Dissident Soaps (@Dissidentsoaps)

Which brings to mind a broader point regarding the design of the US military’s command & control systems and doctrine. It was mostly written by very smart White guys over the past 70 years or so. It was intended to be used by relatively smart White guys in the field. Reference the many old quotes about how the US military thrives on chaos, because traditionally US soldiers have been some of the smartest in the world, able to take initiative and improvise in order to achieve mission objectives. As a result, this was essentially codified into doctrine in the form of “mission command.” The basics of which are, you’re given the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of this mission with a few guidelines, and you figure out the ‘how,’ based on conditions on the ground and your own experience/judgement. But as the US military recruiting pool has become dumber, fatter and browner, this system has completely broken down. Like our many third world ’partner forces,’ constant, direct supervision of nearly all tasks & missions is required, particularly when coupled with a ‘zero-defect’ risk averse attitude from the top down. You simply can’t risk 85 IQ soldiers “taking the initiative” because they’ll do something catastrophically stupid and cost lives & equipment. But demographics and affirmative action have progressed so far that now a significant portion of even the officer corps can’t be trusted to take any initiative of their own. They’re put into company command and micromanaged constantly out of necessity, because their boss doesn’t want to get in trouble for allowing them to screw up. You’ve reached a point where 90% of the officers can’t adjust fire or even navigate based off Known Point grid coordinates provided to them by higher HQs in their operation orders. Essentially you have a brilliantly crafted orders & planning system that people have become too stupid to use. It’s being bandaided together by technology (GPS, digital comms, drones) that will absolutely not function in a peer-to-peer conflict.