Hegseth Blows His Load
You knew that replacing all the qualified people with those less endowed with talent in the country’s most important roles probably wasn’t going to go well. But in the back of your mind, you hoped someone like Pete Hegseth could keep it in his pants long enough for American history to limp toward a safer era. But no luck. He started a war he was convinced would be as easy as dropping some seamen from their fishing boats. But this nut proved harder to crack. War is harder than it looks. Hegseth whipped out the nation’s most powerful conventional weapons and sprayed ammo all over the Middle East. He and his boss announced climactic victory multiple times. But it turned out this was a case of premature obliteration. Emission accomplished. Mission, not so much. The discharge was dishonorable. And thus we find the world’s most powerful military in a state few of us imagined prior to this administration. We have a surplus of testosterone, but a shortage of weapons. The launchers are erect, but the defense secretary has them shooting blanks. The incompetence is, in a word, lethal.
+ As you might imagine, Hegseth’s boss is going ballistic. “President Donald Trump’s frustration over the Iran war boiled over at Camp David last week, where he demanded answers from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on why he had apparently been misled on extreme munitions shortages that now threaten to limit military options with Iran.”WaPo (Gift Article): Trump, Hegseth clashed at Camp David over Iran missile depletion concerns. “The president asserted overnight that the United States has ‘massive amounts’ of munitions, saying in a post on Truth Social that ‘large amounts are being manufactured and shipped to the U.S. as needed.’ The “‘leakers’ of these treasonous statements are being hunted down.” (“Massive.” “Large.” If I didn’t know better, I’d think someone was compensating for something.)
+ Let’s hope this is an exception when it comes to Trump’s proclamations and that it’s true that we have massive amounts of munitions, because the reported shortage isn’t just impacting Iran. It’s endangering Ukraine and emboldening our enemies around the world. The Atlantic (Gift Article): How the U.S. Squandered Its Strategic Advantage. “The United States is running out of missiles. After five months of war with Iran, stockpiles of long-range weapons are so low, current and former U.S. defense officials told us, that they don’t believe the U.S. has enough to combat a threat in Asia. The remaining supplies, depending on the munition, are as low as 20 percent of what the Pentagon would like to have in hand. And stores of sophisticated interceptor missiles, such as Patriots and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missiles, are too depleted to give or sell the weapons to Ukraine or effectively defend against Iran’s launch of ballistic missiles. Even when troops see Iranian missiles approaching, they are forced to decide in a matter of seconds whether to expend a limited number of interceptors or hope for the best.” (That’s what the rest of us have been doing since Trump and Hegseth took over.)
