"Support the troops"

06:03 Saturday, 15 August 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 55.63°F Pressure: 1023hPa Humidity: 96% Wind: 0.51mph
Words: 545

As a retired career officer in the United States Navy, I have strong opinions about what's going on in our nation's military today. In the past, I have often shared them here. Today, it's harder to do so.

Not because I worry about retribution or anything like that. It's because those opinions are accompanied by powerful emotions, and it's often difficult to write when there is a storm going on.

It is impossible to quantify the damage, physical, mental and moral, that this administration is doing to the men and women who serve our country in uniform. Not all of them, to be sure. I'm certain that there are more than a few of them who delight in what's taking place. These souls were lost long before Trump took office.

The problem is that the same moral rot that infects them will spread. And it's difficult to arrest once it's taken hold. Good people will leave the service rather than continue to serve with people like that. New members will be shaped and guided by the twisted, immoral, amoral and ambitious cretins that remain. It will become an embedded part of the culture.

"Rust never sleeps." We spend a lot of time in the navy chipping paint. When I say "we," I mean very young sailors, new recruits. It's hard, loud, hot, demanding work. But we have to do it because steel hulls rust in a salty environment, and if you don't stay on top of it, it spreads. It thins the hull, makes it weaker. You can always cover it with a layer of fresh paint, and it'll look pretty; but it's still there, corroding the hull.

Same thing with honor, integrity and courage. These things require effort to maintain. And it's not the effort of young sailors and new recruits. It's the effort of leadership, officers and enlisted.

It's also hard work, because it requires self-discipline and constant vigilance, and mental resources that are sorely challenged when you're deployed at sea, working eighteen hours a day without a break. Because those young sailors are always watching, looking for the example, the reason for how they should behave. What the meaning of their service and sacrifice is.

And that effort begins at the top. The very top. And we know what's up there.

People argue about the size of the defense budget. Whatever value you place on the material assets of the armed forces, whatever opportunity cost it represents in the larger scheme, it's nothing compared to value of the lives and the souls of the men and women who wear the uniform of this nation.

And we are wasting it. Squandering it. Pissing it away. Not through their deaths, though there have been plenty of those. Through the moral injury we're inflicting on them.

Republicans, "conservatives," always, always like to make a big show of "supporting the troops."

It's bullshit. It's performative bullshit by people who never served anyone but themselves. Republicans and conservatives and the MAGA crowd are unacquainted with the notion of honor. It's absent from their lives.

You reap what you sow.

I know people don't like comparisons with Nazi Germany, but you should study how Hitler and the Nazi leadership employed their troops.

We're doing the same things.

✍️ Reply by email