Footnote: Fetishizing the southern Caribbean, which hasn’t weighed in the international balance of power since the demise of slave-powered sugar plantation - is a road to strategic ruin.

If the United States wishes to remain - or, after Trump, reclaim - its role as a global power, it needs to be especially wary of uncritical technological enthusiasm.

Many failures - especially the canonical France 1940 case - stem from over-learning the seemingly obvious but wrong lessons from history.

The NYT newsroom has been invaded by dilettantes.

They should have, and did to a certain degree, fight such provisions. And even R leadership, especially in the Senate, hate these mostly performative amendments. But on final passage, it’s and all-or-nothing proposition, and you have to eat the peas to get the ice cream.

Still, some shit and special interest provisions do get through, alas. The bill usually runs to thousands of pages. There are always extraneous bad things in an otherwise important piece of legislation.

The NDAA is also the closest thing to a must-pass authorization bill. For example, it sets military pay; no soldier would get a raise or cost-of-living adjustment otherwise. So it becomes a Xmas tree to hang all sorts of amendments on, very few of which survive in final passage.

Pretty sure about that. www.aei.org/op-eds/we-al...

Warfighter warfighter lethality warfighter.

Lawn darts for everyone!

While many of the “groups” are indeed anti-trans, it is misleading to lump in libertarians like Reason or trad conservative institutions like AEI, where I’ve worked for more than 20 years. These are diverse institutions. We have all the enemies we need without manufacturing new ones.

Au contraire, Pierre. Sprey, that is.

Raise your hand if you are old enough to remember the military reform caucus and the Project on Military Reform. Among their many deep insights, they argued that too many electronics made US systems unusable; the F-15 cost too much, the M1 tank was no good in the desert. Then came The Gulf War.

> winter 25-26: joint patrols
> summer 2026: advisor teams
> fall 2026: “as MPD stands up, we stand down”
> 2027: The Year Of The Police
> FY2028 Posture Statement: “we are turning a corner in the DC AOR”

There is no plan.

News to James II.

I suspect a lot of these guys - and maybe especially wannabes who did not qualify for SOF training of various sorts - are now ICE/CPB.

Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!

He was just quoting Locke.