Thread by @johnkonrad

You don’t understand. I’ve watched a ton of congressional defense hearings. In EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. the Admirals and Generals say “we are only strong because of our allies.”

At first I believed it.

Then I started attending defense conferences overseas. I watched U.S. GOFOs get treated like royalty. Five-star hotels. Wined and dined. Told how great they are for “being such great allies.”

The pattern became obvious. Europeans spend lavishly on ego-boosting, awards dinners, and fine wine… and in exchange, every GOFO goes home and tells Congress how indispensable our allies are.
And our “allies” save a fortune on defense.

Then a buddy got a job at European Command and confirmed everything—except it wasn’t just GOFOs. There are entire departments of people working in “intelligence” who are basically travel agents for generals and members of Congress.

Then I started digging into the UN. Guess what? They hold a massive number of “security” conferences too—except most of theirs are in straight-up resort towns.

Then I got inside a few think tanks. You want to see posh surroundings and excellent wine and food? Buddy up with them.

I started posting about all this a few years ago and got MASSIVE pushback—which I knew meant I was on the right track.

But I still wasn’t 100% sure. Most of it was grift, but maybe some parts were essential… until Midnight Hammer. Then Maduro. Now this.

My European friends were totally blindsided by all of it. And guess what? We performed better without these great “allies.”

Why?

Going all the way back to Korea, one thing has remained true: Europeans don’t fully trust us—and they like having a little power over us. So they are absolute sticklers for Rules of Engagement.

They wine and dine our JAGs. They hold endless conferences about “the rule of law” to reinforce the “importance of ROEs.”

And ROEs are what kills our military.
Nobody is suggesting soldiers should do anything immoral. Nobody is saying there shouldn’t be consequences for atrocities. What I am saying is that having a battalion of JAGs and a dozen allied nations—each with their own ROEs—breathing down every commander’s neck is why we lose wars.

That includes Vietnam, where most “allies” refused to fight but every one of them put serious diplomatic pressure on DC to tighten ROEs.

All of this “allies are our strength” dogma gets reinforced at these conferences, at war colleges, by European-influenced media, and through think tanks.

The reason we’re suddenly so effective is because @PeteHegseth has cut all this out.

Our allies are flying blind. They can’t throw up a million legal objections because they don’t know the details behind these missions any sooner than we do.

Just look at Starmer’s body language. He’s clueless.

And it’s not just our allies that no longer get to micromanage everything but media and UN diplomats and think tanks and bureaucrats and more.

Now if we could just cut Congress off from this “allies are great” grift, we could probably start passing legislation too.

P.S. I see no signs of Hegseth or DoW weakening our allies or alliances. They genuinely seem to want Europe to be stronger. They just aren’t asking permission anymore or giving allies veto power over everything like before.