The US isn’t serious, and the fiasco this week where Lloyd Austin stammered in front of a committee, clearly unprepared to answer questions about what his own command is doing, was only one sign. Austin’s sheepish admission that he’s blown a half-billion dollars training a Syrian insurgent force that can be counted on a single hand’s fingers, max, wasn’t even the low point of his testimony, and Austin’s failure isn’t the Army’s only failure this week.
Friday PM — the usual time for a Data Dump of Shame in DC, because all the overpaid, underworked .gov workers are out of the city and into Beltway traffic in the early afternoon — the Army dumped the name and circumstances of the new Secretary of the Army, and he’s a doozy. The youthful-looking Secretary-designee, Acting Undersecretary Eric Fanning comes by his youthful looks honestly: he’s young (46) and callow, a career midrange bureaucrat without significant executive experience (.pdf), or private-sector experience, although he’s been parked in Democratic lobbying firms during Republican administrations. He has never served in the military and has never displayed much respect for those who do and have. They are there to serve him. He has never held a job in the productive economy.
He is also a proponent of the nuclear armament of Iran, also known as the Iran Deal, which should give you an idea of just how he didn’t succeed in one of his previous bureaucratic sinecures, Deputy Director of the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism. He is also a former CBS reporter, in the Dan Rather fabrication days. Hey, but he is an Ivy grad (Dartmouth), where he majored in Not Joining ROTC, and that counts for something.
Why pick him, then? To Send A Message™, to count a valuable bean among people for whom the military exists to enable bean-counting. Fanning is fabulously gay, and his tasking is to increase the social engineering pressure on the Army to make it more friendly to GLBTQWERTY individuals, and more hostile to those who are not, whilst presiding over the readiness and end-strength declines he’s already been managing as Acting Undersecretary. He has said that his highest priorities are to forbid criticism of gay (etc) soldiers and to encourage transgender soldiers.
The Washington Post suggests another reason, too:
Fanning’s role as Army secretary would give him influence over the generals the Army selects to rebuild the service….
Let a thousand Austins bloom. Only, GLBTQWERTY ones this time.
So that’s just how serious the US is, Eric Fanning serious. If you felt a vibration on Friday, it was probably al-Baghdadi quivering in fear — or suffused with mirth, perhaps.
But an unserious US is something that has effects far beyond the areas in DC where they’re debating how many sexual minorities can dance in government jobs.
How an Unserious US is Received by Rivals
In Syria, where Austin’s tragicomic ineptitude in Washington was already known to friends (not that we have any) and foes alike within hours, the latest player is Russia, which is about to extend an air-defense umbrella over the forces of Bashar Assad, who have been irritated and inconvenienced by very occasional US air sorties.
On Friday, the same day that the US announced its highest defense priority is gay rights, the US woke up to confirmation of the Russian move1, which had been unimagined by American intelligence analysts and caught US National Security Advisor Susan Rice, who had been as always focusing on how she could crush Israel, completely by surprise.
US Ambassador to Russia John Tefft, a political appointee who essentially bought the ambassadorship with campaign donations (Correction: While Tefft was politically appointed to this position, he’s a career FSO. We had him confused with another hack), called on Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, but was fobbed off on an underling, Mihkail Bogdanov. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter was able to reach his Russian counterpart, Sergei Shoygu, on the phone, during which call Shoygu explained the principle of “honoring commitments made to the Syrian government” to a baffled Carter.
Charles Krauthammer has a field day with this. Read The Whole Thing™, but here’s a taste:
Kerry and Obama are serially surprised because they cannot fathom the hard men in the Kremlin. Yet Putin’s objectives in Syria are blindingly obvious:
1. To assert Russia’s influence in the Middle East and make it the dominant outside power.
2. To sustain Russia’s major and long-standing Arab ally.
3. To expand the reach of Russia’s own military.
4. To push out the Americans. … Putin… is demonstrating whom you can rely on in this very tough neighborhood.
5. To re-legitimize post-Crimea Russia by making it indispensable in Syria.
Russia is not the only geostrategic rival emboldened by American vacillation, hesitation, and unseriousness. Consider China’s push into the Spratly Islands, for example, Iran’s Marg Bar Amrika nuclear-weapons program, the ransoming (and White House celebration) of traitor Bowe Bergdahl, the other ransoms paid, the resulting roughly 30 Americans held hostage around the world while the people who are supposed to be planning their rescue — or scaring the crap out of people who might otherwise take hostages — are held hostage themselves, to SHARP re-retraining or GLBTQWERTY appreciation indoctrination2.
How an Unserious US is Received by Friends
The message from DC is: “Don’t bother us, we’re counting beans here. Unless you can send us some more left-handed albino Shiite bisexuals, KMAGYOYO.” The message was sent by the shattered bodies of our few allies in Syria, the car-bombed ruins of those who trusted us in Afghanistan, and the rolling heads of the people who put their faith in us in Iraq.
But hey, we’re going to let RuPaul be a drill sergeant, if it wants. What’s more important? The message, then, to twist an aphorism, is that the desperate peoples at the rim of the Free World have found in today’s US “No worse friend, no better enemy.”
Events in the Japanese Diet this week sent a loud “transmission received” our way: the Japanese rolled back their historic Constitutional prohibition on external military operations. They did it on the same day the US announced its highest defense priority was gay rights with the promotion of Fanning, but that’s strictly coincidental.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe says Japan needs the legislation to bolster its defense amid China’s growing assertiveness and to share global peacekeeping efforts.
And, of course, he has a weak US with a weak President, weak Secretary of State, and weak Secretary of Defense — a US he cannot trust. Japan must be ready to defend herself.
Well, it’s true a major European power had some trouble with Japanese militarism 110 years ago, but they’ve scarcely been a bother since then.
Notes
- If you’re paywalled out of the WSJ article, this Google Search should get you in.
- The White House official in charge of Counterterrorism (and hostage rescue, or, as she usually decides, Lack Of The Same, is Lisa Monaco, a lawyer and political appointee without CT, defense, or national-security experience, and it shows — she’s way over her small head. (She was an in-house counsel at FBI).
