"What did you do in the Iran War, Daddy?"

 

Luckily, nothing.

For the first time in my adult life I've been completely uninvolved in a U.S. war - or whatever this clusterfuck is - in the global hinterlands. It's given me an interesting perspective.

I didn't think it was possible to craft a geopolitical scheme that combined fairly blatant foreign economic and political opportunism (or, to be more honest, the combined Deadly Sins of Greed and Wrath) with domestic indifference (and a huge helping of cynicism and outright lying and deception) more 1) strategically misinformed, 2) tactically inept, and 3) operationally mismanaged than Dick n' Dubya's Excellent Iraq Adventure.

Yet, here we are.

But what feels even stranger to me is the way this is playing out here in the Land of the Big PX.

Which is to say; it isn't.

I thought I'd seen the ultimate in "American Empire" in the complete indifference of the U.S. public to the actual conduct of the wars in Southwest Asia during the Oughts and Teens. Outside of the occasional spasm of reaction to breaking news like the recent USS Abraham Lincoln stories, today the Great Unwashed can't even be bothered with the most performative sorts of yellow-ribbon-magnet "patriotism".

Even with gasoline prices reflecting the effect on petroleum production and processing and the multi-billion-dollar cost of this futile air and sea warring providing the usual Republican scolds the opportunity to discuss slashing public pension programs like Medicare and Social Security, there's been absolutely no public outcry.

I've seldom seen the U.S. military put on such a visible collision of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence since the Fredricksburg Campaign of December 1862.

The public response?

Zero. Zip. Nada. Not a goddamn thing. 

Not even when we're smacked in the face with shit like this:

That's...I honestly don't know what the hell to say about this beyond "WTF..!?"

Especially when you combine that with the move to dispatch the USS George Washington group to CENTCOM to replace the Lincoln. The geopolitical incoherence of this combined with Tubby's public backhand to the ROK is pretty stunning.

It removes INDOPACCOM's primary naval power projection piece, and has domino effects through the entire U.S. naval strategic planning setup. There's an internet commenter who blogs as "Empty Bag of Ducks" who put up a fairly thoughtful dive into the Washington/Lincoln move that's worth quoting in full:

 "I want to talk about the USS Abraham Lincoln (and her relief by the GW) in terms of strategic risk, readiness, and morale. For those curious about high level military decision making, you might be surprised by how much time (should) is spent discussing risk.  Let’s talk “risk to mission” first.

Risk to mission is pretty much what it sounds like.  In this case, what is the risk to INDOPACOM’s mission for the GW, the only carrier currently deployed in theater, to be transferred to CENTCOM.  As the only forward deployed nuke carrier, the GW clearly has a role in IPC’s mission.

Clearly, a question from Hegseth to the IPC Cdr should have been, can you conduct your mission without the GW?  Or, how do you categorize the risk, and what actions do you recommend to mitigate the risk? This is essence of strategic risk.  We never have everything we need, so we have to make risk informed decisions and decide if the risk is acceptable. Of course, the mitigation actions also have risks associated with them since there’s always a robbing Peter to pay Paul, but the goal is to move down the risk ladder.

Next is “risk to force” which really gets us into the realm of readiness.  By deploying the GW out of theater, what is the impact to the rest of the carrier force (and associated escorts)?  Is one of the mitigations to pull another carrier out of scheduled maintenance early, or defer a carrier? The Ford is an example of what happens when you extend a vessel well beyond a scheduled deployment cycle.  Every decision that you make that is outside the Navy’s force generation model has ramifications leading to decreased readiness.  At some point you have to buy that readiness back.

And to do that you’re likely going to have to accept increased risk to mission at some point by pulling carriers out of service for extended maintenance, repair and overhaul.  Then there’s the impacts to the readiness of the crews and air wings.  Over time, those degrade during a deployment...there’s simply the physical and mental weariness created by operating for months on end in a high stress, high optempo environment.  That’s why the COA of keeping the Lincoln on station was likely not viable.  You can break a unit, and you can break a force.

 Which is to what degree is Hegseth breaking the force (or at least the Navy)?  Resiliency is intrinsically tied to morale, so the experience of the Lincoln should make us wonder what is the morale across the force? hat’s an open question, and I don’t know the answer, but there are plenty of warning signs that should give a true leader, and not a martinet like Hegseth, real pause and cause them to put their senior enlisted leaders and IGs to work exploring.  Good leaders don’t fear the truth."

But, as we've discussed here, the current Secretary of DefenseWar is not that leader. 

MAJ Pushups is locked into a testosterone-fueled roid rage vision of combat-centric videogame-play "leadership" that's all about shooting things and blowing stuff up and not boring details of LOGPACs and supply chains. 

I've read people making fun of Sun Tzu's admonitions to the rulers of medieval China about things like "Remember, soldiers need food", but it's fairly clear that the China of Sun Tzu's time had more than it's share of Hegseths and, yes; they needed to be reminded of things like that. Hegseth doesn't have a Sun Tzu and the effects are showing up in the Gulf.

What he, and his mad king, appear to have managed so far is to:

Lock the United States into a difficult position in the Middle East. The Iranian hierarchy has little motivation to accommodate Trump's need for a "win" (and no reason to trust that he'll keep any sort of "terms" in an agreement short of a full-on capitulation "win"), the Gulf States have little reason to continue providing support for U.S. operations in hopes of some sort of escape from this trap, and the Israel of Netanyahu is always going to keep poisoning the water in hopes of accomplishing Bibi's Final Solution to the Palestine problem, meaning prolonging the fighting to keep the PM out of fucking jail.

Further toxify the relations between the U.S. and former allies in Europe and Asia. No one wants to get dragged into their wingman's stupid brawl, so neither the EU or any of the Asian democracies are or are likely to step up in a way that will appease Trump or aid in his war. Indeed; if I was Poland, or South Korea, or any other former U.S. geopolitical partner with a large, powerful, potentially aggressive neighbor such as the PRC or Russia (or North Korea, for that matter...) I'd be looking hard to make other arrangements for my protection that don't involve the U.S. Even when his death frees us from the Phantom Trump Menace the fact that the U.S. public (combined with it's electoral system) placed this clearly incompetent wannabe-tinpot-caudillo back on the throne means that We the People can't be trusted to do that again with some other gormless (or vile, stupid, and otherwise unfit) idiot.

Make it clear that the competing Powers (including the minor "nuisance powers" like the DPRK) can act with impunity up to some point (and that point seems very poorly defined, so the possibility of one or more crossing it into a hot war or something dangerously close is increasingly risky). 

 

The current Administration's behavior makes it clear to me, at least, that any other polity that looks to the U.S. for assistance needs to be prepared to offer up a massive bribe to have any hope, and the problem with even that is feeling assured that someone as avaricious as Trump will stay bought. 

Go a long way towards destroying the logistical, operational, and managerial competence that was the strength of the U.S. military system. Here at MilPub we've discussed to death the problem with U.S. geopolitical/military strategic thinking (or, more specifically, the lack of it). And I'm not going to argue that the U.S. government has done a terrific job since 1953 in picking it's fights, or figuring out how to accomplish it's geopolitical objectives without fighting.

But when it gets into a fight, the U.S. has - generally - managed the operational, theater-level management, and logistical sides of the conflicts fairly well. 

The Fourth Gulf War may well be the first time since the Spanish-American War that the U.S. has shown a Third World/thug-army (think Saddam's or similar sorts of warlord militaries) level of operational incompetence. 

(As an aside, friend of the Pub Sven asked in the comments on the last post whether this clear showing of the Trumpkins' wholly incompetent ass to "the troops" will shake the snuffies' allegiance to the MAGA Creed. My comment is that it hasn't on the civilian side - the rock-bottom level of support for Trump looks like it's settled above the Crazification Factor into about 30 to 35% - and GIs in general tend to be more "conservative" than the public at large. The GOP is the only "conservative" game in the U.S. political town, so the joes and mollies are likely to grumble but stick with Their Guy. 

Meaning that if Trump orders them to seize ballots in November? They almost certainly will.)

And let's not even go into the whole "catapults will be saved...by steam!" and moving carrier islands forward and Trump "battleships". The examples from the last Great Power whose Leader liked to fiddle-fuck around with warship and warplane and military vehicle design and construction are...not good ones.   

Where does this leave the "rest of us"?

I don't know.

Not in a good place, surely.

The problems that this Administration, and this war, have exposed, are multivariate and difficult to solve. The "guardrails" of unwritten Executive conduct, as stressed as they may have been by former "imperial" Presidencies and undeclared "wars", are visibly meaningless to the current regime. The primacy of the Congress, as supposedly written into black-letter Constitutional law, has proven to be utterly meaningless when the majority Party in the legislative branch cowers in terror of it's own Chief Executive. The notional competence of the Judiciary to reign in Executive or Congressional illegality has been shown to be illusionary when the highest court can be captured by the faction(s) committing those illegal acts (as well as the Executive responding to the slightest check with the Jacksonian "well, let him enforce it..." sneer).

I keep coming back to the conclusion that Bret Devereaux came to months ago; that while it's not possible for both parties to win a war, it is possible for both sides to "lose". Mutual destruction - in the short and long term - is very clearly not just probable but likely the longer the war drags on. Or one side exhausts itself defeating the other to the point where a third power can then defeat the "winner" of the original dispute.

Will we someday look back at the Fourth Gulf War as the United States' Syracuse Expedition, and Donald Trump as America's Alcibiades?

Surely, though...at least the last of the Alcmaeonidae had better hair.

Right? 

(cross-poseted to MilPub) 

A day ending in "y"...

So, after a year of magisterial thumb-sucking the U.S. Supreme Court issued it's ruling that confirms, in the same sense that your eyes "confirm" seeing a barn in broad daylight, that, no, the executive branch cannot - simply by calling some random things an "emergency" - grift the power of the purse explicitly assigned to the legislative branch by the foundational documents of the republic.

Tl:dr; fuck you, Fatso, your "big beautiful tariffs" are illegal.

I'll get back to this in a bit, but the most annoying-to-the-point-of-infuriating part of this is the whole "No, duh?" part.

Everyone with a functioning hindbrain knew this the moment the felonious fucker came storming off his gilded toilet to announce that We the People were going to do a big ol' round of McKinleynomics. I wrote a whole post about this idiocy back in April 2025 when the nitwit spammed everything with his first round of them, and then revisited the subject with my own Tariff Tale in November. 

(Oh, and at this point I should throw in the most recent chapter of my personal encounter with Dumbfuck Don's Tariff Turgidity, in which I received a reply to my disputation of duties in January, 2026. UPS sent me the following:

"I am the Post-Entry Researcher assigned to the attached dispute. Your shipment has been flagged for aluminum duties, and U.S. Customs requires the attached Section 232 form to be completed. If the items do not contain aluminum, please enter the commodity name in the description field and indicate “N/A” in all remaining fields."

Okay, now; keep this in mind. The time and expense of all of this nonsense, from the billing for, and initial payment of, the duties on the object (a replica sword manufactured in Japan), the additional 200% tariff demand, my dispute of the additional demand, and now UPS' dispute of my dispute, were being borne by U.S. citizens. Neither a nanosecond nor a penny of this stupidity was coming from Tozando, the Japanese retailer.

Per UPS the duties on aluminum imposed by the administration's both then- and now-clearly-illegal fuckery were, indeed, 200%. Which sent me back to the calculator and, after that, the laptop keyboard, to compose the following reply:

"Here's the Section 232 Form with the information from this item, based on the following:
The item is a replica sword.
The aluminum is contained only in the blade.
The weight of the blade is approximately 5kg
The amount of aluminum in the blade is 13.5% per the manufacturer's declaration.
Based on this the approximate weight of aluminum is approximately 0.675kg.
The price of aluminum in Japan is listed as $86/ton for Q4 2025.
Therefor the value of the aluminum in this item is ($86/907.185)*0.675, or about  $0.14."

At which point I came damn near to dropping three dimes in an envelope and mailing them to the Post-Entry Researcher's address in San Diego. I resisted, but, fuck, it was a damn near-run thing.

I'm debating whether to now go ahead, or turn around and demand my initial $54 back from Felony Fats' crew of gormless idiots).

Here's the larger, and more infuriating, point of my ranting about this. It's just one more goddamn thing that this crew of acephalic numbskulls does every fucking day. And...

What's

The 

Fucking

Value

Of 

ANY 

Of 

This 

Trumpy

Bullshit?

To any of us not 1) in the two-yacht income brackets, or 2) utterly baked in gibbering racist, sexist, xenophobic, Christopathic lunacy to the point where "fucking with those people" is "in my best interests" (i.e. nuttier than a Snickers bar). 

I mean, pick one. Any one. Of the fucking things these treasonous Nazi fucks have wrangled up over the past year and change, like these ridiculous (and now officially illegal) tariffs.

Deporting everything and everyone in sight? Drywallers, bean and pear pickers? Bodega grannies? School kids? (Oh, and ass-beating and murdering random passersby in the process)?

Sluicing tax cuts to fatcats?  

Pimping coal mining?

Deregulating everything in sight so the fatcats and coal miners and all the other GOP remoras get to wet their fucking beaks while the world overheats and the clean air and water disappear?

Trashing things like the vaccinations and the medical care and research and disease control that made 20th Century medical care the safest and healthiest in human history (for those who could afford it, anyway...)?

Doing bizarre, random, vicious and/or stupid acts of violence all over the place, from South and Central America to the Middle East as they destroy the post-1945 Western alliance systems?

And that's just the legal stuff. We haven't even turned towards the grotesquely Trumpy corruption that makes Warren Harding's crew look like rank amateurs and the policeman in Arrijan green with envy.

At least the OG Nazis had World War 1 and Versailles and occupation and hyperinflation and depression to blame. And actual, no-shit Commie Reds right next door.

Doesn't excuse the murderous fuckers, mind. But you can see how Joachim and Marta Mittagessenkasten could see voting for the sonsofbitches.

What's our excuse?

That transsexual illegal Haitian porch pirates are cooking up Labrador au gratin? 

Give me a fucking break.

That, as I've repeated over and over, is the truly infuriating piece of all this Trumpfuckery.

It's more than the destruction. It's more than all the toxic "isms" aimed at people just trying to live a life; poor people, brown people, immigrant people, non-binary people, gay and lesbian people, liberal people, urban people. It's more than the vile, repugnant, evil shit that these fucksticks love and plan and do every fucking day.

It's the obvious pointlessness for everyone - liberal or MAGAt - who's not living off daddy's trust fund or some sort of credit-default swap scam or who isn't, as noted above, so mentally baked as to be functionally an intellectual house plant.

None of this shit "makes America great".

If the average Republican wasn't in a Trump cult the GOP would have been tossed in the trash bin of history after 2008 the way they were for the two decades after their post-1929 plutocratic fellatio made it clear whose trouser snake they were Hoovering.

 (I see what I did there)

Here's the problem for the rest of us, though.

The mention of 2008 dredges up the ugly reality that, much as the non-insane factions of political power are an order of magnitude better than the MAGAtraitors, they're not that great for the rest of us.

It was as plain as a dog in the daylight that the wealthy, the financial rentier class, the finance bros and banksters, the government "regulators" and fiscal manipulators that were and are in their pockets, are largely in control of the government's hand on the economy. Fiscal policy. Tax policy. Employment and education and almost every other aspect of life in the United States is grotesquely tilted in the direction of the "rich, the well-born, and the able".

It's not "conspiracy theory" for those of us not born with a trust fund to suspect that even if every MAGAt was raptured tomorrow the chances of us and ours getting a better deal for medicine, for college, for solid, reliable, good, rewarding work followed by an honorable and comfortable retirement are...not exceptionally high.

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns, & Money has an excellent explanation of the problems with the notion that "we" just need to "take the country back from the MAGAts" by voting out Republicans and then joy and happiness will reign: 

"The approach required by this profounder corruption (the "financialization" or elite capture of the economic as a whole, of the sort that 2008 was a symptom, not a cause) is not recovery: returning to where we were means going back to a state of affairs that was manifestly unsustainable. To borrow from the architect of the Democratic Party’s most enduring platform, any recovery that simply restores things as they were will see us all right back where we are now before too much time has passed. Franklin Roosevelt argued in 1934 that the nation needed not merely recovery but “reform and reconstruction . . . much of our trouble today and in the past few years has been due to a lack of understanding of the elementary principles of justice and fairness by those in whom leadership and business and finance and public affairs was placed.” Reconstruction—Roosevelt was well aware of the word’s legacy after the Civil War—meant that leadership, and the conditions that kept them in place, “had to be corrected.” 

My only quibble is that it needed more ropes and lampposts, just as 2008 should have, but you take what you can. What we need, though, is a thorough cleansing of the Augean stable of corrupt elite wealth and privilege that has metastasized in the American system. A complete revision of the post-Reagan tax-cut-and-deregulation schemes that have returned the nation, economically and socially and politically, to 1929 if not 1899.

The failure of the First Reconstruction must be reversed, and the success of the Revolt of the Rich and the Rise of the Second Confederacy that has taken place over the past forty-six years, must be destroyed.

Can the United States post-2025 do that?

I'm not sure.

But, goddamn it, we have got to fight for it.

Because the alternative is to be ruled by these idiots.

 

Is there a doctor in the house? (Hint: No.)

 Here's National Public Radio:

Shall we do a bit of "fact-checking" as the Kidz Today call it? First stop, Wikipedia:

"Means graduated from Stanford University School of Medicine in 2014 but dropped out of her surgical residency four years later and subsequently chose to practice functional medicine, a form of alternative medicine. Her medical license has been inactive since 2024."

Meaning "no, not an actual "medical doctor". Failed the OJT that is a critical piece of becoming a board-certified MD. 

I'm a "certified engineering geologist" because I 1) have a degree (two, actually, baccalaureate and masters) in geology, 2) passed my boards (two, actually, the state RG and CEG examinations), AND 3) worked under a licensed CEG for a period of five years to learn the important practical aspects of my profession.

Part 3 is not "optional"; it's considered an essential part of my licensure just as internship and residency is essential to medical board certification. "Doctor" Means couldn't hack it and fucked off into some sort of woo-woo bullshit at that point, which would be like me doing my CEG training as a sales clerk at Ed's House of Gems.

Wait. "Woo-woo bullshit"?

Here's Wiki on "functional medicine":

"Functional medicine (FM) is a form of alternative medicine that encompasses many unproven and disproven methods and treatments.^[1][2][3] At its essence, it is a rebranding of complementary and alternative medicine,^[4] and as such is pseudoscientific,^[5] and has been described as a form of quackery"

So, yeah; woo-woo bullshit and "not an actual medical doctor".

So what does this not-an-actual-doctor-woo-woo-bullshit-artist "believe"?

Hang on; shit gets deep here. From the first Wiki piece:

"Means and her brother, Calley, co-wrote Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health in 2024.

(T)he book's central claim is that a single mechanism, which the authors call "Bad Energy", described as a common form of mitochondrial dysfunction caused by improper lifestyles...cause(s) disorders as diverse as depression, anxiety, acne, infertility, insomnia, heart disease, erectile dysfunction, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, as well as "most other conditions"...

The book asserts that the underlying causes of this dysfunction are rooted in unhealthy modern lifestyles: "too much sugar, too much stress, too much sitting, too much pollution, too many pills, too many pesticides, too many screens, too little sleep, and too little micronutrients. These trends-with trillions of dollars behind them-are causing epidemic levels of mitochondrial dysfunction and underpowered, sick, inflamed bodies."

The authors also assert that diseases such schizophrenia and depression are caused by..."leaky gut syndrome", and...claim that "researchers can identify a person with depression or schizophrenia just by analyzing their gut bacteria composition".

Oh, horseshit.

Also; fuck off, NPR. "medical degree from Stanford"? That's some real fucking sanewashing right there, you nimrods. Don't think that's gonna save you from Big Ballz and the DOGE Pounders.

"Bad Energy"? "Leaky Gut Syndrome"?

Why not "Demon Sperm"? Remember that weird Trump shit? Ohhellyeah. He's totally like that, and when you look at it that way his tapping this gimp for Surgeon General makes total sense. She's in the "wellness" grift just like he's on the "wealth" grift. Game recognize game.

This whacko has no more business being Surgeon General than I do claiming to be the fucking Dragon King of Bhutan.

There's a lot of "unhealthy modern lifestyles", yes.

None of them cause cancer. Or Parkinson's. Or acne. Or cure them.

Anymore than this freak can.

 

But she's a skinny sorta-blonde white chick that Trump would totally rage-fuck, so she's right in his ten-ring.

What a completely fucked-up country we live in.

 

I see no method at all, sir...

I'm reading speculation that Tubby's SECDEF has finally shat the security bed so thoroughly that Dear Leader will get shut of him.

I don't buy it. 

Hegseth is precisely the sort of posturing ignoramus that Fat Nixon loves; a preening, smug, self-satisfied blowhard in love with the sort of performative "toughness" that people who are not genuinely hard find fascinating.

If competence was an issue Fatso would never have considered the ninny, or pushed him through the confirmation process. It stands to reason, then, that INcompetence at his job isn't a deal-breaker. No, if the jamoke made the mistake of praising (or promoting) someone MAGA-icky like a woman, or a darkie, or a trans-person it'd be the end for him.

But fucking things up at work?

Why should Porco Arancia give a shit?

Those guys are all losers, right? NPCs, just there to do The Leader's bidding and die. So long as Hegseth keeps doing MAGA work there the actual professional staff will keep the lights on and the munitions stockpiled enough to blow up pesky foreigners and shoot domestic opponents, so, fine.

Nope. This goober isn't going anywhere.

Which is annoying as hell, not because of that kind of shit, but because of this kind of shit:

 

It's exactly this sort of 12-year-old's-concept-of-"military strength" that bugged me about the guy in the first place. I knew he was a MAGA creep - with Felon47 that's baked in - whose c.v. was tissue-thin. But it was his wanktastic obsession with the Manly Men Doing Manly Things With Manly Stuff Like Rifles that made me really question his value in this particular post.

Because anyone who runs the War Department needs to understand that United States armed forces don't win wars because their minds are sharper, bodies are stronger, and mindsets are more "mission-first".

They win because their bureaucracy is bigger, stronger, more capable, and their economy is more massive.

There are a fuck-ton of smart, strong, mission-focused people in Indonesia, Dakar, the PRC, and Russia.

There's nothing remotely as sophisticated, deep, wealthy, and multitask-capable as the U.S. Defense bureaucracy and the echelons-above-reality in the armed services themselves, or as immensely, terrifyingly monstrous as the U.S. economy.

So the SECDEF's job. Their ONLY job. Is to oversee, manage, direct, grow (and prune) that bureaucracy and harness that economy to manage the steel behind diplomacy in peace and win in war.

Whatever inside Hegseth's head that wasn't pickled with Fireball has the mind of a middle schooler addicted to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. He thinks like a shavetail, and a not-very-bright one at that. 

Someone like this goofball is going to be easy pickings for defense contractors, as well as completely incapable of managing an organization as diverse and complex as the armed components. 

To complete the analogy it's like making that middle schooler superintendent of schools; by June you'll be lucky if the entire fucking curriculum isn't recess and lunchtime. 

He's got nowhere near the ability to figure out how to manage the existing setup, let alone anticipate or respond to challenges from as-near-to-peer-foes-as-we-have, like Russia or the PRC.

Which seems troublesome to me. 

But what do I know? I don't have a problem with "bureaucracy" so obviously I know nothing about military readiness like our current SECDEF.

Maybe I can get an invitation to the next Signal chat and then I'll learn something... 

Update 4/26:

So, yes. It's funny, in a kind of "look at that fucking idiot!" way.

But this idiot is the boss of my Army brothers, and his boss refuses to can the idiot because owning the libs or some equally stupid shit like that.

I'm not sure if there's enough profanity in existence to explain how I think about that.

Fuck all these people.