Let’s see some Iran headlines, how much are we winning our pointless chosen war today?
Well, we see at NBC News that Iran has inflicted billions upon billions of dollars of damage to intel and surveillance sites, which has left Congress scrambling to find money to repair them. “Iran’s air attacks also have raised questions about why the Pentagon, the intelligence community and the State Department were not better prepared to defend government facilities from drone and missile strikes, military experts and former U.S. officials said.” What a pickle!
And then there’s this four-byline story from the New York Times, which seems kind of great big:
“Leaves the Army Rudderless.”
In other words, Secretary Shitfaced has been so busy firing generals for threatening his authority by being obviously superior to him in every way, and now there’s nobody home to lead the Army.
Look at you, Major Hegseth! You’re a humiliating fuckup all over again!
The subheadline of the piece says “The leadership vacuum comes as the Army is trying to adapt to a new kind of war dominated by deadly drones.”
Yes, “drone war” does seem to be confusing this secretary of Defense whose prior expertise pretty much capped off at latrine and beard maintenance.
It’s like a comical movie where an alcoholic cow has to learn to do hard things like brain surgery and dismantling bombs, because everybody else is dead! Pete Hegseth plays cow!
The Times reviews Hegseth’s “series of firings and feuds,” because the Pentagon is basically a reality show right now.
There’s still no Army chief of staff, after he fired Randy George in April. Hegseth might not know things like this, but that’s the top officer position in the Army, it’s kind of important. Why did Hegseth fire George? That’s been unclear, but the Washington Post also dropped a story today that says George had been advised by Gen. Chris LaNeve, who is currently Trump’s and Hegseth’s favored pick to take George’s spot, to kill the investigation into that weird, stupid helicopter flyby at Kid Rock’s house. George thought it might be important to investigate something like that, because he is an actual professional who earned his job. (LaNeve currently doesn’t have the support among Republicans in the Senate to get through, which is why he’s not officially nominated.)
“George later confided in colleagues that he seemed troubled by the encounter with LaNeve, who suggested it would be best if the review was scuttled,” says WaPo.
The Times calls George’s absence the “most glaring” of all the absences, and there are many:
As Army chief, General George was responsible for training and equipping Army units around the world. His responsibilities included accelerating the purchase of critical munitions such as Patriot interceptors, ATACMS artillery systems and other ground-based weaponry, which are in short supply.
Can’t imagine how any of that might be valuable right now. The Times notes there are three people who could maybe have replaced George, but Shitfaced fired them as well.
And then there’s the latest, Daniel Driscoll, the Army secretary Hegseth reportedly has asked to start gathering his things and leave. Why? Unclear, but that’s been some of the “feuding,” we reckon. Just in these august pages of Wonkette, we have had occasion to mention Hegseth feuding with Driscoll over his refusal to summarily fire/block promotions for Black people and women, AKA two of the big categories of people Secretary Shitfaced is scared of.
So it could be that! Maybe it was because Driscoll said on Fox & Friends that there was a soldier stationed on the moon, and SHHHH, Sergeant Green Cheese was supposed to be secret!
But yeah, it’s probably that he didn’t fire Black guys and women fast enough for Secretary Nazi Tattoo’s tastes. Or that, as the Times notes, Driscoll was “widely seen as a potential candidate to replace Mr. Hegseth if he decided to step down or fell out of favor with President Trump.” Can’t have obviously better and more qualified candidates just milling around the place!
All of this is just stellar timing:
The turmoil comes as the Army, the military’s largest service, faces its busiest period since the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Army air defense soldiers are playing the leading role in defending U.S. troops in the Middle East from increasingly sophisticated Iranian missile attacks. The Army’s command in Europe is providing critical intelligence and other support to Ukraine as it fights to hold off a larger Russian force.
The Times reports that Driscoll and George had been working on the drone thing, which we’re sure Hegseth doesn’t understand, since he thinks the key to the US winning wars again lies in caucasian skin and testosterone gel applied once per week. He had also been working on the “peace deal for Ukraine” thing, not that this regime can be trusted to do that without making it like Christmas morning for the Kremlin.
Those peace efforts have largely stalled, the rapid modernization push is being scaled back and Mr. Driscoll is barely on speaking terms with Mr. Hegseth, officials said.
Cool. We’re sure Hegseth’s little priss fights are more important.
Any other generals in the house? Anybody who knows how to work these controls? Nope, not really. Right now there are only five four-star generals serving actively. Before Secretary Shitfaced stumblefucked his way into the room, there were 10.
Mr. Hegseth has fired or forced out a half-dozen senior officers — a generation of the Army’s most combat-hardened leaders — thinning the service’s top ranks for the next several years, officials said.
“Hollowing out the most battle-tested and most lethal, proven leaders in a time of war means troops are less safe and we’re less likely to win,” said Representative Pat Ryan, Democrat of New York and a former Army intelligence officer.
One job that is sitting empty, the Times notes, is the person who’s supposed to oversee the Army’s Transformation and Training Command. Hegseth did hire somebody for it, Gen. David M. Hodne, but then he fired him for God-knows-why after eight months. And what does that job do?
The command is responsible for training and equipping the Army’s ground units, including its Patriot antimissile crews. The Patriots are the main defense against Iranian ballistic missiles fired at U.S. bases in the Middle East.
We are starting to see how all these things are connected! All the damage to our intel sites, the sailors stranded in the middle of the ocean without food because Shitfaced was trying to hide that Iran had destroyed the key resupply base, all of it. Whatever is going poorly anywhere in the US military, look and see which boss of that thing Shitfaced has recently fired for making him feel like an inferior man, or for being Black, or a woman, or gay.
Maybe hiring a Fox & Friends weekend host who was never good enough for a real day wasn’t the best idea for leading the most powerful military in the history of humanity. That’s the real fucking DEI hire here. Shame that the Republican senators who confirmed him weren’t able to see that at the time.
The Army issued a response to this story, of course, but we note that it’s a very non-denial denial. Very “Army guys are tough! Army guys are Ford Tough!” They said “global readiness is never compromised,” which sounds more like a slogan than a response to the charges in the Times article, not that Hegseth would know the difference.
Which is appropriate, we guess, when the secretary of Defense is little more than a slogan about “WARFIGHTERS!” hastily pasted on top of some cheap AI slop.
Read the whole thing, as they say on the internet.
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Before my retirement, I spent 34 years working for the DOD as an engineer conducting ammo malfunctions and new weapons systems acquisition (you know writing the requirements and putting all the specs together).
The last project I led was a doozy. It was a hardware acquisition with a $1B ceiling for multiple agencies - including foreign sales. Everybody was a stakeholder. Nobody knew how to move forward with this project. For over 7 years, everyone dicked around with possible acquisition strategies. Each strategy seemed to lead to a potential legal protest.
Finally, there was money in the budget to move forward and when they did - they dumped the hardware procurement on a Black, female lieutenant colonel who was in charge of procuring software*. It was the most disgusting thing I ever saw. I was asked if I could "help her" and I said yes because I had nothing to lose and I was pissed. (*Note: buying software isn't even remotely close to buying hardware. It's unconscionable to think so - especially without an acquisition strategy.)
In the end, the team pulled it off: within 6 months! We were 2 Black women, 2 Black men, 1 Asian woman, 1 Asian man, 4 white women (3 over the age of 50), and 2 white men (1 over the age of 60). We did this during COVID, primarily from home.
After this draining exercise just about all of us retired - including the Black, female lieutenant colonel. So basically, just take this little dot of a story and apply it across the USG - not just the DOD. I maintain that many faceless bureaucrats have been making things run because we were highly skilled, but undervalued and now we've been ousted.
Meanwhile WHY is John Ratcliffe visiting the Kremlin right now?
What marching orders is he getting from Putin?