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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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My estimate is that if you managed to magically kill the top 1000 US military officials, the effectiveness of the US forces would perhaps drop by a few percents

My estimate is that the effectiveness would quadruple. The US has a very top-heavy system, shitloads of officers, most of which have fake jobs and don't do anything but create paperwork for other officers. We have enough officers that every four-man team in the entire military could be commanded by one. All but a few (like, double digits few) are impediments to military readiness and effectiveness.

If you managed to magically kill the entire officer corps, the US military would be vastly more effective, perhaps overly so. The officers aren't there to make the military more effective, they're there to make sure it isn't effective against the state.

See also: Rickover's suggestion to improve the DoD's efficiency by taking one third, have them do nothing but write long form letters back and forth to a second third, and let the final third actually do the job of running the military.

X. At a certain point you do need people in charge of the whole thing, and I’m guessing that although there probably exist sergeants who could do it, there isn’t a system to immediately move those specific NCO’s into position, and this is likely true even if the median officer does nothing except require the rank and file to fill out extra paperwork indicating they’re up to date on cultural sensitivity training.