I rarely read anything that I agree with 100%. This is one of those times.
Infuriating to hear *billions* and critical strategic oil/military materials to go here, there, everywhere, as if America is some magic fairy with no bottom to the bucket.
We need more statesmen like JD Vance who are veterans and know the harsh realities of war. Our establishments Magical thinking on printing money, men, and weapons out of thin air is ending. Only in América can someone go from hillbilly poverty to Yale Law to the Senate and perhaps the Oval Office one day.
"Helping to secure the Gaza Strip, Vance writes, is more achievable and more important for American interests than helping to recover Ukrainian territory, which would require decades of sustained conflict at the current pace."
Yes.
"It’s very hard to look in the mirror and say America is constrained in part because I made mistakes. It’s much easier to pretend that those constraints don’t exist and hope that reality never hits you in the face.” "
They've been too busy pretending that the constraints of the sex binary do not exist - even as US military policy.
People need to understand where we are, not where we wish we were or where we were 25 yrs ago.
I served in the army from 1986 til 1991 when I was released after Desert Storm. I know what a large, well trained, well equipped, fully supplied army looks like.
I have spent the last 20 yrs working with DoD across the branches. I have watched the procurement cycles and watched the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have seen the war on terror and I have seen how the military has changed. None of it is for the better. None of it. Too many in the officer corp and even the enlisted are just there for the paycheck and potential opportunities to go work for a defense contractor when they get out. Certainly not all, but a very large portion of the members in our service are like that. Our defense contractors are greedier even than they were then and their influence on Capital Hill is larger. The mergers, the acquisitions, the going public, all of it has undermined what once was an industry populated by people who really gave a damn even while trying to skim a little extra. Not today. The companies are now no better than any run by a hedge fund. VC money showed up and treated these companies like they made consumer electronics. No real concern for national security. Even Boeing and Lockheed have gone to crap.
Congress and the presidents have wasted the lives of so many troops, burned out so many more with multiple deployments that nobody wants to stay in and nobody wants to enlist unless they are desperate. To get to the level of manpower we need we are going to have to institute a draft. But GenZ is such a emotional and physical wreck that even under a draft we would probably have to reject 2/3 of them. Never mind they all want seem to want to support our enemies and undermine our own country. UGH!!
We allowed the government and Wall Street to de-industrialize the country. We shipped our manufacturing ability and the skills to do it to our enemies for cheap labor. In the process, we undermined wages here, wages that were would have been taxed, taxes that were not paid (also undermining the Social Security Trust Fund) while the government ran up eye watering debts. All while Wall Street financialized the entire economy, funded useless companies like Face Book, Instagram, and Apple, that produce NOTHING that actually has value in the material world.
Like it or not, the US has been hollowed out, physically, financially, culturally and there is nothing left but a facade of what we were before the Boomers took over the government and the economy. It started with Clinton, got really going under Bush Jr, accelerated under Obama, slowed a little under Trump and has accelerated again under Biden.
Sorry folks. We are not defenseless, but we are NOT what we were 30 yrs ago. We allowed that to be pissed away and it is going to take decades to recover assuming we ever are able to recover. For God's sake we are not even capable of securing out borders.
My favorite thing DC experts do is trash JD Vance and friends as dangerous fools when literally none of their ideas have been tried. Meanwhile the foreign policy DC expert class has spent $5 trillion dollars losing 19 consecutive wars. Morons.
I work in blown film manufacturing. My suppliers, competitors and customers all have trouble finding reliable equipment operators.
Operating film lines is not rocket science but requires attention and some thinking. It’s a job with responsibility, but if you’re good, it requires only intermittent physical labor.
It seems to me no one wants this type of job. Folks want to be on their phone and be told what button to press.
I worry we can’t ramp up the manufacturing talked about here even if we wanted to.
What did these guys think was going to happen when we offshored our entire heavy industry to other places?
It would take vision and guts to change course and years to make it happen. We have neither the caliber of politicians to push this or a population than can move itself off social media and Netflix enough to realize the danger.
Good luck, the next war is going to be a wakeup call and a funeral of epic proportions.
We need a ceasefire and treaty in Ukraine. They have this ridiculous idea they can get all of their territory back from Russia but really should be content with getting their boarders back to a pre-war state. It's gone on way too long and the amount of money we are wasting there is absurd. I don't think every dollar we've spent there has been a waste, but they were a corrupt nation prior to the war and are likely more so now.
I can't believe Biden has made me a Trump voter...thanks Obama!
Looking to JD Vance for insight is going to make some people’s head explode regardless of what the insights are.
One can go into a battle of folksy sayings. However, one that popped into my head was ‘keep your powder dry’. We’ve taken our powder out and scattered it everywhere.
Was this entire plan formulated once they saw that the corrupt Biden Crime family would be in charge? Did they see Biden would diminish our strategic oil reserves, allow all these illegals into our country and let this DEI flourish? Let the leftist destroy our universities? Promote transgenders, corrupt our FBI, CIA and DOJ? Look at all the antisemitism leftist protest and marches? 140 elected democrats would not sign a pledge to support Israel? All the MSM propaganda? I could go on and on? Would this have happen under Orange man? I don’t think so but they were after him from the start. This country is falling apart because of all the lies the democrats and leftist tell us. I pray we come out ahead but my bets aren’t very good.
Are the enemies of the US who aren't actively in a war(i.e. China and Iran at the moment) actively ripping through munitions through aiding their allies as quickly as the US is? I lean isolationist, but it would make me feel a little better that at least everyone is depleting their weaponry instead of just us.
The difference between Ukraine and Israel, first and foremost, is that the latter has nuclear weapons (very probably) and the former does not, while the Ukraine's adversary has the world's largest nuclear arsenal. That makes the calculus for aiding these two nations VERY different.
The author accepts a flawed premise from Republican isolationist politicians, which has nothing to do with foreign policy but with the understandable political desire to prove the Biden Administration wrong in all respects at all costs. Yes, in a true shortage case some weapons like artillery shells and Patriot missiles would rather go to Israel than to Ukraine - Taiwan needs mostly different weapons such as land to sea missiles.
And yes, giving fewer artillery shells to Ukraine might very well mean that recovering territory conquered by Russia might have to wait - maybe a very long time. However, unlike what J.D. Vance claims, Ukraine needs money, even with fewer weapons, to keep its economy functioning and to avoid a very different and catastrophic outcome - a real Russian victory. If the isolationist crowd would be able to add one plus one plus one, they would realize that if the “Axis of Evil” scores at least one full victory out of three - when the other two wars haven’t even fully started - that puts them in a dominating position, where the US might see some of its allies looking for the exits.
Biden and company yammer on about climate change being the biggest existential threat to the US. In fact there are several more immediate threats that the administration's war on fossil fuel energy is exacerbating. If we maximized drilling and fracking and otherwise ended the pursuit of a green new deal, we would be better able to address the immediate serious threats we face.
I rarely read anything that I agree with 100%. This is one of those times.
Infuriating to hear *billions* and critical strategic oil/military materials to go here, there, everywhere, as if America is some magic fairy with no bottom to the bucket.
We need more statesmen like JD Vance who are veterans and know the harsh realities of war. Our establishments Magical thinking on printing money, men, and weapons out of thin air is ending. Only in América can someone go from hillbilly poverty to Yale Law to the Senate and perhaps the Oval Office one day.
"Helping to secure the Gaza Strip, Vance writes, is more achievable and more important for American interests than helping to recover Ukrainian territory, which would require decades of sustained conflict at the current pace."
Yes.
"It’s very hard to look in the mirror and say America is constrained in part because I made mistakes. It’s much easier to pretend that those constraints don’t exist and hope that reality never hits you in the face.” "
They've been too busy pretending that the constraints of the sex binary do not exist - even as US military policy.
People need to understand where we are, not where we wish we were or where we were 25 yrs ago.
I served in the army from 1986 til 1991 when I was released after Desert Storm. I know what a large, well trained, well equipped, fully supplied army looks like.
I have spent the last 20 yrs working with DoD across the branches. I have watched the procurement cycles and watched the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have seen the war on terror and I have seen how the military has changed. None of it is for the better. None of it. Too many in the officer corp and even the enlisted are just there for the paycheck and potential opportunities to go work for a defense contractor when they get out. Certainly not all, but a very large portion of the members in our service are like that. Our defense contractors are greedier even than they were then and their influence on Capital Hill is larger. The mergers, the acquisitions, the going public, all of it has undermined what once was an industry populated by people who really gave a damn even while trying to skim a little extra. Not today. The companies are now no better than any run by a hedge fund. VC money showed up and treated these companies like they made consumer electronics. No real concern for national security. Even Boeing and Lockheed have gone to crap.
Congress and the presidents have wasted the lives of so many troops, burned out so many more with multiple deployments that nobody wants to stay in and nobody wants to enlist unless they are desperate. To get to the level of manpower we need we are going to have to institute a draft. But GenZ is such a emotional and physical wreck that even under a draft we would probably have to reject 2/3 of them. Never mind they all want seem to want to support our enemies and undermine our own country. UGH!!
We allowed the government and Wall Street to de-industrialize the country. We shipped our manufacturing ability and the skills to do it to our enemies for cheap labor. In the process, we undermined wages here, wages that were would have been taxed, taxes that were not paid (also undermining the Social Security Trust Fund) while the government ran up eye watering debts. All while Wall Street financialized the entire economy, funded useless companies like Face Book, Instagram, and Apple, that produce NOTHING that actually has value in the material world.
Like it or not, the US has been hollowed out, physically, financially, culturally and there is nothing left but a facade of what we were before the Boomers took over the government and the economy. It started with Clinton, got really going under Bush Jr, accelerated under Obama, slowed a little under Trump and has accelerated again under Biden.
Sorry folks. We are not defenseless, but we are NOT what we were 30 yrs ago. We allowed that to be pissed away and it is going to take decades to recover assuming we ever are able to recover. For God's sake we are not even capable of securing out borders.
My favorite thing DC experts do is trash JD Vance and friends as dangerous fools when literally none of their ideas have been tried. Meanwhile the foreign policy DC expert class has spent $5 trillion dollars losing 19 consecutive wars. Morons.
I work in blown film manufacturing. My suppliers, competitors and customers all have trouble finding reliable equipment operators.
Operating film lines is not rocket science but requires attention and some thinking. It’s a job with responsibility, but if you’re good, it requires only intermittent physical labor.
It seems to me no one wants this type of job. Folks want to be on their phone and be told what button to press.
I worry we can’t ramp up the manufacturing talked about here even if we wanted to.
What did these guys think was going to happen when we offshored our entire heavy industry to other places?
It would take vision and guts to change course and years to make it happen. We have neither the caliber of politicians to push this or a population than can move itself off social media and Netflix enough to realize the danger.
Good luck, the next war is going to be a wakeup call and a funeral of epic proportions.
We need a ceasefire and treaty in Ukraine. They have this ridiculous idea they can get all of their territory back from Russia but really should be content with getting their boarders back to a pre-war state. It's gone on way too long and the amount of money we are wasting there is absurd. I don't think every dollar we've spent there has been a waste, but they were a corrupt nation prior to the war and are likely more so now.
I can't believe Biden has made me a Trump voter...thanks Obama!
This information certainly accentuates the absolute debacle of the US Afghanistan withdraw and the arsenal left behind.
As a Jew with friends and family in Israel, I've been naturally scares for 3 weeks. This only makes me more scared.
Looking to JD Vance for insight is going to make some people’s head explode regardless of what the insights are.
One can go into a battle of folksy sayings. However, one that popped into my head was ‘keep your powder dry’. We’ve taken our powder out and scattered it everywhere.
Was this entire plan formulated once they saw that the corrupt Biden Crime family would be in charge? Did they see Biden would diminish our strategic oil reserves, allow all these illegals into our country and let this DEI flourish? Let the leftist destroy our universities? Promote transgenders, corrupt our FBI, CIA and DOJ? Look at all the antisemitism leftist protest and marches? 140 elected democrats would not sign a pledge to support Israel? All the MSM propaganda? I could go on and on? Would this have happen under Orange man? I don’t think so but they were after him from the start. This country is falling apart because of all the lies the democrats and leftist tell us. I pray we come out ahead but my bets aren’t very good.
Are the enemies of the US who aren't actively in a war(i.e. China and Iran at the moment) actively ripping through munitions through aiding their allies as quickly as the US is? I lean isolationist, but it would make me feel a little better that at least everyone is depleting their weaponry instead of just us.
The difference between Ukraine and Israel, first and foremost, is that the latter has nuclear weapons (very probably) and the former does not, while the Ukraine's adversary has the world's largest nuclear arsenal. That makes the calculus for aiding these two nations VERY different.
The author accepts a flawed premise from Republican isolationist politicians, which has nothing to do with foreign policy but with the understandable political desire to prove the Biden Administration wrong in all respects at all costs. Yes, in a true shortage case some weapons like artillery shells and Patriot missiles would rather go to Israel than to Ukraine - Taiwan needs mostly different weapons such as land to sea missiles.
And yes, giving fewer artillery shells to Ukraine might very well mean that recovering territory conquered by Russia might have to wait - maybe a very long time. However, unlike what J.D. Vance claims, Ukraine needs money, even with fewer weapons, to keep its economy functioning and to avoid a very different and catastrophic outcome - a real Russian victory. If the isolationist crowd would be able to add one plus one plus one, they would realize that if the “Axis of Evil” scores at least one full victory out of three - when the other two wars haven’t even fully started - that puts them in a dominating position, where the US might see some of its allies looking for the exits.
Biden and company yammer on about climate change being the biggest existential threat to the US. In fact there are several more immediate threats that the administration's war on fossil fuel energy is exacerbating. If we maximized drilling and fracking and otherwise ended the pursuit of a green new deal, we would be better able to address the immediate serious threats we face.