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Phil Ewing Profile picture
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9 Sep, 5 tweets, 2 min read
This is critical 👇 and so far all the Casting Forward From A'stan takes have been too polite to take it on. But take it on we must because the real danger is a force that cannot or will not be honest within itself + leadership -- *especially* re You Know Who in WestPac
Some of the takes have been like, "when will the brass be held accountable for its lies" -- which have merit on their own, but the true issue is (to quote, maybe, Stephen Colbert) it's not a lie if you believe it. And if these guys believed what they said, that is bad too
I'm not trying to minimize A'stan in any way, shape or form by saying that the scale of the task and challenge it posed is insignificant compared to a potential conflict with You Know Who in Indo-Pacom. And if our guys aren't honest about that, we could be in SERIOUS trouble
No amount of years' worth of warnings from within and without about material readiness, training and culture in the Surface Force prevented the 2017 tragedies in WestPac, for example. All along all we got was, 'old news, we're on top of it, FDNF gets the best.' That wasn't so
What America needs is a military establishment that, if necessary, will say, "Madame President, we are too jacked up to fight You Know Who in Scenario A; we can do X in Scenario B; and we can sustain Z in C." The nation cannot afford A'stan style wishful happy talk

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More from @philewing

Phil Ewing Profile picture
9 Sep
Excellent analysis & also underscores that the facts don't matter when they're being used as tokens for in-faction/out-faction identification. They didn't then and they don't today -- it's about validating group dynamics
What was the stereotype-bumper sticker anti-vax cohort before the present crisis? West Coast tricycle stroller moms with sufficient education to know better than to distrust childhood (pre-covid!) vaccines ... yet they derived validation and identity from that
POTUS 45 likely could not give a detailed account about Lee's failures as a commander or anything else regarding the substance of the matter -- but he has keyed onto Lee as a way to signal to the people he wants to reach that he's with them & against who they're against
Read 4 tweets
Phil Ewing Profile picture
8 Sep
No. Too cosmic. Our present crisis has nothing to do with Foucault. It derives from intra-cultural factionalism in which factional identity, which derives as much from exclusion as inclusion, requires acceptance or rejection of X, Y or Z americanpurpose.com/blog/fukuyama/…
The vaccine holdouts (for example) don't not use electricity. They don't not use mobile telephones or computers because they don't believe in binary code. But they do glean cohesiveness from rejecting the same thing an out-group is telling them to accept
No amount of Foucault or anything else was able to dissuade the 1/6 mob beforehand that the 'factual' basis upon which they were acting -- ostensibly undoing the elex by disrupting a pro forma Hill session -- would not achieve that aim. B/c it was about common identity
Read 6 tweets
Phil Ewing Profile picture
7 Sep
More from the CJCS Fox interview. So in the AU in which the US builds an ANSF that isn't a rib from your United States Army, but something more Talib-like, what ALSO makes the Kabul institutions succeed? Image
With the costly and painful benefit of hindsight, could the United States (widely opposed & frequently indistinguishable to many Afghans from the Soviets) ever have built anything that not only functioned operationally but was, ref Milley's point ☝️ politically legitimate?
I wasn't in A'stan very long back in the day but still clearly remember learning in the East how often ppl in the mountains believed the US forces there were Soviet occupiers whom they never knew withdrew -- and how that distinction made no difference to many of them
Read 4 tweets
Phil Ewing Profile picture
13 May
The selective credibility needed to entertain some propositions in this take is as interesting as its thought experiments -- a gubbment that couldn't keep its torture, overseas prisons, tech-exploitation or other IC functions secret could hide aliens?nytimes.com/2021/05/13/opi…
The US gubbment could not successfully build a moderate Syrian opposition, build a secular civil Afghan state, create a viable nation in post-democratic Iraq, buy a small naval combatant or even a new scout helicopter or armored vehicle for the Army among 10 million other things
Could it interface with space aliens or posses crashed alien spacecraft -- and keep that secret all this time?

:: former FBI director eye squint, looking up over the line of the camera, then back down ::

It's ... possible.
Read 9 tweets
Phil Ewing Profile picture
12 May
Not gonna tag them b/c I legit feel sorry for them. "45th Space Wing" is a great name for a unit. A proud name, obviously. "Space Launch Delta 45," the new designation -- that's embarrassing. Poor guys
Can you imagine if you were in the crew of USS Lake Erie or USS Ramage and they renamed your ship "Large Radar-Missile BMD Shooty Surface Combatant 70" or "Slightly Less Capable Radar-Missile Shooty Combatant 61" out from under you?
"Yeah we know you guys liked being the world-famous and iconic 7th Bomb Wing but now your name is Variable Geometry Non-Nuclear Large Ordnance-Delivery Aircraft Organizational Unit 7. Carry on."

".... fly fight win, sir"
Read 4 tweets
Phil Ewing Profile picture
11 May
I see all this commentary about China's public messaging and propagandizing, and without disputing the consequences of disinformation in general terms, question how actually effective it is based simply on its qualitative suckiness, tin-earedness and overall hamhandedness
It's one thing for a sophisticated foreign actor to shape the info environment by making it appear real Americans (who actually are fake) are saying things they aren't about internal U.S. matters with no reference to any foreign power. But all China does is talk about itself
Russia's efforts are disruptive and corrosive because it nihilistically puts its bugle into domestic disputes (about the NFL, for example) for the sake of simply turning up the volume. The resultant agita is a sufficient reward of its own, esp given the low cost
Read 4 tweets

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