Lord Ratner

All completely plausible. I will only quibble on one point, that politicians and generals are good at covering their ass. They are very good at not giving answers. But when it comes to what they do (when they think they are) behind closed doors, there I have to disagree with you. McChrystal (sp?), Patraeus, Mark Sanford, Larry Craig. Obama's "after the election" message to Putin, John Edwards... Do I need to go on? They absolutely, positively, always cover their ass. But that doesn't mean that they're always smart enough to know when they should. And honestly, at this point I think it's abundantly clear that there is a negative correlation between intelligence, competence, and vision, vs the drive to achieve the highest levels of political power.

Why would they wing someone right before administratively separating them? I'd be surprised.

Nearly everybody on this forum has used the words "if true" or some derivation, and no one said we should bypass his right to a fair trial. Your arguments don't require strawmen to be true. Further, there's no requirement to wait until the trial has been conducted to speculate, since none of us are going to be investigating him. Especially with politics. Politicians (and Milley is probably more of a politician than he is a soldier at this point) act very predictably. One thing they almost never do is allow a false story to float without an outright denial. Think Hunter Biden and his laptop. As I've said repeatedly, I don't trust Woodward as far as I can throw him. However if the journalist is famous as Bob Woodward makes a claim about a politician, and the politician doesn't issue a denial, it's time to pay close attention. There are also some fairly high profile rebukes coming out that I don't believe would occur without some behind the scenes validating. Christopher Miller is one such example. Honestly looking at Milley, a cartoon character of what a military General should be, I'm not at all surprised that he did it, and had the chutzpa to brag about it to a journalist. It seems like a lot of these "dissidents" from the conservative wing get a taste of media adulation for some "heroic" act against the great orange vulgarian and they quickly forget that they are still enemies to the left and will not be forgiven for their unacceptable wrong-think.

Remember that time Flynn communicated with a Russian government official as part of his upcoming duties and it spawned a 3 year investigation into Russian control of the executive branch? That said, I'm skeptical of anything Woodward says these days, but if anything even remotely approximating "I'll tell you if we are going to attack" was said, an example should be made. Prison would suffice.

Woodward jumped the shark a while ago. He'll bite on a juicy story from anyone if it'll give him a shadow of the high he got from Watergate.

Found General Chang

Actually there is missing data there. I'm going to use extremes to make the point, but you'll almost certainly find that it applies here. Those numbers don't show the cohorts of the overall population and vaccine status. So, simplified, 1500 deaths, 1000 vaccinated and 500 unvaccinated. But that's out of a population of 15000, where 1500 are unvaccinated and 13500 are vaccinated. 500/1500 = 33% mortality amongst the unvaccinated, 1000/13500 = 7% mortality amongst the vaccinated. And the follow-up to that would be that if the entire cohort were unvaccinated, you would have 5,000 deaths instead of 1500. Again, the percentages are simplified and exaggerated, but I believe you will find they apply to the data set.

Your analysis is about as small as the people you must be friends with. I've noticed no correlation between shit bags and vaccine status. What I have noticed on both sides are people that you would never guess of having a position suddenly having one. It's also hilarious hearing how many people are suddenly advanced medical professionals with nuanced perspective on the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Face it, you're pro vaccine because you were told to be. Just like me. Just like how you, I, and everyone else out there believes 95% of what we know because that's what we were told. It's a positive trait of the species to be able to transfer knowledge, but now that the knowledge transfer industry has accelerated to a pace we are completely unprepared for (thanks to internet and social media specifically), so all of the original gateways of information that for the most part kept everybody believing largely the same things (which were largely correct) are now defunct. And the gasoline poured on this fire were the bureaucrats and politicians. They haven't changed, they have always lied to influence our behavior, but now their lies are exposed in a way they have never experienced. And regardless of what side you're on, people respond to lies in a pretty predictable way. They stop trusting you. Sure, if the lie was something that you were already positioned to believe, then you are more inclined to let the lie slide. Think Republicans with Trump and liberals with Fauci. But the distrust spreads. So yeah, fall victim to all the human nature quirks and play directly into the hands of the politicians who are only interested in our money and our votes. If you disagree with me you're a shitbag, if you agree with me you're the enlightened. That should fix things. Disclaimer: I am fully and voluntarily vaccinated with the mRNA vaccine.

No, I'm mad because all reporting/interviews/personal interactions indicated that they have always been, and remain completely opposed to the withdrawal. So a more accurate and less patronizing rephrasing of your assessment would be: I'm mad that more generals didn't resign in protest because they didn't like the political decision that the elected president made. You know, the decision that has been the biggest foreign policy embarrassment in modern American history? That got more Americans killed in one day than in the past several years combined. Or are you aware of any flag officers who were advocating for a complete pull out?

This might be the worst post I've ever read here, only because of how insidiously dangerous this mindset is. Yeah, war is messy. But this war wasn't messy for over 2 years, and really it wasn't messy for quite a bit longer than that. This war was very very clean, to the point where you can't even really call it a war anymore. But it suddenly became very messy because of the idiotic desires of the president (and his predecessor) and the bureaucracy that enabled them to fuck this up. Under Trump a couple high-profile generals resigned because of this idiotic desire to return to isolationism. Where were the resignations under Biden? It is inconceivable that the military hierarchy did not know this was going to happen. Anyone who has been deployed there over the last two decades knew that this would happen if we left, so where are the high-profile resignations? Where are the generals falling on their swords in an attempt to prevent bloodshed? Instead we get an airstrike as a consolation prize, a wishful distraction by an administration that is fucked up so royally even an incredibly accommodating press can't help but push back on their lies. If you don't lose your job over a fuck up like this, then you are essentially advocating for a system that has no accountability.

Did the advertising on these forms just get a whole lot worse for anybody else? It seems like I have to click through five pop ups and banners now just to navigate to the next topic. I'm not sure I can browse the forums much longer like this, but I wanted to make sure it's not just my phone

This is the single biggest complication with liberal ideology (I'm not saying you are necessarily a liberal). Smart people who have a track record of making responsible choices that lead to successful outcomes look at the people around them, many of whom are in fact not nearly as smart, and despair the bad choices they make that often lead to worse outcomes. It eventually leads (with the best intentions) to restricting, discouraging, or outright banning the behavior. And without fail, the people who were meant to be helped by the ban find new and creative ways to self-destruct. That's just how humans are. For many, many people they only learn successful habits through failure. Even very smart, otherwise rational people. Taking away that failure opportunity only send them in another destructive direction, except now they are exacerbated by the rage of having some well-meaning prick tell them what the "must" do. There is a positive correlation between personal freedoms and national power and wealth. Paradoxically, short term complications lead to long term success.

Vaccines historically do not have effects that manifest more than 12 months after getting the shot. Mostly it's a matter of weeks. However identifying the pattern takes much longer, and constructing and executing the proper studies to validate the potential effects takes even longer. Years in fact. 10 years also ensures the bulk of the elected officials, appointees, and bureaucrats involved "at ground zero" are cycled out, allowing for a more dispassionate analysis of the necessity for a mandate.

At least 10 years of real-world data using voluntarily vaccinated as the sample. Then mandates must be proportional to the threat, so only mandates where they make sense. Hospitals and schools. Children when the disease actually threatens children. The severity of the disease is the true regulator of vaccination rates. If COVID-19 was killing people like SARS or MERS(10-30%), people would line up for the vaccine, just like they did in Feb/March when it came out and all the fat/old people who were most at risk went and got it. After 10 years of studying the vaccine effects, then you can make it mandatory as well as punish people on their insurance premiums if they won't get it. Disclaimer, I'm voluntarily vaccinated, so your stupid and hysterical arguments are not just ridiculous-sounding to the anti-vax crowd.

Yeah, I think we're just split on semantics. How you execute the vision is up to you, but if your execution doesn't live up to the executive vision, buhbye. There's no time to spend months or years trying to retrain a bunch of generals or colonels to think how you need them to think to execute the vision. That's where Welsh failed. This is one of the ongoing problems with the concept of time and milestone-based promotions. I think that's semi-functional up to lieutenant colonel. But colonels and generals should be promoted based off the job they have, not the jobs they had. That would free up higher level commanders to select exactly who they already know to be the right people for the right job (vision), then promote them to the required rank. Historically this happens anyway during wartime with field promotions. When the stakes actually matter, which they have not for many many years, the ridiculous system of broadening and education to produce leaders is cast aside.

I used to make this point about autism. Even if you believe that vaccines cause autism (which I don't), the number of autistic kids is way lower than the number of kids killed/ruined by measles, polio, etc. So isn't autism better?

Shack. I'm vaccinated, but I'm completely against the mandatory programs because once your leaders demonstrate they are perfectly comfortable lying to you, trusting them is foolish. We still don't have hard numbers for ending lockdowns and mask mandates after 20 MONTHS! Really? You have to be intentionally blind to think there's a plan. There isn't. Just like the military, the people who desire and achieve leadership positions in government bureaucracies are largely incapable of operating in an unfamiliar situation. Our system prioritizes individual liberty because the incompetence of leaders in large organizations is an old and persistent phenomenon. Just look at the totality of the pandemic, not just the mandates you like or the actions that made sense, but the whole timeline, and tell me you want more government control over our lives. No thanks.

Exactly that mentality is why military leadership is so bad. What you described is a lack of accountability to the vision. It comes from the mindset in the military that the right professional education and career "broadening" will produce good leaders, when in fact, for a lot of people who make it to Sq/CC and above, they just don't have what it takes. You can't run a huge organization without delegating, and delegating is an ongoing process. Keep cycling through people until you find the right one. But in the military we instead we cycle leaders out every two years regardless and "let [them] loose to figure it out" for that short amount of time. The results speak for themselves. Figuring out how to solve a SQ/GP/WG specific problem as the leader of that organization is great. Figuring out your own interpretation of the executive vision is not. Comply or step aside. An example: https://www.507arw.afrc.af.mil/About-Us/Biographies/Display/Article/2409725/colonel-michael-b-parks/ This guy got one of the worst climate assessment surveys in the AF when he was SQ/CC. 44 pages of comments of I remember correctly, almost entirely negative. I've never seen such a united disdain for a commander from the whole squadron, even the ones he was pushing for future command. Yet there he is... Rewarded. There are plenty of examples.

I never once saw a general who held his subordinate generals accountable to their leadership vision. I'm not sure you could find a more revered leader than Welsh as CSAF, yet for all his talk of "if it doesn't make sense, we don't do it," he never fired a general or O-6 who ignored that philosophy within their own command. And there were plenty to make examples of. It might be the single greatest leadership failing of the AF. Wing commanders and above are only held accountable if they do something illegal or something that generated publicity.

For the same reason the vaccinated are being told to wear masks. The leadership knows they can't easily discriminate between vaccinated and unvaccinated, so unvaccinated people will be able to get by not wearing masks. This is intolerable to the power hungry, so everyone wears masks. They are, however, smart enough to realize that if the vaccinated were told the truth, that they were forced to wear masks because the unvaccinated were breaking the rules, they would never go along with it. So instead we're subjected to wild exaggerations and logical fallacies about disease transmission amongst the vaccinated. It always shuffles back to the same unanswered question. If the vaccinated are largely protected from the disease, and everybody has had a chance to be vaccinated, and the unvaccinated are not asking anybody to do anything to protect them, why exactly are masks still mandatory? And overloading the hospitals is no longer a relevant argument. It's been 18 months and trillions of dollars spent. If the hospitals haven't been built out to handle this disease, they never will be.

Shack. You've hit precisely on why I'm so opposed to what .gov has been doing for a year and a half now. If this was really about "the science" we'd be doing things a lot differently. This is a battle between political ideologies. Primarily, the modern leftist movement (more collectivist than the classically liberal left of the 1900's) views this as an opportunity to prove that collective compliance will yield superior outcomes over decentralization and individualism. Thus the outage over republican states choosing different prevention strategies despite no correlation between lockdown policies and long term spread. Since they were unable to secure national uniformity on masking and lockdown policy, vaccination is the final opportunity to "pull together" and validate the merit of centralized (federal) control. If infection-based immunity is a part of the solution, then the eventual goal (herd immunity "beating" the disease) will have been obtained through means not directly guided by the government. For the political left, COVID was an opportunity to finally justify the abolishment of states' rights, a long held goal of progressives.

Which in no way takes away from the success of the vaccine. But it sure does remove legitimacy from the very aggressive push for mandatory vaccination in a wide range of career fields (like airline pilot and military). And now we are already talking about booster shots, after less than a year. I suspect many will want those to be mandatory as well. I'm a big science advocate, but I've never heard of a single medical research subject being mastered to the point of directing legally compelled participation in less than a year. There's no such thing as experts on new diseases, and COVID 19 is still very new. It's not a coincidence that overwhelmingly the "pro-vax" people are democrats and the "anti-vax" people are republican. Like everything else in the modern world of social media and 24-hour news, it's about what team you're on, not facts.

I'm not sure this sounds the same in your head as it does to the rest of us. I'm vaccinated and you sound like a twat.

For sure. It's not about what the left (institution, not voters) will go after as racist (literally anything), it's about what will capture the attention of the moderate voters.

That's kind of my point. Harris was picked because they recognize that presidential candidates need something that catches attention. In their opinion, her being a woman and black was the hook. I don't think Biden won so much as Trump lost, because Biden doesn't have any hook at all. Trump was his own worst enemy and he paid the price. Don't get me wrong, I like DeSantis a lot. He's been a good leader, he's able to coherently explain his position, and he's not afraid to call out media bias. But those are red meat for the base. If you want to pull Independence and Democrats, you need something the differentiates. DeSantis is just another white guy with ideas on how to run the country. He has nothing visual to distinguish him from the competition and attract the shallow voters. I also agree that Dan Crenshaw is not ready to run for president, which is why I'd love to see him as Haley's running mate. 8 years in Washington will make him a national figure, give him all of the experience he needs, and we would actually have a relevant and intelligent vice president. I really liked Mike pence, but he's just another boring white guy. For better or worse, we need to push back on the leftist narrative that conservatism is a white only event. It's difficult to do that without interesting figures.