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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.
How would raining widespread destruction on Somalia even help prevent piracy? They're not the Barbary pirates - the reason why the pirates are in Somalia is that the government of Somalia basically doesn't exist, and certainly can't prevent pirates operating out of its territory - not that they are insufficiently motivated to. The situation with Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda is similar - bin Laden moves to Afghanistan in 1996 before the Taliban has successfully consolidated power and sets up his first terrorist training camp in Jalalabad where Taliban control was shaky. The way the Taliban behaves after 9-11 certainly looks like a group that had become dependent on Al-Qaeda to maintain control of Afghanistan, and so couldn't kick them out even if they wanted to.
The reason why the US and allies took up nation-building in the noughties was that the problems we were facing at the time originated in failed states, not rogue states.
If there are no Somalis and/or no Somali boats, there can be no Somali pirates.
Yes, and the inherent flaw in this was looking at the "failed states" as states that failed their people, as opposed to states which gave their people what they wanted and/or deserved. Somalia isn't failing Somalis, the Somalis are just failing all over. The Afghan government that lost the country to the Taliban in like 14 hours didn't fail Afghans, it gave them the government they wanted.
The concept of a failed state had nothing to do with failing its people, even in the minds of the most high-minded Blairites - nobody saw North Korea as a failed state. A failed state was a state that was so dysfunctional that it couldn't prevent its territory being used to attack other states, like Somalia with pirates, OG Taliban-ruled Afghanistan with Al-Qaeda, or Syria with ISIS.
But Somalia's government isn't incapable of stopping pirates because theoretically. It doesn't care to because the people don't care to. And/or there aren't enough functional people in somalia to erect a state with that sort of state capacity.
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