not to get up because I didn't want to hurt the guy too badly and I therefore didn't lose? Even if it's true, it just means I lost on purpose.

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