InfantryDort reacts to a retired US general’s opinions on public executions on X (that is, the post is on X, not the executions … but now that I think on it …)
Why does it consistently appear that the criteria to be a General officer is historical illiteracy, suicidal empathy, and being toxically egalitarian? How did we get here?
This one thinks its “fundamentally unamerican” to publicly execute people. Well I guess George Washington is unamerican too. Or Abraham Lincoln.
You know what’s “fundamentally unamerican”, General? Simping for terrorists.
I hear this guy talk and I can’t help but think: no wonder GWOT didn’t end the way we wanted it to. The militarily crucial act of killing people disgusts this type of leader.
No wonder why it was so easy for guys like him and Stan McChrystal to make us practice “courageous restraint” on the battlefield. Letting the enemy gain the upper hand in every engagement, on purpose.
Out of what? Some wayward sense of nobility? That we’re the “good guys”?
No, General. Being the good guys doesn’t mean allowing our enemies to have a monopoly on violence. WE MUST HAVE THE MONOPOLY ON VIOLENCE.
Why am I constantly explaining this to Generals? Especially of the retired variety? Why am I having to explain that killing people is not only important to our profession, but for protecting western civilization itself?
The bar for General officer has been so low it’s practically in the basement. And no matter what institutional changes we make, these types always choose themselves to replace…. themselves.
So it’s more of the same. Same bad experience, same bad channel. Same feckless worldview. Incapable of victory. Incapable of common sense. Incapable of doing their jobs. But completely capable of making Instagram videos about how mean and cruel we’ve become.
BEING MEAN AND CRUEL TO OUR EVIL ENEMIES IS THE ENTIRE POINT!
Pathetic filth.
To which Tom Kratman responds:
Did I ever … hmmm … maybe not. Wait a sec …
Not only will you be rated or senior rated by about 100 people, in 30 years in the Army, but you can never have pissed one of them off. These men, however, will range from the bright to the ignorant, the moral to the immoral, and will have vastly diverging experiences which will drive their judgment. And you cannot disagree with them if you want stars. It would be one thing if they were all the same and you learned to echo just one theme. But when they are all different, and you still agree with every trivial thought they ever had, it can only be because you lack any center of your own, any moral compass whatsoever, since everything in the military has a moral aspect to it. In other words — with only very rare exceptions; I thought well of Foss, LeMoyne, and Petraeus, for example — the man who rises to stars usually has nothing, no values of worth, inside him.
Which is worse than contemptible; it’s absolutely pathetic, given how useless it is to become a general.
True story: Some people thought there were stars in my future. There came a day, early 1988, I was on my second company command, of three, and I was shooting the crap with the brigade commander in his office. I’d been ambivalent about stars for some time by then, but it was a very amorphous thing. I couldn’t have told you why. Eventually, I realized that my brigade commander (Annapolis, oddly enough) was trying to mentor me into stars. “You need to do this, Tom, then you need to do that. Then you need to …”
And it all came clear, an epiphany, a blinding flash of the obvious, and I said, “Sir, I don’t want to be a general.”
“Wha … what … WHAT?”
So I stood up, walked across the office to his LCE tree, and took his helmet in hands.
“Sir, do you remember General Meyer?”
“Shy Meyer? Chief of Staff?”
“Yes, sir, him.”
“Sure.”
“Sir, Meyer was a reformer. He had a bag full of good ideas for improving the Army. I counted thirty-seven once, about half and half trivial and important. I may have missed some.”
“Yes, so?”
Then I turned the helmet around to point at him the two silly bits of glow in the dark tape on the camouflage band around the helmet. “Sir, of all that, this is all that’s left of Meyer. Everything else is gone. In a matter of a few years it’s as if he never existed. So what, sir, would be the point of becoming a general, if, even if I rose to be Chief of Staff of the Army, I could not possibly have a good and lasting effect?”
Which is, in any case, why I turned to writing. My brigade commander didn’t get it; he still tried to stick me as the incoming CG’s Aide, but I wanted nothing to do with that.
