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http://www.duffelblog.com/2013/12/general-mattis-crosses-potomac-100000-troops-president-senate-flee-city/ http://www.duffelblog.com/2013/12/general-mattis-cros

http://www.duffelblog.com/2013/12/general-mattis-crosses-potomac-100000-troops-president-senate-flee-city/ http://www.duffelblog.com/2013/12/general-mattis-crosses-pot... Former Marine here. I thought this article was funny when it recirculated just prior to the recent election. But I also sort of thought to myself "Yeah I would vote for him over HRC or Trump." Now I worry. A few thoughts: 1. If the military remains the most-trusted branch of government that's a bad thing. We need to take steps to reduce its power now. 2. If the Freedom Caucus is really committed to reducing the powers (and spending) of government they should be fervently resisting budget plans to expand the armed forces and pull us back from pointless non-productive conflict in the Middle East. 3. It is critical that Congress finds ways to reverse the rise in income disparity or we're going to have an even more dissatisfied and formerly middle-class voter base next cycle. 4. If Congress remains gridlocked by partisanship we are surely heading down the Road to Serfdom, and voters will either cede more power to Trump, or perhaps worse, be dissatisfied and demand an even stronger strong man.

djrogers 10y ago
Re #4 - we saw this throughout the Obama tenure as well, more executive orders, more expectations of the President to create and change law rather than execute it, etc. Point is, it's not just Trump - or Trump and Obama - it's been a slow but steady march toward treating the Office like a monarch...
- kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
  He only resorted to the EOs because of the obstructionism from Congress. What else is a president to do when faced with such petulance?
  - bpodgursky 10y ago
    Nothing. He should be able to do nothing. That's the point of having three branches of government. A president has no god-given right to push through whatever policies they want; congress has no obligation to help.
    - throwaway729 10y ago
      > nothing That's also a failure of checks and balances. Of course the presidency can do all sorts of things without Congress! It's not and was never intended to be a ceremonial position. Or a position bound to the will of congress in all things! Hence "separation of powers", not "devolution of powers to Congress and the judiciary". Indeed, kevin_thibedeau's observation is SPOT ON, and is exactly how things should and were explicitly designed to work! The presidency has certain powers that are typically only exercised during a divided government. This has been true since the very beginning of the union. That shouldn't be surprising at all! It's intrinsic to an effective separation of powers. If the presidency proceeded in identical fashion regardless of who Controlled congress, then that would be a clear indication that the separation of powers has failed. The presidency should do what he thinks he has the authority to do. Congress should pass explicit laws limiting that power if it feels the presidency has become too powerful, using the purse as leverage when necessary. The courts should mediate inevitable conflicts and check the abuses of a unified executive and legislature. That is separation of powers.
      - ethbro 10y ago
        > This has been true since the very beginning of the union. Not entirely true. Executive orders (and similar powers of the executive), as far as I understand, have significantly evolved since the founding of the US. The ability to use them is implied rather than explicitly granted by the US Constitution, and use in practice (and what constitutes overreach) has largely been defined through the US Supreme Court. Side note: this right was not explicitly given to the Supreme Court either in our founding documents and was largely hammered out by sheer force of will by John Marshall in Marbury vs Madison (perhaps one of the greatest cases of all time, replete with some seriously shady last-days-in-office chicanery by John Adams) [1] [2]. I'd highly recommend listening to the podcast episode in the second link. Based on Wikipedia's numbers [3] (which seem reasonable, given that they weren't called "executive orders" until ~1900 when they were retroactively numbered them back to Lincoln), Theodore Roosevelt could definitely be said to be the first major user. By my count, the 25 presidents before Teddy Roosevelt signed 1,262 orders. Roosevelt signed 1,081 himself (in two terms). Notably, if I'm reading the figures right, both of Roosevelt's terms were characterized by large majorities in the Senate and slim but still majorities in the House. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison [2] http://www.wnyc.org/story/giggly-blue-robot/ http://www.wnyc.org/story/giggly-blue-robot/ [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_order_(United_States) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_order_(United_Stat...
- jkn 10y ago
  we saw this throughout the Obama tenure as well, more executive orders... Number of executive orders per president, per year in office[1]: Theodore Roosevelt 144.7 William Howard Taft 181.0 Woodrow Wilson 225.4 Warren G. Harding 216.9 Calvin Coolidge 215.2 Herbert Hoover 242.0 Franklin D. Roosevelt 307.8 Harry S. Truman 116.7 Dwight D. Eisenhower 60.5 John F. Kennedy 75.4 Lyndon B. Johnson 62.9 Richard Nixon 62.3 Gerald Ford 69.1 Jimmy Carter 80.0 Ronald Reagan 47.6 George H. W. Bush 41.5 Bill Clinton 45.5 George W. Bush 36.4 Barack Obama 34.6 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_federal_executive_orders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_federal_...
  - notadoc 10y ago
    Is this some kind of fact based comment?
  - bpodgursky 10y ago
    The raw numbers are not really useful. There are a lot of EOs which do not push the bounds of presidential authority (awarding medals, ordering flags to half-mast, etc). They are not comparable to EOs which, for example, order the government to not enforce immigration law, or use torture.
    - 1_2__3 10y ago
      Right, so we're just arbitrarily moving the goalposts now that the data doesn't back the claim. Got it.
      - jMyles 10y ago
        Not arbitrarily, but with good reason. It sometimes makes sense to move the goalposts when they no longer work as a mechanism for measuring the metrics of the sport in question. In this case, the total number of executive orders doesn't speak to the degree to which executive power is used to do things other than execute.
theseatoms 10y ago
Great comment. Relatedly, we might see a third party candidate on the debate stage in 2020, for the first time since Ross Perot. The FEC/CPD was successfully sued (after many attempts) regarding the polling threshold required to be invited to the debates. Edit: Citation: http://reason.com/blog/2017/02/02/libertarian-party-gets-victory-in-suit-a http://reason.com/blog/2017/02/02/libertarian-party-gets-vic...
remarkEon 10y ago
Gonna throw some nuance out there on this. I think it's much more complicated than resisting expansion of the Armed Forces. The last ~16 years of war has fundamentally changed the way the military operates, both in terms of how we build our strategies and how we operationally conduct these wars. Instead of a full-force commitment (units deploy and don't come home until the job is done), we've instead fought this thing in spastic increments, with a kind of warped "turn-based" leadership model ("Whose turn is it to be a Combatant Commander?"). This is why from the invasion through 2014 we had 16 different ISAF commanders. No wonder we've struggled to develop a coherent strategy. I point that out because I agree that we need to back off from pointless Middle East entanglements immediately, because the Long War has altered how we (I mean soldiers and their leaders, both GOs and Civilians) view preparation for war. There is no way the model used in Afghanistan and Iraq (I understand the difference between the two, I'm talking about sustainment differences here), full of mega-FOBs for the sustainers and (mostly) consistent resupply for the war-fighters, is something we should be expecting in the future - be it a conflict with Russia, China, those pesky Donovians. There's reasons to be optimistic, and Mattis is one of them. General Milley also seems to "get it", that we've gotten pretty lost in our understanding of what "readiness" and "sustainment" really means.[1] Disclaimer: Former Infantry Officer, though I do spend a lot of time thinking and writing with friends both in and out about this stuff. [1]http://breakingdefense.com/2016/10/miserable-disobedient-victorious-gen-milleys-future-us-soldier/ http://breakingdefense.com/2016/10/miserable-disobedient-vic...
- Jtsummers 10y ago
  Part of that deployment strategy shift began in the 90s during operations Northern and Southern Watch. Along with a set of shorter conflicts (with NATO and others) under Clinton. There was a political need/desire to shift the way we acted, and it persisted even during the '00s and '10s period of sustained, long-term military conflict. EDIT: My experience was with the USAF side, other forces still had longer deployment periods at that time, and it wasn't uniform across USAF.
  - remarkEon 10y ago
    Yes that's totally true, though I'll submit that the "deployment cycle" mindset was certainly solidified in the last decade as "the way we do things" - at least on my side in the Army (Obviously I don't speak for everyone, and I know I'm not the only one who had problems with the "cycle" mindset). The politics are also a reason we moved toward that strategy. I just don't think it's a wise one. It probably wasn't wise back then, and I definitely don't think it's wise for the future. Edit: One of the stories (Myths?) you hear about McChrystal is that he'd ask Company Commanders downrange this question: "What would you do different if you couldn't come home until we'd won?" Granted, that presupposes we actually had a true picture of what it would look like when we'd "won" but it shows how easy it can be to become...disconnected when you know that you're outta there before next fighting season.
r00fus 10y ago
I read that and kept thinking "so when is Mattis going to cross the Rubicon"? The Potomac is the new Rubicon, and the US is the new Rome. Where are we exactly in the imperial lifecycle? I wonder.
smacktoward 10y ago
> If the military remains the most-trusted branch of government that's a bad thing. Agreed, but I think the thing driving it isn't really the size of the defense budget. I think it's the All-Volunteer Force. During the Vietnam era, U.S. military spending was much higher as a percentage of total GDP than it is today -- around 10%, compared to ~4.5% today (see http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1900_2020USp_XXs2li111mcn_30f_20th_Century_Defense_Spending#view http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1900_2020...). But the military's reputation for competence was much lower then. Why? Because back then lots of Americans had first-hand experience with the military, or knew someone within one degree of separation who did. So they knew that people in the military were just like people anywhere else -- that generals could be principled or venal, officers clever or clueless, soldiers motivated or lazy. They knew it because they'd lived alongside all these people in the ranks, and personal experience doesn't leave a lot of room for mystique. We're now more than four decades in to an all-volunteer force, though, which means that the days when a broad slice of the population had seen the realities of the military up close are slipping out of living memory. Today's average American knows the military only at a distant remove, heavily mediated by hoorah propaganda (just watch an NFL game) that emphasizes the idea that Soldiers -- who we are supposed to refer to with a capital S now, just to drive home the point -- are a breed apart from ordinary workaday people. As a civilian who grew up in a military family, I see this happening and it worries me profoundly. History has not been kind to democracies that turn their soldiers into a remote, unaccountable elite. They tend not to be democracies for too much longer.
- Jtsummers 10y ago
  https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/the-tragedy-of-the-american-military/383516/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/the-tra... Your third paragraph reminded me of this article.
  - smacktoward 10y ago
    Yep, James Fallows has been an articulate voice on this very subject for many years now.
- 10y ago
ocschwar 10y ago
"2. If the Freedom Caucus is really committed to reducing the powers (and spending) of government they should be fervently resisting budget plans to expand the armed forces and pull us back from pointless non-productive conflict in the Middle East." Unfortunately, there's the slight matter of the Carter Doctrine, the idea that the US has a vital interest in the continued uninterrupted flow of oil from the Persian Gulf. The US can't just withdraw from the Middle East until Middle America withdraws. There's a large portion of our population that has arranged their lives in such a way that they literally cannot leave their homes and return with a jug of milk, without getting in their cars and driving a long drive. And so if the flow of oil from the Gulf is interrupted, the ramifications stateside would have them screaming bloody murder. Ironically, these people are unable to see that it's their choices that lead to this: you choose where you live, you choose where you work, and you choose how you get there. And until there's a sober discussion of the problem, there will be a US presence in the Middle East.
- openasocket 10y ago
  I think you're over-estimating the impact of Middle East oil in the US. Only about 12% of US oil consumption is from oil from the Middle East, half of that from Saudi Arabia. Losing that would be damaging but wouldn't be as bad as the gas rationing under Carter. Middle Eastern policy now has a lot more to do with terrorism, with the exception of Saudi Arabia.
  - Jtsummers 10y ago
    The Middle East may only provide 12% of our (US) oil, but they have a massive role in global oil production and reserves. A strong, negative, impact to the region would have global effects on oil prices.
  - remarkEon 10y ago
    ~19% of Saudi Oil exports go to the United States. So while I agree that the United States would turn out just fine, I'd submit that it would represent a significant power shift away from OPEC (fine by me). Perhaps that's a long term Strategic goal for the United States. Perhaps it's a wise one. http://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/visualize/tree_map/hs92/export/sau/show/2709/2015/ http://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/visualize/tree_map/hs92/export...
tonystubblebine 10y ago
As a military person, I'm curious how you feel about the US's role in curbing nuclear proliferation. I agree that we seem to be in pointless wars, but I'd mostly forgotten about the dangers of nuclear proliferation until a Pentagon-working friend pointed it out to me. Essentially the idea is that the US acts as both the carrot and the stick. We will protect countries that don't have nuclear weapons and threaten any that try. I think that's the justification for having such a large military. But it's also a justification that's largely not talked about. So I've been wanting to get alternative thoughtful viewpoints to go along with the one my friend has.
- killjoywashere 10y ago
  It's highly valid: you have to convince the Russian satellites (aka, Europe) and the Chinese satellites (Japan, Korea, Philippines) that you can present China and Russia with a credible threat of ground force. Which is nuts in a way, but that's where we're at. But we've staved off catastrophe for 70 years in large part by maintaining unparalleled economic strength (the world economy is measured in dollars after all). It's a self-reinforcing situation: as long as the Europeans and Asians believe in you, they trade with you, ally both politically and economically with you, and keep Russia and China in check. Now, Trump is undoing that. The fourth leg of the nuclear triad is ground force. The fifth leg is economic power. He's kicking legs out as fast as he can.
- dforrestwilson1 10y ago
  So I know a lot of intelligence folks who cover different "threat vectors". I have never met one who doesn't believe that their coverage universe is the most important one to focus on. Fighting nuclear proliferation is important, but ultimately it is a losing battle. In 100 years will less countries have nuclear weapons or will more? Regimes will aggressively pursue it because they can see how things shook out for Qaddafi and Saddam vs Kim. I think the reality is that MAD has kind of worked. As scary as it is, nobody (sane) wants to push the button because they understand that these are very different weapons, and it would mean the end of life as we know it. Pressing that button ever means total ostracism. So far anyway.. The other interesting question in my mind is does this lead to a lot of stratified borders/countries?
hblanks 10y ago
If you haven't read it, you may find Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism a worthwhile read. She offers a lot of analysis on the rise of a classless society, paired with a deep sort of aimlessness in state leadership. It doesn't end well.
- killjoywashere 10y ago
  If you like Arendt, check out Snyder's On Tyranny and Mesquita's The Dictator's Handbook.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Snyder's "Politics and Prose" talk is up on YouTube. Recommended.
cmurf 10y ago
1. All of these institutions should be trusted. The problem is there is not enough enhancement in other institutions to build trust. There should be ever stronger ethics laws for elected officials: the perception of self-dealing is inherently damaging, and there is peripheral damage to completely unrelated parties when it happens. There should be a constitutional amendment getting money out of politics. Most everyone now believes elections can be bought, however indirectly, they who have the most money, get the most advertising, the most media coverage, will win. The military industrial complex is an oligopoly but it's not regulated like one; Eisenhower called the complex a grave threat to democratic government. We were warned, we continue to ignore the warning. 2. Out of the entire Congress there might be 10 members who are very aware of our interventionist foreign policy, for 70 years, in the middle east, and the role that's played in destabilizing the whole region. There's no possible way we stop stepping on our own d|cks if we don't understand the multitude of ways we've been doing it already for that long. This is a good primer from post WWII to 1991, most people are familiar with our extracurricular activities in the middle east since then. https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/ancient-history-us-conduct-middle-east-world-war-ii-folly-intervention https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/ancient-hi... 3. Baby boomers will have to start dying in appreciable numbers before this will be politically possible. The baby boomers have cornered both political parties. There is no possible way we get back to the near 40 years where the top tax bracket was above 75%, and for 10 years it was above 90%. The incentive is to try as hard as you can to spend the money on allowed deductible expenses like growing or starting a business. And for that 40 years, this country build massive private and public infrastructure as money was moving. Taxes went down, and building went away, but the stock and bond markets flourished which is where the baby boomers have their money, and expect to find it even after death. Meanwhile that generation has charged the country credit card $20 trillion and that's just so far. If they can find a way to cheat death, they will demand to be first in line. 4. Denigration of institutions needs to be resisted and admonished. Constructive criticism, based on facts, is necessary and appropriate, but this inane "so-called judges, activist judges" and the "do nothing Congress" and "liberal, fake news media" and "rigged elections" is a precision strategy to weaken checks and balances in a system, and favors a unitary executive. And that's a huge problem. Democracies are not easy, and they're not on autopilot. The American Civil War was vicious. At the start, General Sherman made his men pay restitution for civilian property destroyed, and he was convinced the wonton destruction of private property was detrimental to the Union cause. Later in the war, he considered it an exigencies of the war to eviscerate Southern citizens themselves for aiding the Confederate Army. The photographs of what was done to the South are easy to confuse with Dresden and Berlin. It was wholesale obliteration. By any modern standard what was done was way beyond war crimes. But today we have this batshit insane menace of unreality where large numbers of people are opting into alternate realities, and electing paranoid conspiracy theorist to run their countries. Not even the free market with a minuscule government functions at all properly with a misinformed population.
gozur88 10y ago
>If the Freedom Caucus is really committed to reducing the powers (and spending) of government they should be fervently resisting budget plans to expand the armed forces and pull us back from pointless non-productive conflict in the Middle East. The reduction in commitments has to come first, or at least coincidentally. I would like to see a reduction in military spending, but we shouldn't be making overseas commitments without allocating the resources necessary to carry them out. I would like to see the US out of Europe in the near-to-medium term and a disentanglement from our commitments in the East long term. If we're not willing to do that, if we refuse to step down from the role of the Heavy who keeps the peace, then we need to maintain a military up to the task. And that requires increases in spending.
- youngtaff 10y ago
  It's funny that you describe the US as "the Heavy who keeps the peace" I suspect much of the rest of the world would describe the US as a warmonger and has been for decades
  - gozur88 10y ago
    "Much of the rest of the world" is wrong. Be as that may, if they think that it bolsters my argument. The US should pull out of Europe and the Far East. And if the Europeans or the Asians go at each other again? We should stay on our side of the pond.
    - youngtaff 10y ago
      Is "much of the rest of the world" really wrong? The US is a country that spends more on the military than the next seven (?) combined and since World War II has been heavily intervening using (both explicitly and covertly) in countries all over the world Korean / Cuba / Dominica / Vietnam / Grenada / Libya / Panama / Gulf War I / Somalia / Haiti / Afghanistan / Gulf War II Plus all the 'secret wars' in Central America, Africa, other parts of the Middle East, Indochina etc.
      - 10y ago

djrogers 10y ago

Re #4 - we saw this throughout the Obama tenure as well, more executive orders, more expectations of the President to create and change law rather than execute it, etc. Point is, it's not just Trump - or Trump and Obama - it's been a slow but steady march toward treating the Office like a monarch...

kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
He only resorted to the EOs because of the obstructionism from Congress. What else is a president to do when faced with such petulance?
- bpodgursky 10y ago
  Nothing. He should be able to do nothing. That's the point of having three branches of government. A president has no god-given right to push through whatever policies they want; congress has no obligation to help.
  - throwaway729 10y ago
    > nothing That's also a failure of checks and balances. Of course the presidency can do all sorts of things without Congress! It's not and was never intended to be a ceremonial position. Or a position bound to the will of congress in all things! Hence "separation of powers", not "devolution of powers to Congress and the judiciary". Indeed, kevin_thibedeau's observation is SPOT ON, and is exactly how things should and were explicitly designed to work! The presidency has certain powers that are typically only exercised during a divided government. This has been true since the very beginning of the union. That shouldn't be surprising at all! It's intrinsic to an effective separation of powers. If the presidency proceeded in identical fashion regardless of who Controlled congress, then that would be a clear indication that the separation of powers has failed. The presidency should do what he thinks he has the authority to do. Congress should pass explicit laws limiting that power if it feels the presidency has become too powerful, using the purse as leverage when necessary. The courts should mediate inevitable conflicts and check the abuses of a unified executive and legislature. That is separation of powers.
    - ethbro 10y ago
      > This has been true since the very beginning of the union. Not entirely true. Executive orders (and similar powers of the executive), as far as I understand, have significantly evolved since the founding of the US. The ability to use them is implied rather than explicitly granted by the US Constitution, and use in practice (and what constitutes overreach) has largely been defined through the US Supreme Court. Side note: this right was not explicitly given to the Supreme Court either in our founding documents and was largely hammered out by sheer force of will by John Marshall in Marbury vs Madison (perhaps one of the greatest cases of all time, replete with some seriously shady last-days-in-office chicanery by John Adams) [1] [2]. I'd highly recommend listening to the podcast episode in the second link. Based on Wikipedia's numbers [3] (which seem reasonable, given that they weren't called "executive orders" until ~1900 when they were retroactively numbered them back to Lincoln), Theodore Roosevelt could definitely be said to be the first major user. By my count, the 25 presidents before Teddy Roosevelt signed 1,262 orders. Roosevelt signed 1,081 himself (in two terms). Notably, if I'm reading the figures right, both of Roosevelt's terms were characterized by large majorities in the Senate and slim but still majorities in the House. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison [2] http://www.wnyc.org/story/giggly-blue-robot/ http://www.wnyc.org/story/giggly-blue-robot/ [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_order_(United_States) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_order_(United_Stat...
jkn 10y ago
we saw this throughout the Obama tenure as well, more executive orders... Number of executive orders per president, per year in office[1]: Theodore Roosevelt 144.7 William Howard Taft 181.0 Woodrow Wilson 225.4 Warren G. Harding 216.9 Calvin Coolidge 215.2 Herbert Hoover 242.0 Franklin D. Roosevelt 307.8 Harry S. Truman 116.7 Dwight D. Eisenhower 60.5 John F. Kennedy 75.4 Lyndon B. Johnson 62.9 Richard Nixon 62.3 Gerald Ford 69.1 Jimmy Carter 80.0 Ronald Reagan 47.6 George H. W. Bush 41.5 Bill Clinton 45.5 George W. Bush 36.4 Barack Obama 34.6 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_federal_executive_orders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_federal_...
- notadoc 10y ago
  Is this some kind of fact based comment?
- bpodgursky 10y ago
  The raw numbers are not really useful. There are a lot of EOs which do not push the bounds of presidential authority (awarding medals, ordering flags to half-mast, etc). They are not comparable to EOs which, for example, order the government to not enforce immigration law, or use torture.
  - 1_2__3 10y ago
    Right, so we're just arbitrarily moving the goalposts now that the data doesn't back the claim. Got it.
    - jMyles 10y ago
      Not arbitrarily, but with good reason. It sometimes makes sense to move the goalposts when they no longer work as a mechanism for measuring the metrics of the sport in question. In this case, the total number of executive orders doesn't speak to the degree to which executive power is used to do things other than execute.

theseatoms 10y ago

Great comment. Relatedly, we might see a third party candidate on the debate stage in 2020, for the first time since Ross Perot. The FEC/CPD was successfully sued (after many attempts) regarding the polling threshold required to be invited to the debates. Edit: Citation: http://reason.com/blog/2017/02/02/libertarian-party-gets-victory-in-suit-a http://reason.com/blog/2017/02/02/libertarian-party-gets-vic...

remarkEon 10y ago

Gonna throw some nuance out there on this. I think it's much more complicated than resisting expansion of the Armed Forces. The last ~16 years of war has fundamentally changed the way the military operates, both in terms of how we build our strategies and how we operationally conduct these wars. Instead of a full-force commitment (units deploy and don't come home until the job is done), we've instead fought this thing in spastic increments, with a kind of warped "turn-based" leadership model ("Whose turn is it to be a Combatant Commander?"). This is why from the invasion through 2014 we had 16 different ISAF commanders. No wonder we've struggled to develop a coherent strategy. I point that out because I agree that we need to back off from pointless Middle East entanglements immediately, because the Long War has altered how we (I mean soldiers and their leaders, both GOs and Civilians) view preparation for war. There is no way the model used in Afghanistan and Iraq (I understand the difference between the two, I'm talking about sustainment differences here), full of mega-FOBs for the sustainers and (mostly) consistent resupply for the war-fighters, is something we should be expecting in the future - be it a conflict with Russia, China, those pesky Donovians. There's reasons to be optimistic, and Mattis is one of them. General Milley also seems to "get it", that we've gotten pretty lost in our understanding of what "readiness" and "sustainment" really means.[1] Disclaimer: Former Infantry Officer, though I do spend a lot of time thinking and writing with friends both in and out about this stuff. [1]http://breakingdefense.com/2016/10/miserable-disobedient-victorious-gen-milleys-future-us-soldier/ http://breakingdefense.com/2016/10/miserable-disobedient-vic...

Jtsummers 10y ago
Part of that deployment strategy shift began in the 90s during operations Northern and Southern Watch. Along with a set of shorter conflicts (with NATO and others) under Clinton. There was a political need/desire to shift the way we acted, and it persisted even during the '00s and '10s period of sustained, long-term military conflict. EDIT: My experience was with the USAF side, other forces still had longer deployment periods at that time, and it wasn't uniform across USAF.
- remarkEon 10y ago
  Yes that's totally true, though I'll submit that the "deployment cycle" mindset was certainly solidified in the last decade as "the way we do things" - at least on my side in the Army (Obviously I don't speak for everyone, and I know I'm not the only one who had problems with the "cycle" mindset). The politics are also a reason we moved toward that strategy. I just don't think it's a wise one. It probably wasn't wise back then, and I definitely don't think it's wise for the future. Edit: One of the stories (Myths?) you hear about McChrystal is that he'd ask Company Commanders downrange this question: "What would you do different if you couldn't come home until we'd won?" Granted, that presupposes we actually had a true picture of what it would look like when we'd "won" but it shows how easy it can be to become...disconnected when you know that you're outta there before next fighting season.

r00fus 10y ago

I read that and kept thinking "so when is Mattis going to cross the Rubicon"? The Potomac is the new Rubicon, and the US is the new Rome. Where are we exactly in the imperial lifecycle? I wonder.

smacktoward 10y ago

> If the military remains the most-trusted branch of government that's a bad thing. Agreed, but I think the thing driving it isn't really the size of the defense budget. I think it's the All-Volunteer Force. During the Vietnam era, U.S. military spending was much higher as a percentage of total GDP than it is today -- around 10%, compared to ~4.5% today (see http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1900_2020USp_XXs2li111mcn_30f_20th_Century_Defense_Spending#view http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1900_2020...). But the military's reputation for competence was much lower then. Why? Because back then lots of Americans had first-hand experience with the military, or knew someone within one degree of separation who did. So they knew that people in the military were just like people anywhere else -- that generals could be principled or venal, officers clever or clueless, soldiers motivated or lazy. They knew it because they'd lived alongside all these people in the ranks, and personal experience doesn't leave a lot of room for mystique. We're now more than four decades in to an all-volunteer force, though, which means that the days when a broad slice of the population had seen the realities of the military up close are slipping out of living memory. Today's average American knows the military only at a distant remove, heavily mediated by hoorah propaganda (just watch an NFL game) that emphasizes the idea that Soldiers -- who we are supposed to refer to with a capital S now, just to drive home the point -- are a breed apart from ordinary workaday people. As a civilian who grew up in a military family, I see this happening and it worries me profoundly. History has not been kind to democracies that turn their soldiers into a remote, unaccountable elite. They tend not to be democracies for too much longer.

Jtsummers 10y ago
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/the-tragedy-of-the-american-military/383516/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/the-tra... Your third paragraph reminded me of this article.
- smacktoward 10y ago
  Yep, James Fallows has been an articulate voice on this very subject for many years now.
10y ago

ocschwar 10y ago

"2. If the Freedom Caucus is really committed to reducing the powers (and spending) of government they should be fervently resisting budget plans to expand the armed forces and pull us back from pointless non-productive conflict in the Middle East." Unfortunately, there's the slight matter of the Carter Doctrine, the idea that the US has a vital interest in the continued uninterrupted flow of oil from the Persian Gulf. The US can't just withdraw from the Middle East until Middle America withdraws. There's a large portion of our population that has arranged their lives in such a way that they literally cannot leave their homes and return with a jug of milk, without getting in their cars and driving a long drive. And so if the flow of oil from the Gulf is interrupted, the ramifications stateside would have them screaming bloody murder. Ironically, these people are unable to see that it's their choices that lead to this: you choose where you live, you choose where you work, and you choose how you get there. And until there's a sober discussion of the problem, there will be a US presence in the Middle East.

openasocket 10y ago
I think you're over-estimating the impact of Middle East oil in the US. Only about 12% of US oil consumption is from oil from the Middle East, half of that from Saudi Arabia. Losing that would be damaging but wouldn't be as bad as the gas rationing under Carter. Middle Eastern policy now has a lot more to do with terrorism, with the exception of Saudi Arabia.
- Jtsummers 10y ago
  The Middle East may only provide 12% of our (US) oil, but they have a massive role in global oil production and reserves. A strong, negative, impact to the region would have global effects on oil prices.
- remarkEon 10y ago
  ~19% of Saudi Oil exports go to the United States. So while I agree that the United States would turn out just fine, I'd submit that it would represent a significant power shift away from OPEC (fine by me). Perhaps that's a long term Strategic goal for the United States. Perhaps it's a wise one. http://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/visualize/tree_map/hs92/export/sau/show/2709/2015/ http://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/visualize/tree_map/hs92/export...

tonystubblebine 10y ago

As a military person, I'm curious how you feel about the US's role in curbing nuclear proliferation. I agree that we seem to be in pointless wars, but I'd mostly forgotten about the dangers of nuclear proliferation until a Pentagon-working friend pointed it out to me. Essentially the idea is that the US acts as both the carrot and the stick. We will protect countries that don't have nuclear weapons and threaten any that try. I think that's the justification for having such a large military. But it's also a justification that's largely not talked about. So I've been wanting to get alternative thoughtful viewpoints to go along with the one my friend has.

killjoywashere 10y ago
It's highly valid: you have to convince the Russian satellites (aka, Europe) and the Chinese satellites (Japan, Korea, Philippines) that you can present China and Russia with a credible threat of ground force. Which is nuts in a way, but that's where we're at. But we've staved off catastrophe for 70 years in large part by maintaining unparalleled economic strength (the world economy is measured in dollars after all). It's a self-reinforcing situation: as long as the Europeans and Asians believe in you, they trade with you, ally both politically and economically with you, and keep Russia and China in check. Now, Trump is undoing that. The fourth leg of the nuclear triad is ground force. The fifth leg is economic power. He's kicking legs out as fast as he can.
dforrestwilson1 10y ago
So I know a lot of intelligence folks who cover different "threat vectors". I have never met one who doesn't believe that their coverage universe is the most important one to focus on. Fighting nuclear proliferation is important, but ultimately it is a losing battle. In 100 years will less countries have nuclear weapons or will more? Regimes will aggressively pursue it because they can see how things shook out for Qaddafi and Saddam vs Kim. I think the reality is that MAD has kind of worked. As scary as it is, nobody (sane) wants to push the button because they understand that these are very different weapons, and it would mean the end of life as we know it. Pressing that button ever means total ostracism. So far anyway.. The other interesting question in my mind is does this lead to a lot of stratified borders/countries?

hblanks 10y ago

If you haven't read it, you may find Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism a worthwhile read. She offers a lot of analysis on the rise of a classless society, paired with a deep sort of aimlessness in state leadership. It doesn't end well.

killjoywashere 10y ago
If you like Arendt, check out Snyder's On Tyranny and Mesquita's The Dictator's Handbook.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Snyder's "Politics and Prose" talk is up on YouTube. Recommended.

cmurf 10y ago

1. All of these institutions should be trusted. The problem is there is not enough enhancement in other institutions to build trust. There should be ever stronger ethics laws for elected officials: the perception of self-dealing is inherently damaging, and there is peripheral damage to completely unrelated parties when it happens. There should be a constitutional amendment getting money out of politics. Most everyone now believes elections can be bought, however indirectly, they who have the most money, get the most advertising, the most media coverage, will win. The military industrial complex is an oligopoly but it's not regulated like one; Eisenhower called the complex a grave threat to democratic government. We were warned, we continue to ignore the warning. 2. Out of the entire Congress there might be 10 members who are very aware of our interventionist foreign policy, for 70 years, in the middle east, and the role that's played in destabilizing the whole region. There's no possible way we stop stepping on our own d|cks if we don't understand the multitude of ways we've been doing it already for that long. This is a good primer from post WWII to 1991, most people are familiar with our extracurricular activities in the middle east since then. https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/ancient-history-us-conduct-middle-east-world-war-ii-folly-intervention https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/ancient-hi... 3. Baby boomers will have to start dying in appreciable numbers before this will be politically possible. The baby boomers have cornered both political parties. There is no possible way we get back to the near 40 years where the top tax bracket was above 75%, and for 10 years it was above 90%. The incentive is to try as hard as you can to spend the money on allowed deductible expenses like growing or starting a business. And for that 40 years, this country build massive private and public infrastructure as money was moving. Taxes went down, and building went away, but the stock and bond markets flourished which is where the baby boomers have their money, and expect to find it even after death. Meanwhile that generation has charged the country credit card $20 trillion and that's just so far. If they can find a way to cheat death, they will demand to be first in line. 4. Denigration of institutions needs to be resisted and admonished. Constructive criticism, based on facts, is necessary and appropriate, but this inane "so-called judges, activist judges" and the "do nothing Congress" and "liberal, fake news media" and "rigged elections" is a precision strategy to weaken checks and balances in a system, and favors a unitary executive. And that's a huge problem. Democracies are not easy, and they're not on autopilot. The American Civil War was vicious. At the start, General Sherman made his men pay restitution for civilian property destroyed, and he was convinced the wonton destruction of private property was detrimental to the Union cause. Later in the war, he considered it an exigencies of the war to eviscerate Southern citizens themselves for aiding the Confederate Army. The photographs of what was done to the South are easy to confuse with Dresden and Berlin. It was wholesale obliteration. By any modern standard what was done was way beyond war crimes. But today we have this batshit insane menace of unreality where large numbers of people are opting into alternate realities, and electing paranoid conspiracy theorist to run their countries. Not even the free market with a minuscule government functions at all properly with a misinformed population.

gozur88 10y ago

>If the Freedom Caucus is really committed to reducing the powers (and spending) of government they should be fervently resisting budget plans to expand the armed forces and pull us back from pointless non-productive conflict in the Middle East. The reduction in commitments has to come first, or at least coincidentally. I would like to see a reduction in military spending, but we shouldn't be making overseas commitments without allocating the resources necessary to carry them out. I would like to see the US out of Europe in the near-to-medium term and a disentanglement from our commitments in the East long term. If we're not willing to do that, if we refuse to step down from the role of the Heavy who keeps the peace, then we need to maintain a military up to the task. And that requires increases in spending.

youngtaff 10y ago
It's funny that you describe the US as "the Heavy who keeps the peace" I suspect much of the rest of the world would describe the US as a warmonger and has been for decades
- gozur88 10y ago
  "Much of the rest of the world" is wrong. Be as that may, if they think that it bolsters my argument. The US should pull out of Europe and the Far East. And if the Europeans or the Asians go at each other again? We should stay on our side of the pond.
  - youngtaff 10y ago
    Is "much of the rest of the world" really wrong? The US is a country that spends more on the military than the next seven (?) combined and since World War II has been heavily intervening using (both explicitly and covertly) in countries all over the world Korean / Cuba / Dominica / Vietnam / Grenada / Libya / Panama / Gulf War I / Somalia / Haiti / Afghanistan / Gulf War II Plus all the 'secret wars' in Central America, Africa, other parts of the Middle East, Indochina etc.
    - 10y ago