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Notes -
For a somewhat lower stakes culture war topic:
A few weeks ago, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered that troops who need an exemption from shaving their facial hair for longer than a year should get kicked out of the service.
The culture war aspect here is twofold:
To the first, I have never been particularly impressed by the "warrior" posturing. Most proponents of it that I've met been underwhelming human beings (at best), but that might be forgivable if it cashed out in superior performance. However, if the performance of the Russian Army (or the IJA or...) is any indication, boring competence and logistical capability seems to heavily outweigh posturing about warrior spirit when it comes to combat performance. (These are not strictly in tension, but leaning into "warrior ethos" seems to go hand in hand with disdain for unglamorous organizational work).
It's also not really clear to me how beards compromise warrior ethos (especially since vets seem to love them), but I've also never been in the military, so it's possible there's a piece of experiential knowledge I am missing.
To the second: while I strongly doubt this is a scheme to purge the military of black soldiers, I struggle to think of a practical justification for this policy. The traditional rationale is for gas masks, but that doesn't apply to special operations forces (who are presumably so high speed and low drag that they outrun the poison gas) and beard-compatible respirators already exist.
The beard issue is silly ;what's more concerning is Hegseth saying that rules of engagement are for pussies. He advocated for trump to pardon men like eddie gallagher and the blackwater operators at nisour square. At least for now the military is limited to blowing up narco boats and standing around federal buildings.
I agree rules of engagement are for pussies. The United States should stop with this half ass shit. The US can destroy civilizations with the power of suns. If the US decides that you are deserving of its wrath there is no resistance, there is capitulation or everyone dies. Of course, the standard for such attention should be astronomically high.
The US has a lot of concerns where total annihilation would be wildly excessive and counterproductive. Obliterating Somalia because some enterprising fishermen decided to moonlight as pirates would be silly on top of appalling. It's a level of deranged collective punishment that would instantly turn the rest of the world against the US because nobody is sure when we're going to make an absurd demand at nukepoint. And it wouldn't even work, because the strategy immediately fails against any sort of decentralized opponent.
Doing nothing is comparatively reasonable, but still suboptimal, since having your shipping go unmolested is kind of a big deal.
Not super invested in this argument, but --
This only makes sense if you extend care to all humans equally as part of an internationalist humanitarian ethos. Many people don't, so they don't really care if 1 or 100 or 100,000 Somalians get killed in reaction to bothering us. If you ask them directly they would probably mumble something about how terrible it is because it's socially expected, but if you asked them to e.g. pay 5% higher taxes to Stop the Nuking of Somalians I doubt you would get much support.
Internationalist humanitarian true-believers are only (somewhat) common in U.S., Europe, and maybe Japan, countries so rich that luxury beliefs have become widespread. Most other nations' peoples still posses the tribal mindset I outlined above, and so to them the value of Somalian lives is approximately zero. Belgium and France might whine about it, but they increasingly irrelevant. Russia and China, who are relevant, would not care, though they would certainly cynically posture and feign outrage (just like the U.S. often does).
I don't really think maximum brutality is as beyond the pale as many (including myself) hope. There is a lot of room for American nastiness before Russia and China seem like more trustworthy and reliable allies, IMO.
Governments are so prone to lying, or at best motivated reasoning , about taxes that there's a certain base level of "if you tell us we need 5% taxes we won't believe you, no matter what it's for".
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No doubt Saudi Arabia would see this as ‘just what happens. FAFO’. But the Latin American elites do not differ in worldview(or complexion) from Anglosphere and Western European elites, and there’s a butload of unstable countries with serious crime problems that really don’t want to set that precedent.
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