It is the wrong military

Fred on Everything writes a piece about our military. Unlike PJ O'Rourke who Fred says thinks our military

is an international Charles Atlas, a motingator, astonishous, gleaming military monster such as the world has never seen (and didn´t ask to, but never mind).

Fred, on the other hand, thinks

the Pentagon has the wrong things. It is glorious and glitters and has many buttons and screens. It is just the wrong military.

The great Chinese strategist Fred Tzu once said, “Never use a broadsword to fight a swarm of pissed-off hornets.” Exactly. You have to understand the enemy. Otherwise you are in trouble and can´t understand why. If you are a behind-the-times sort of dinosaur, the rats are going to eat your eggs. If you are an American infantry battalion, sneaky little guys behind rocks are gonna blow hell out of your up-armored Humvee with the revolving IR heads. Trust me.

Think about it, PJ. I´m serious. The world´s most magnificent budget got run out of Nam like a scalded dog, yelling that actually, really, I mean honest, we really really won, shriek.

Not so´s you´d notice.

The same highly-trained martial codpiece got run out of Lebanon with 241 Marines dead, run out of Mogadishu by teenagers with armed pickup trucks, performed a comedy routine trying to rescue hostages in Tehran, lost in Iraq, and works diligently at losing in Afghanistan. Not too much bang for the buck, I´d say, or for the doe either.

Our global strategy is to surround Russia with military bases and missiles, and similarly to surround Iran and China. This latter is like an aging bull terrier trying to surround a frisky Rottweiler pup that is reaching puberty. The portents are sub-optimal. Anyway, when you have surrounded China, what does it buy you? Given our sorry record against several thousands of annoyed peasants in the bush world, do we figure to land at Shanghai and take on a billion Han Chinese? What could be a better idea?

Now, they say that money isn´t everything. Oh yes it is. And it is what America doesn´t have so much of any more. All those zoom-wowees and whizz-kerblams cost moolah. The days when the US could afford high wages and fun wars and a vast military all at once, them days is over. Oh. Ver. The jobs went to Asia and Mexico, unemployment runs way high, everybody is on food stamps or welfare, the standard of living falls, infrastructure rots, everybody is getting edgy and hates everybody else, and the military budget grows like kudzu on a Georgia road-cut. Hoo-boy. Think of an aging wrestler with a withered leg and padded jockstrap going into a biker bar and saying, “I can whip any bozo in the joint.”

Uh, yeah.