What does the military know that we don’t know? Why are anti-American illegal immigrants allowed to swarm over our borders? Why are West Point cadets refusing to make a career out of the Military? Do these three questions have any connection?
yeah,
it’s called
decline of the roman empire, the sequel.
Coming from a background almost identical to these young officers (my academy was a few hundred miles to the south of West Point), it's easy to rebel at the situation in which Rumsfeld, GWB and the current crop of political generals have put these captains and within the zone for promotion to major. They've been tasked to command troops in a futile, no-win battle in which they are ordered to allow mission accomplishment to become secondary, or even tertiary, to casualty phobia and sparsity of force application driven by venile political concerns.
Read the comments of the recently retired and dissenting generals in the February or March issue of Vanity Fair and the entire rationale' and explanation of the facts extant in the post come clear.
Indeed, my oldest son (USMA '94), acknowledged these realities on his last visit home in Januaary after returning from his second visit to Iraq (and one to Afghanistan). Even he, with a male family tradition of career military service reaching back to the Civil War, was disheartened enough to confess his frustration and the transient thoughts going back for a graduate degree as a civilian. He is scheduled for yet another deployment in June and is now back at the National Training Center in the California desert; a battalion commander of infantry.
We have become victims of the most inept and corrupt administration in modern U.S. history. That is a sentence I never thought I'd utter about a president for whom I worked diligently in Florida, assisted as part of the 2000 legal team of volunteers, raised money and considering the immediate preceeding eight years of Bill Clinton.
It pains me to say these thing, not because I, as so many others have been fooled, but because they're true.
Immigration, free trade, outsourcing. Sooner or later you figure its not worth fighting for the country that won’t fight for you.