Thinking Thursday - War Worries

In case you missed it; we blew a sorry goat fucker into the next plane of existence last week. And of course there was blow back. Both at home and aboard. Not to get too terribly partisan, but it was as if suddenly eight years of drone strikes suddenly never occurred.

Here's the thing; from my soda straw view of the world and the Global War on Terror, we will always be at war with some of the more radical, fundamentalist parts of Islam. Hell, we have been since the Marines landed in Tripoli in 1805 under the command of an Army officer.

I don't see that threat disappearing if we up and decide to withdraw from, well, everywhere.

Here's the thing, and this is going to be obscenely callous, but I would rather fight Mister I Hate America in the mountains of Afghanistan or the deserts of Iraq than clean up the carnage of a holy warrior wearing twenty pounds of Semtex and 200 ball bearings at a Target.

I skew libertarian on most thing. I really do. However, I probably suffer from some late stage colonialism, white guilt, or whatever, when I say that at this point I don't think we, as in the United States of America, have any choice other than to be the world's policeman.

Who else will fill that void? The Germans, Brits, and French don't have the ability nor the national will to project force in any meaningful way.

And I would really prefer not to have to fight a land war in Africa against local forces with Russian and Chinese "advisors" if we can help it. That would be ugly and bloody on a scale we as a nation haven't seen since Korea/WWII.

And it sucks. Because at least for the foreseeable future, those battles in far away lands are gonna be fought by volunteers.

Hell, despite the joke about eating crayons and getting fired from Burger Kings, the average American enlisted guy or girl is hella smart. The highly technical nature of war requiring it now.

So, it is no longer, not that it ever really was, America's rejects fighting her wars. We send our best and brightest. Even if they do have a propensity to marry a stripper and buy a Charger at like all the APR.

What brought this all to focus was a kid who came into the shop with his Mom the other day.

This guy was home on Christmas leave from BCT. I didn't know such a thing existed. Nor did I know you could go in as an E-4 based on your MOS. And further more; I didn't realize that there were MOSs where after BCT you go right off to Ft Meade for super secret squirrel shit.

So, this aspiring Joe educated me about all that. And in turn I educated him about the M-4 platform to the best of my ability with a S&W M&P-15. Kid had never handled a gun of any sort until he went off the Ft Jackson.

And no offense to the round browns there, but he didn't know a whole lot after Phase 1 either.

But that kid will probably be on the front of our next near peer major regional conflict. Which is a bunch of buzz words for a damn war.

Which it looks like America will always have to fight.

I just hope we're ready.