The problem with American generals — captured by Lucian Truscott

© 2017 Peter Free

 

05 August 2017

 

 

Insightful insults are useful

 

Evaluate the merit of this one — about today's highest ranking American generals:

 

 

The single biggest myth about [President] Trump’s generals is that they’re the “adults in the room,” . . . . [see, for example, here]

 

To answer that question, I present the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq! We’ve been losing one for 16 years and the other for 14 years, and those wars belong to these guys.

 

Trump’s generals saluted and said yes sir every time they were given yet another absurd mission in furtherance of yet another insane goal in those abject quagmires we’re still waist deep in.

 

[T]hat’s the problem with generals. In order to become one, you’ve got to spend the better part of 30 years saluting and saying yes sir to every half-baked loon who’s above you, so one day, you can get to be the one guy who isn’t a half-baked loon.

 

Except of course by the time you’ve saluted and said yes sir enough times to get stars on your shoulder, you’ve become the half-baked loon you saluted for all those years to get those stars.

 

An increasingly incompetent and amoral political leadership in Washington presides over an increasingly incompetent and amoral leadership in the military.

 

Trump, with his five deferments and his bellicose thumbs isn’t an aberration. He’s the logical product of 70 years of doing the same thing over and over and over again until you finally get really really good at it.

 

And really, really good, in this insane system, give us Trump and his generals.

 

© 2017 Lucian K. Truscott IV, The myth about Trump’s generals, Salon (02 August 2017) (excerpts, paragraphs split)

 

 

Truscott is a West Point graduate (1968), who quickly became dubious about American military mindsets. Not surprising, during the string of vicious inanities that comprised the Vietnam War.

 

 

That said — I find it difficult to criticize general officers

 

They are the inevitable product of a flawed organizational system.

 

Asking them to be different than they are is equivalent to telling them to resign their careers early on. That means before the system's entrenched lame-headedness enters their bloodstreams like an advancing sepsis.

 

The dominantly un-meritorious leading herd rewards inept, but unthreatening behaviors and squelches more capably realistic ones. Which results, for example, in the clueless strategic bloviating that I so often criticize.

 

 

The moral? — Maybe we should improve civilian leadership, instead

 

The United States establishment is good at turning smart and formerly capable people into polished strategic idiots. That trait is not entirely bone-headed. Continual war is profitable.

 

If history is guide, Trump's generals are not going to produce anything notably different than what came before. And they are certainly not going to turn our arguably overconfident Commander in Chief into a subordinate.