Heh.

Fred nails me, I guess. This is what Owen has been trying to get across: War is too important to be left to the likes of me.

GI Joe is the go-to guy.

Further, and I want to say this carefully, officers often are not quite adults. They can be (and usually are) smart, competent, dedicated, and physically brave, and some are exceedingly hard men. But there is a simple-mindedness about them, an aversion to the handmaidens of introspection, a certain boyishness as in kids playing soldier. A lot of make-believe goes into an officer’s world. Enlisted men, grown up, see things as they are. Officers are issued a world by the command and then live in it.

Note the heavy emphasis of the military, meaning the officer corps, on ritual and pageantry. It is adult kid-stuff. Three thousand men building a skyscraper just show up, do their jobs, and go home. The military wants its men standing in squares, precisely at attention, thumbs along the seams, with brass perfectly polished. It wants stirring music, snappy salutes, and the haunting tones of taps, “Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full, sir.” This is justified as necessary for discipline. It isn’t. A gunny sergeant has no difficulty maintaining his authority without the hoop-la

Officers remind me of armed Moonies. There is the same earnestness, the same deliberate optimism-by-policy. Things are going well because doctrine says they are. An officer is as ideologically upbeat as Reader’s Digest, and as unreflective. This is the why they don’t learn, why the US is again flailing about, trying to fight hornets with elephant guns. “Yessir, can do, sir.” Well, sometimes, and sometimes not. It is not arrogance, more like a belief in gravitation.

Read the rest, here.

Of course, Fred doesn't know that many officers, methinks. Not well. There is some superficial truth here. And a lot of "I'm just sooo much smarter than you," too.

Of course, I'm doubly-damned. I'm a stupid officer, and one who wasn't successful by most lights. So I'm a real piece of fluff.

Hmmm. One thing, Fred, and your buddy Jim (not to be confused with my buddy Jim) - Vietnam was fought with a draftee Army, not a professional one. It's an important difference many of your age cohort can't quite wrap their minds around. Re-enlistment rates are still holding - which is not a support for your thesis, really.

Sure, there are always malcontents. And many of them have good reason to be. That doesn't mean they're ready to start refusing orders or lobbing grenades into tents.

Okay. Check still comes at the end of the month.

H/t, Jim C, who was marginally more successful than I... ;^)