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.
