{"id":61577,"date":"2015-08-27T08:00:03","date_gmt":"2015-08-27T12:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=61577"},"modified":"2015-08-27T08:00:35","modified_gmt":"2015-08-27T12:00:35","slug":"matt-cavanaugh-the-militarys-purpose-is-not-to-kill-people-and-break-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=61577","title":{"rendered":"Matt Cavanaugh: The Military\u2019s Purpose is Not to Kill People and Break Things"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you read Matt Cavanaugh’s article at War on The Rocks<\/a>, I guarantee you that it will be the dumbest thing that you read today. Apparently, he’s upset that former Governor Mike Huckabee said during the debate a few weeks ago that the military’s mission is to kill people and break things. Mister Cavanaugh takes exception to that statement;<\/p>\n

The military\u2019s purpose is not to kill people and break things. This idea is factually, historically, professionally, and philosophically wrong \u2014 and must itself be remorselessly killed and violently broken. This 11-word platitude has no place in modern society.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

If my purpose is to kill people and break things, how do I explain this to my wife and two young daughters?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He continues to illustrate his point with many of the shit-jobs that the military has had to perform for the world like building the Panama Canal and the Space Race. I remember one of the shit-jobs the military had feeding the Somalians that turned even shittier because the forces of evil were more willing to kill people and break things than the leaders of the US military. In order to do all of those things that Matt wants to do that make him and his daughters feel good about his job, it needs to happen in a safe and secure environment. Because there are forces of evil in the world, the US military has to be prepared to kill people and break things.<\/p>\n

When a foreign leader wakes up in the morning and finds a Fleet Marine Force on his shores, I’m sure he’s not expecting them to hand out Halloween candy to his subjects. When a flight of aircraft packed with paratroopers of the 82d Airborne Division appear on his horizon, he knows that he f***ed up beyond reason. It’s not by chance that the first course of study in the Army for the enlisted soldiers is called Basic Combat<\/strong> Training. <\/p>\n

Critics will counter with Clausewitz, dismissing my argument as the na\u00efve, \u201ckind-hearted\u201d words of someone that misguidedly believes there is \u201csome ingenious way to disarm or defeat an enemy without too much bloodshed.\u201d But Clausewitz was writing in an era of limited options, when a bloodsucking leech was often the medical profession\u2019s first and only recourse. Today is different. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Unfortunately, it’s clowns like Cavanaugh who don’t want to accept the realities of the world. That nonacceptance of realities is what has given us the rise of ISIS, al Qaeda, the Taliban, the mullahs of Tehran. He’s part of the reason that a day after rejecting the possibility of release of Americans held by Iran, they demanded the release of Iranian prisoners in the West. See, the western world may have changed, but the enemies of freedom haven’t changed. They behead children and burn women alive because there is nothing that they fear from the West – and their thinking predates Clausewitz. Because the Cavanaughs of the world don’t understand the basic nature of war. <\/p>\n

It’s the thinking that Cavanaugh follows that dragged out the Civil War until Grant and Sherman followed the advice of Clausewitz and fought total war, instead of the touchy-feely bullshit that McClellan espoused. But, I guess it’s because Grant had limited options. He should have started a meals-on-wheels program to defeat Lee’s armies. Or built schools and mosques for southerners. Maybe raise the minimum wage.<\/p>\n

Then Cavanaugh goes completely off the rails with some diatribe aimed at Hollywood, Captain America and steroids. I lost him there. It’s Hollywood that perpetuates Cavanaugh’s view of the world, that solutions can be arrived at quickly and peacefully and that there’s something wrong with killing bad people and breaking their things.<\/p>\n

The Germans were still fighting after Hitler had committed suicide and the Allies had dropped everything in the country to ground level rubble. The Japanese were preparing to defend their own country until the US made it less attractive by radiating a couple of large cities and their inhabitants. In 1991, Hussein still clung to his military power and used against his own people even though most of his Army lay in smoking ruins on the battlefields in Kuwait and Iraq. Then twelve years later sent them back out on the field of battle even though it had already been proven that he couldn’t win. the US military kills people and breaks things better than any other – our biggest enemies are the politicians who don’t have the heart to fight wars the way they should be fought because the Cavanaughs of the world can’t explain their jobs to their wives and children.<\/p>\n

If you need a way to explain it to your wife and daughter – tell them that you kill people and break things because someone has to do it and most Americans are too cowardly to even admit that they know about it. That you kill people and break things so that people don’t come here and do it to us first – because they certainly want to come here and kill us and break our things. Or, you could just go get a nice job on Wall Street in a suit, because that kind of thinking that you’re doing now, that isn’t really thinking, especially coming from a professional military officer. It’s just a mindless stringing together of words that make no sense and have nothing to do with the realities of the world in which we live.<\/p>\n

Thanks to Chief Tango for the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you read Matt Cavanaugh’s article at War on The Rocks, I guarantee you that it … Matt Cavanaugh: The Military\u2019s Purpose is Not to Kill People and Break Things<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35870,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dumbass-bullshit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61577\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/35870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}