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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.
Very few Somalis would share this sentiment if the shoe was on the other foot, which is the problem with modern ROE. They work when its Americans fighting Germans or the English. They fail wherever the enemy lacks sufficient honor.
Why? The shoe isn't on the other foot, will not be on the other foot in our lifetimes (if ever), and if somehow the shoe did switch feet it would involve a Somalia so transformed that any comparison to present Somalia would be useless. "What would the Somalians do in this situation?" is irrelevant to what we should do in the situation we are dealing with. Punishing people for the infractions of their hypothetical counterparts is counterproductive to your actual goals.
I'm not sure what this means. The US' last war against Germany was fought under very different circumstances, with different goals, and with different ROE than the GWOT.
Disagree. It is highly relevant when making moral calculations, which is part of what ROEs are supposed to do. If you are fighting someone who will knife you and your children when you're asleep it is very different than if you are fighting someone who would adopt your children and take good care of them if you die during your honorable duel.
Asserted not only without evidence, but in contravention of mountains of evidence from past historical conflicts.
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