Every time I’m stuck behind a slow merger and I see a tractor trailer in the right lane: “welp, this is how it ends.”
Paul-AB
synerg4ce
Putting excessive amount of space between a hard shoulder (wall, re: construction) such that they’re straddling the opposite lane.
Add no lights at dawn/dusk; ghost riders I call them.
24-hour duties, field-training measured in days-to-weeks length-of-time away from family; 9-month deployments (I’ll be fair and not hearken back to 12-month standards & the 15-month Surge era), kind of a no-quit policy so-to-speak; contracts specifying years of commitment, restrictions on your freedom of speech &…
Oh & that French operation?
One might wonder how you measure the performance of 2 military’s with a wholesale LACK of wartime experience or actions to actually judge.
Or am I forgetting about SouthWest-Pacific-wide protests at Japan’s most recent use of combat troops abroad & the Second Korean War?
No — no I am not. These things don’t exist.
The DoD certainly isn’t faultless.
They have said on many an occasion they simply can’t audit themselves.
I’d say in addition to the fact, for whatever reason, we spend money very inefficiently. Or Congress is stealing from the budget / organic, unintentional & mendacious waste.
As Mike D F points out as well, discretionary spending can change by dint of legislative majority changing parties. Republicans in charge, DoD gets a bit bigger; Democrats, smaller.
Non-discretionary spending is so-called because IT IS PRESCRIBED TO BE FUNDED BY LAW. It is not easily changeable.
If our country is…
If you cut out every iota of military spending, on an average year ... we are still deficit spending.
Oh sure, it’s only by paltry amounts, a few billion perhaps — the point is, the budget deficit is STRUCTURAL.
FINANCIAL OBLIGATIONS (spending required by law) neatly eats up almost the entire annual budget. The…
Broadly speaking, terrorist organizations exhibit a growth from narrow, domestic or regional focus, and if they grow big enough, tend to broaden their focus internationally. History being as it is, they attack the West.
Based on various interviews he’s given, it’s pretty obvious he’d rather still be shooting people for a living (he’s former Jordanian SF) than running Jordan as King.
Reminds me of Andrew Jackson, who allegedly had 2 dying regrets: “[That] I didn’t shoot Henry Clay and I didn’t hang John C. Calhoun.”
Solid man. And his…
On a 4K-resolution upload.
That’s not how the armed forces work.
I state as much in a different comment tree that I agree China wants a buffer. And they’ll grab as much as they can until they meet the West in the middle.
At that point, shots might even be exchanged, but only out of confusion; I wholly doubt they’ll pursue a fight against the US & RoK armies to get all the way South…
A big, beautiful pile of TNT. Yuuuge
I didn’t mean to imply they would fight over it. (I say as much elsewhere in this nested comment tree)
In the event of war, I very much expect them to annex some territory for “humanitarian” reasons. And they’d fight Nork units in that scenario.
But IMO they’ll assiduously avoid a fight with the West.
I doubt that. A broader conflict against the West will ruin their economy — really, the world economy — and for what? A few hundred kilometers of the Korean Peninsula?
That’s Ayatollah / Kim Jong-Un levels of crazy.
China’s great interest would be to establish some kind of substantially-sized buffer between themselves & RoK, an American ally. Also to head off a refugee crisis.
The status quo has been convenient for them for so long, but this isn’t the 50's — they’re not sending a million men screaming down South in a fight…