Graham Hilliard has an excellent article in the Washington Examiner about “Military rot”, but his timeline is off. We know about the rot. It’s glaring and in our faces. I think this rot goes back much further. We look at Korea and Vietnam and know that the top down rot was there. Can it be stopped?

Hilliard’s article begins:

It is difficult, 20 years on, to say which is more unlikely: that flip-flopping, wind-surfing, “Jinjis” Khan-pronouncing John Kerry came within an Ohio whisper of the White House or that Kerry’s rebuke proceeded in large part from a bevy of cheesed-off veterans. Politics change in two decades, of course, and my guess is that the presidential nomination process has produced its last patrician Bay Stater for some time. Yet the real development since 2004 is the sheer improbability now of what Kerry’s onetime comrades in arms pulled off.

With a series of devastatingly well-made television ads, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth won the battle over the Massachusetts senator’s war record, moral fiber, and fitness for office. But they have lost the ideological war.

Five presidential election cycles later, we have moved to Kerry’s side of the vessel.

In case you have forgotten, or are too young, here is one of the ads:

The ads were effective because they were true. Here is more from the Hilliard article:

s any of this surprising given the war-losing, the wokeness, the naked politicking, and the general incompetence that have attended America’s officer class for the last two decades? Data aside, I encourage the reader to perform a thought experiment in the privacy of his own home. If, as several Republican presidential hopefuls recently urged, the United States were to use military force against Mexico’s drug cartels, is it at all likely that we would win that war? Or consider the China conflict into which we are sleepwalking. Can the American military, in anything like its current form, really be expected to defeat a disciplined, ruthless superpower in its own backyard, 8,000 miles from our shores?

Whatever your answer to these questions, grant that voicing them would have been political suicide a generation ago. Today, by contrast, even mainstream Republicans have eyes to see, for example, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley brazenly thwarting the will of an elected president. The “dissident” Right is full of grifters who will say whatever it takes to get their next click. When 90-year-old Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) starts talking about military “smoke and mirrors,” it’s time to listen.

Grant that all of this is true. It’s certainly not the military’s fault. Not the average Joe’s that make up the military, that is. They have always had the fight in them. The problem has always been at the top. This I learned from the late Colonel David Hackworth:

4-Star, huh. David Hackworth (the second most highly decorated without a Medal of Honor of all time – McArthur is first) called those DC political officers:

"Perfumed princes of the Potomac".

— SIGINTSAILOR (@sigintsailor) April 11, 2024

That’s right, those “Perfumed Princes of the Pentagon” have always been the downfall of the military. General Mark Milley is not that much different from John Kerry. And, Kerry and Milley aren’t that much different from WWII Lt. Colonel Robert McNamara, who became Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson. He believed the era of the dogfight had passed and didn’t equip the fighter jets with external guns. That left our brave pilots vulnerable to be shot down.

Along with our stunningly (like Milley and McNamara) incompetent Perfumed Princes of the Pentagon, we have those who are flat risk averse. Which would be most anyone who has crossed the threshold of the Pentagon. Plus, the nimrods of Pentagon want to turn the all-volunteer military into the all-mercenary army by luring foreigners who would have no loyalties to our country or people, as our Carol, an honorable veteran herself wrote.

Finally, from Mr. Hilliard:

Of course, young people don’t need another Senate floor speech to make up their minds about our armed forces. They are voting with their feet, to the tune of an unprecedented military recruiting crisis. Perhaps our men of fighting age are simply following their leaders. Obama did not throw open the gates to transgender service members because he loves and respects our military institutions. Nor did Trump’s savaging of the late Sen. John McCain proceed from a deep wellspring of reverence. If Kerry follows the news — no sure thing given his commitment to breaking lifetime private jet travel records — he must be cursing his electoral timing. Released today, his Senate testimony would barely raise eyebrows. Of course our soldiers behaved abominably in Vietnam, the thinking would go. They’re representatives of a broken brand.

In short, John Kerry-ism — the notion that our military is one more problem to be ashamed of — is now ascendant. The vision of American might once expressed by the swift-boaters, meanwhile, is drowning in a murky river, slowly vanishing in the gathering fog. As a conservative, I hold the foundational belief that there are no solutions to many of our crises. But here are a few for the armed forces: Shut up about diversity. Stop playing politics. Win a war. You’ll be shocked by how quickly the public comes back to your side.

I disagree about Donald Trump. He was right about John McCain, my late Dad taught me that. Besides Trump hired too many of the top brass and held them too much in awe. The institutionalized rot of the military goes back much further than that.

The Pentagon opened in January 1943. Too late to screw up World War II, but the rot has been institutionalized since then. How about selling the Pentagon to a Veterans Assisted Living Facility developer and disbursing the Perfumed Princes of the Pentagon among the Joes and Swabies, see if they can excise the rot?

Worth a try.

Featured Composite: thierry ehrmann/flickr.com/cropped/Creative Commons/Michael Belanger/flickr.com/cropped/Creative Commons