Our gutter culture, our toxic media, quotas, affirmative action, anti-male family court laws, $18 trillion dollar deficit, food-stamp lifestyle, exodus of American manufacturing to the third world, legislation driven by bogus climate change science, NSA surveillance, crony capitalism, breakdown in the rule of law, marginalization of the religious, militarized police problem, out of control regulatory agencies, open borders, entitled illegals and amnesty supporting leftists ... none of this can be solved by military intervention abroad.
Domestic military action, like an American Pinochet, might be able fix it. He fixed Chile by running a dirty war and throwing thousands of leftists out of airplanes without parachutes. This achieved killing off the cancer of the left in his country. Today they are the best country in South America. That seems to have worked.
But would it work here? Is there even enough cancer-free tissue left in the body politic for the nation to survive if we went on a cancer killing spree? I think not. The therapy would likely kill the patient.
But it's pretty clear we're not going that route. That's far outside our tradition Today the American military is full of Politically Correct affirmative action supporting sissies, just like every other institution in the USA. Patreus? He couldn't even figure out how to pull off a simple affair without be caught, humiliated, stripped of his career and prosecuted. He would hardly be able to pull off a coup.
Nope, the military are just another Govt. special interest group, complete with guys in camoflage and red shoes learning to be sensitive to woman.
Maybe I'm agreeing it would take leaders, but it also takes people and institutions for those leaders to lead. The quality of "followership" in the USA is at an all-time low.
I agree with the author's sense of pessimism.
(BTW: WW2 didn't undo the previous 8 years of FDR's transformation of America either. Much of our current mess was started by him, and WW2 locked all that progressive BS in place, essentially forever. SO even in our most heroic war, it did not provide a foundation for fixing the culture and social fabric.)
This organization is probably not up to the task of saving America from ourselves.
BTW: Archy: you taught me a lot about the Dirty War a decade ago, right here on FR with some of your original CWII posts. As I recall you have always felt that the goings on in South America were more like what might happen here than, say, the War Between the States. So I realize I'm just repeating back to the professor what he has instructed, possibly with a little twist.