Does anyone remember a hilarious low-budget 90s comedy film called Down Periscope, starring Kelsey Grammer and Lauren Holly?
I do – quite well, actually. It’s a funny, if inconsistent and somewhat badly acted, film:
The trailer is actually almost as funny as the movie – partly because there are a few scenes in it that didn’t show up in the film.
All of that as may be, the reason why I bring this up is because of a story that I saw in one of the PommieBastardLande newspapers yesterday, in which the Limeys couldn’t resist pointing out that “Get Woke, Go Broke” applies just as thoroughly to modern militaries as it does to corporations:
A scathing new report commissioned by members of Congress has claimed that the Navy’s surface warfare forces have systemic training and leadership issues, including a focus on diversity that overshadows basic readiness skills.
The report prepared by Marine Lt. Gen. Robert Schmidle and Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, both retired, came in response to recent Naval disasters, including the burning of the USS Bonhomme Richard in San Diego, two collisions involving Navy ships in the Pacific and the surrender of two small craft to Iran.
The authors conducted hour-long interviews with 77 current and retired Navy officers, offering them anonymity to identify issues they wouldn’t feel comfortable raising in the chain of command.
The report found that a staggering 94 percent of the subjects believed the recent Naval disasters were ‘part of a broader problem in Navy culture or leadership.’
‘I guarantee you every unit in the Navy is up to speed on their diversity training. I’m sorry that I can’t say the same of their ship handling training,’ said one recently retired senior enlisted leader.
The report focused on issues within the Navy’s surface warfare forces, as opposed to submarine and aviation, and suggested that issues in the surface fleet could be unique due to better funding and training for submarine and aviation units.
One of the key issues raised by the officers interviewed for the report was a concern that Navy leaders spend more time focusing on diversity training than on developing warfighting capacity and key operational skills.
‘Sometimes I think we care more about whether we have enough diversity officers than if we’ll survive a fight with the Chinese navy,’ lamented one lieutenant currently on active duty.
‘It’s criminal. They think my only value is as a black woman. But you cut our ship open with a missile and we’ll all bleed the same color,’ she added.
One recent destroyer captain said: ‘where someone puts their time shows what their priorities are. And we’ve got so many messages about X, Y, Z appreciation month, or sexual assault prevention, or you name it. We don’t even have close to that same level of emphasis on actual warfighting.’
‘While programs to encourage diversity, human sex trafficking prevention, suicide prevention, sexual assault prevention, and others are appropriate, they come with a cost,’ the report’s authors wrote.
‘The non-combat curricula consume Navy resources, clog inboxes, create administrative quagmires, and monopolize precious training time. By weighing down sailors with non-combat related training and administrative burdens, both Congress and Navy leaders risk sending them into battle less prepared and less focused than their opponents,’ the report added.
You see that picture at the top of this post? Readers of a certain vintage may remember that band as The Village People, and may recall that this merry bunch of reprobates once produced a song called “In the Navy”:
(Not surprisingly, that track features right at the end of the film that I mentioned earlier, too.)
I bring this up because, given what that article says, you Americans would be better off enlisting The Village People to fight your next naval war.
The thing is that America’s next closest rivals, Russia and China, are both far less experienced with naval operations. The Russians no longer bother with aircraft carriers – they consider them a pointless waste of time. They concentrate instead on fighting land-based defensive wars – and NO ONE is better than the Russkies at fighting, and winning, on land.
The Chinese have the world’s biggest navy, by ship count, and are quite happily flexing their muscles at sea. But the Chinese don’t quite grok “systemology”. Here’s a simple example: they don’t understand what the American Navy figured out decades ago in WWII – that EVERY SINGLE PERSON on a ship needs to be trained in damage control. The Chinese rely instead on specialised damage control teams. This isn’t going to help them in an actual fighting war when the people in charge of damage control die in a big hurry.
None of this changes one fundamental fact:
The Russians and the Chinese take war seriously. The Americans do not.
I’ve gone over this already by looking at the difference between Chinese, Russian, and American military recruiting commercials. The Chinese commercial is all about national pride and strength. The Russian commercial is all about discipline and the defence of the Motherland.
And the American commercial? Well that’s all about virtue-signalling.
The article in The Daily Mail demonstrates exactly why the American military is the world’s most expensive paper tiger. It is no longer capable of winning wars – it hasn’t been for decades, but the condition is now terminal. And a big part of that lies in the fact that the military bureaucracy has become sclerotic, rigid, and intolerant of failure.
Most people don’t realise that, pound-for-pound, the German Wehrmacht in WWII were the strongest and most capable military in the world. The best warfighters in the American military at the time were mostly in the Marines – yet many (perhaps not all) serious military historians would argue that even the very best Marine battalions were equivalent only to second-tier Wehrmacht infantry battalions on the Western front.
Why?
Because the Germans never stopped studying the Art of War. Their best officers were nerds of the first order. Their military training methods dated back to the Prussian military reforms following the disastrous Battle of Jena-Auerstedt all the way back in 1806. That was the battle that decimated the Prussian military and showed conclusively just how far behind the times they were when compared to the then-radically innovative French under Napoleon.
So the Prussians went right back to the drawing board and completely overhauled their entire military command structure, training methods, warfighting techniques, and doctrines. They literally rewrote their own manuals on how to fight – one of the men who fought in that battle was a certain General Carl von Clausewitz, author of a certain Vom Kriege, which is possibly the second most important military strategy text in human history.
The Prussians made tolerance of failure central to their new military doctrine. In fact, they built into their training methods an approach whereby officers in training would be given orders that could not be reconciled with the situations that they faced. In other words, the only way for those officers to win, was to disobey orders.
And the Prussians tolerated that. They encouraged and fostered risk-taking and innovation. And within three generations, they had the single most feared and effective land-based army in the world. The Prussians took those lessons forward into the reunification of Germany and built the Imperial German Army under those same doctrines.
When Hitler came to power, he kept the old Prussian training methods intact – because he himself learned them during his time in the Great War and found them effective. The German doctrine of blitzkrieg is basically a repackaged and very powerful version of manoeuvre warfare, as developed by Prussian strategists. And it bloody WORKED.
Again, most people don’t know this, but it’s absolutely true: the French had MORE tanks than the Germans at the outbreak of WWII, of higher quality. And yet the Germans gave the French a bloody good hiding, precisely because the Germans positioned their tanks to break through French lines where they were the weakest.
The Germans had evolved their combat doctrine well beyond the bloody slugfests and artillery-based combat of the trenches and slaughter-pens of the Great War – and the French had not.
It’s not difficult to figure out who won that round.
I point all of this out to help you to understand what an actually effective and capable military looks like. That kind of military is nimble, agile, tolerant of failure, capable of adaptation, and interested in learning from failure.
These qualities are absolutely INCOMPATIBLE with a military obsessed with Critical Race Theory, equity, social justice, and “going green”. A military that promotes those latter qualities over the former qualities that marked the Prussians as such outstanding warfighters, is a military that WANTS AND DESERVES to lose.
Now, I have never served in the military. But a disproportionate number of my readers have. I leave the last word to them. I would like to pose a few questions to them – respectfully and out of genuine curiosity.
Gentlemen:
- Do you honestly believe that the American military is a good place to go these days for young men?
- Do you think that today’s military is capable of winning actual wars any longer?
- In your opinion, can the US military turn itself around, or will that require wholesale restructuring?
- Do today’s generals and admirals have the balls and the spines to carry out their Constitutional duties to the Republic, rather than putting their own interests and promotion chances first?
If the answers to any of these questions is “No”, then we can safely assume that going to war with fake Indians in giant feather headdresses will likely prove to be more effective against the Chinese than anything that the US Navy can come up with. America would still lose in either case, but at least in the first, it would actually be sort of funny, in a rather mordant and black sort of way.
8 Comments
a – these would be questions for Cataline or one of the other vet readers at VP
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b – the US military is a fantastic place to enlist … if your goal is to aid and abet GloboHomoPedo. also, do you really want to follow a Commander in Chief who sniffs 5 year olds?
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c – WHETHER the US .mil is CAPABLE of winning wars is an entirely separate issue from the larger problem, will the US .mil BE ALLOWED BY CIVILIAN LEADERSHIP to win a war? this is a problem which goes clear back to Korea, which may be considered a “win” for the US but which also established the principles that the military would not be permitted to effectively attack production centers or logistics / lines of supply chains. and you can see this going forward into Vietnam, Bay of Pigs, Afghanistan+Iraq+Syria, Mogadishu, chasing Bin Laden in Tora Bora, etc.
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we appear to be incapable of “winning” anything beyond extremely short term goals due to civilian leadership fear of the press. either that or they just like keeping the fighting going as a way for .mil contractors to rake money off of the federal budget.
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d – “can the US military turn itself around” is a non-sequitur. the US military is doing what the civilian leadership has demanded of it, and “turning itself around” would require widespread action in direct opposition to explicit orders and Congressional funding requirements. ie – it would require actions which would be characterized as insurrection, coup de tat and/or treason. and there’s not a chance in hell civilian directives will change while wholesale voter fraud is permitted in Demonrat metro areas.
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e – “and suggested that issues in the surface fleet could be unique due to better funding and training for submarine and aviation units.”
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we know for a certainty that the aviation units have exactly the same problems that the surface fleet does, lack of flight hours, training, funding and qualified personnel.
That is a good point. Certainly there does appear to be significant pressure on people above the rank of Major, or equivalent, to basically have a mandatory lobotomy before they can get to serious rank in the military, precisely because civilian leadership doesn’t actually like or respect real warfighters.
Well, more than that, the military leadership itself has let it be known that they considered the God-Emperor’s actions to try to expose the fraud in the 2020 election to be treasonous. So not only the civilian leadership, but the military top brass, is thoroughly compromised. Supposedly – and this could be fake news – Milley and the other Joint Chiefs strongly considered resigning in order to stop Trump from using the military to declare martial law and institute 6 months of rule-by-decree. I’m willing to believe it, because that is in keeping with Milley’s rather slimy character and with the fact that the God-Emperor quite inexplicably refused to cross the Potomac.
The takeaway from all of this is that America is doomed. Its last remaining useful institution, the military, has been co-opted and subverted. The only alternative now is armed insurrection – which I reckon will probably happen around 2025, at the rate things are going.
i forgot to point out that even Gulf War 1 was not a true “win”, due to “No New Taxes” refusing to prosecute the war to it’s final conclusion.
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the Iraqi military was not even remotely capable of standing up to us, in either GW. but both exercises were rendered completely useless by dumbshit civilian leadership goal setting.
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the fact that we were doing this in “aid” of a muslim population was also incredibly stupid. muslims who had been in a muslim nation will never tolerate living under the rule of khaffir conqueror … no matter how many times we call ourselves “liberators”. therefore, the constant “insurrections” and IED bombings were a certainty, unless you’re willing to suppress and/or eradicate the muslims ruthlessly.
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if we’re not willing to do that, why are we there? to give Iran another proxy state?
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i’ve still not heard anyone ( in government ) talking seriously about shutting down Saudi funding of Islamic terrorism … innocently whistles
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given an unwillingness to eliminate the muslims, the only thing we could effectively do in the MENA would be to bull rush in a wipe out governments doing things we didn’t like, wag our fingers and tell them to be good boys, and leave.
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as to Dire Badger’s complaint about the quality of current staffing … this is a problem common to all peace time armies, that their officer corp gets over run with useless eater bureaucrats and desk jockies. this goes all the way back to the US Civil War, and is not a problem unique to the US. witness our European friend here.
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the question is whether or not the troops can hold the lines long enough for actually capable commandeers to start to rise to positions of authority once things go hot.
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but the military top brass,
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i never said that the brass wasn’t full of anti-American Feminist Critical Race Theory advocates.
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but that top brass is what the civilian leadership has been demanding since Bill Clinton.
America has an army at least and I doubt they are as soft as Europe. If Rommel was alive today, he would go to Brussels and level down every building with bureaucrats and all the old farts that we call Generals today.
People used to be promoted by merit, but now it’s just a cushy office job while climbing the military ranks passively and waiting for a comfortable retirement.
When I was in the army, most of the soldiers would take a good look at the officers, shake their heads in disbelief and wonder if these people were actually capable of leading us to war if it ever happened. Mind you, the soldiers themselves me included, had zero confidence in their abilities to fight.
If I was American, I wouldn’t worry so much. Europe is the most fragile in my opinion.
Yes he would – though, given that the German military of today has a rifle shortage, and their troops train with broomsticks, I do have to wonder how he’d accomplish that particular end.
Oh that’s been the age-old complaint of the rank-and-file going all the way back to the Roman Republic. The difference, of course, is that back then, the Romans had serious discipline and physical fitness requirements that made their legions the roughest, toughest, most dangerous heavy infantry around – their LINE infantry could march 40Km in a single day. And their officers had to endure similar levels of discipline and conditioning – it wasn’t an easy ride for them.
These days, though, I don’t blame sergeants and petty officers for looking at their brand-spanking-new lieutenants and wondering what the hell kind of nonsense they’re teaching at the military academies.
Yeah, but remember that Europe gets away with much of its relaxed lifestyle precisely because of the American defensive umbrella. The moment that the myth of American might shatters conclusively, which it absolutely will the next time that the Americans tussle with either the Russians or the Chinese, then Europe’s ability to maintain internal cohesion will decline rapidly as well.
The moment that the US Army or Navy loses a real slugging match against a tough opponent, NATO’s viability goes straight out the window. Which means no common defence budget for America’s allies. Which means that the entire globohomo empire splits apart.
As far as I’m concerned, that can’t happen soon enough. The EU needs to be destroyed, and the failure of American military power would greatly hasten that.
I would like to make a few notes, as a retired Navy enlisted man.
First, Down periscope is one of my favorite movies. despite a huge number of impossible flaws that could only work in a comedy movie. Kelsey’s character has no place on a Naval Vessel, no matter how amusing he is. The female character reinforced the fact that no woman should ever be on a warfighting vessel, especially a submarine…. it was pure comedy, nothing more.
There are a lot of other decent comedy military movies too, but Down Periscope is as much a comedy as Hot Shots, with slightly less ridiculous humor.The same amount of unrealism, though.
No, I joined in ’89, and the class of…I guess…. ’91? was probably the last actual boot camp. After that, they eliminated fitness standards, cycling, and virtually any real training for joining an actual military force. Literally, fat girls were coming out of coot camp crying when they hit their ship because they didn’t like the boat ride. The ‘crossing the line’ ceremony turned into a circle-jerk kumbaya, and black idiots could literally get promotions for doing some of the most retarded things I have ever seen sailors do… and sailors are known for some dumb stuff (not as bad as the Marines, though)
I have watched first class DC petty officers put their fire teams in PLASTIC emergency oxygen masks to fight fire drills, with core-fram plastic shoes. And NOBODY noticed but me, and fought against me when I forced the whole damned team out of the drill. I was actually sent to mast for ‘disrupting the training’.
And that is one of maybe a hundred incidents of intolerable lack of anything resembling common sense I observed when I was in. Training is supposed to make up for a lack of brains, not encourage it.
Our Military hasn’t been capable of winning wars since the 70’s…. because the officers on-site have absolutely zero responsibility. Your average 8 year 0-4 is expected to wait for orders from suits and politicians for even the most minor of evolutions. a War CANNOT be won that way.
No. It cannot be turned around. We would require carrera-esque restructuring and a complete elimination of the entire officer corps and the vast majority of the enlisted corps…. and to be fair, even the GEAR would need to be almost completely replaced. Not with ‘new and improved’ equipment, but with stuff that actually WORKS, no matter how old the design.
There are likely a few decent officers, but they are surrounded and dominated by possib ly the worst officer corps in existence. If the officer corps were restructured, they would have to be eliminated along with the rest, because it’s like 1 baby in a hundred miles of bathwater, and except for a few NCO’s, there’s almost no one left COMPETENT to judge whether an existing officer is competent.
Thank you for the extensive and insightful comments. I too agree that the US military is too far gone to be turned around without a full torch-and-burn approach.
The Navy is definitely done, judging by what that article says – it is sclerotic, hide-bound, and totally risk-averse. The Air Force is blowing its wad on ridiculously stupid Joint Strike Flying Pianos and horribly expensive “stealth” bombers and can’t fight against a real technologically sophisticated enemy because its planes won’t stay in the sky. The Marines were the foremost warfighting arm of the US military, but even they have gone woke, with the predictable lowering of standards and readiness that comes with it.
I cannot speak for LTC Kratman, but I suspect that he would argue that the Army is done as well. They’ve implemented CrossFit as their physical fitness programme, in modified form, which really says all that we need to know about whether or not they can fight.
So, yeah, the US military is DONE.
I don’t want to come off as one of those ‘enlisted guys that hate officers’ tropes, So I will admit that the enlisted guys are every bit as bad as the officers.
Heck, I took plenty of shortcuts myself just because I had the brains to put on one boondocker at a time. I was absolutely NOT a leader, and yet I managed E6 BM before I got out with almost ridiculous ease, doing nothing more than handling PMS (Planned Maintenance scheduling) and occasionally sitting on a rifle or M60. I got one of the most prestigious technical awards (ESWS, Enlisted surface warfare specialist) the very first time I tried, without studying other than using the tiny bit of knowledge I gained from learning how to grease up a bow ramp and stern gate.
I sucked, but I had a very small amount of common sense. And that fact alone shot me up through the ranks of stupid effortlessly. Add to that the Navy’s ‘up or out’ policy, means that the US military of today is literally the embodiment of the Peter Principle. Getting chief or officer would have been a breeze even for a dumbshit like me, because the bar is as low as democrat morality. The only reason I got out was because I couldn’t stand the sort of people who were becoming ‘lifers’ by that point, because they were almost exclusively minority placeholders given awards simply for not acting like….what they were.
Call it “I would never join a club that would have me as a member’, but recognizing that my own easy rise was an indictment of the entire organization was enough for me to grab Obama’s ‘early retirement’ without question.
I still take my oath seriously, but today it has been warped right along with the constitution, and 99% of those that CLAIM to support the oath are happy to embrace the corrupted re-imagining of the constitution without question. I am an oath keeper, but the ‘Oath Keepers’ are no allies.