This is why Army scouts, tankers, and infantry who operate an M2 all know how to set headspace and timing themselves. Or at least in my era, we did.

Harsh (physical and mental) standards, harsher punishment for failure (easier demotion especially in the officer and upper enlisted) and easy exit options (quit on the spot). Wouldn’t help with stupid but it may clear lazy, shammers, and the fearful. Unfortunately you are absolutely correct on rebuilding, that would take a full generation in any realistic timeline.

There was a time I wouldn’t have believed option 1. Then we had to deal with a defective M2 (out of time would have out of battery detonation) that the armorer eventually sent back “fixed” (still out of time) and on another maintenance cycle sent back with a scratched out serial number and a new one stamped on…… still out of time. May have sent my last PMCS sheet back with less than appropriate verbage as I ETSed.

While I was only national guard the only real training I had (Obama era) regarding marksmanship and land nav (thankfully had a lot of that from elsewhere) was during basic/ait and premobalization. The 2 week annual training typically had a laser training the drill before then we do the qualification shoots. We were encouraged to work on marksmanship outside of the army as yes we did indeed have the proto dei training and endless sexual harassment presentations. I can only hope active duty had more real training but I often hear they had it even worse (don’t get to say fuck it and go back to life after the weekend a month)

Defend our freedom from who? Countries on the other side of the world who pose no real threat so senators and bankers and ungrateful foreigners get their kickbacks?
No, drink bleach faggot not dying overseas in a pointless war because dipshits like you are stuck in a 1980 mindset

CHP officers are required to qualify at the range every month to retain their patrol certs. They have the highest hit percentage of departments that report data to the feds, of 25%. The rest of the country runs about 18% hits. BTW, those numbers include all deliberately fired rounds, such as dogs, wildlife, miscreants, and suicide. If they hit someone in a toe, that counts! And, they bitch and moan about having to go to the range, and wait until the end of the month to go, and for a day or so we wouldn’t see much actual patrol activity. The rest of the country may only hit the range for qualification once a year.

“First problem is that the brass and civvies are terrified of having military armed outside of actual combat.”
This is one of the reasons that persuaded me to not join up when I was a teen. (High draft number, so I had a choice) My sisters and I learned to shoot when we were single digit ages. That ability seems to run in the family, as we are good at it.

I agree 100%, but want to point out that even if the destruction of military effectiveness (in the form of less training, fewer ships, fewer planes, a pathological focus on DIE and using the military for Leftist social engineering, a lack of focus on competence and lethality, and Communist-style political purges, all of which in turn contribute to abysmal recruiting) were stopped tomorrow, and the military returned to its traditional expectations and the mechanisms for meeting them, we still would not win any wars, because, like the rest of the West, we have lost the will to fight and will to win, and now all our enemies know it.

They know they only need not to surrender and supply images of civilian wretchedness, and in short time at least half the country will be calling for the exits.

We exist in a thoroughly feminized, decadent society, which is so removed from the gritty reality of daily survival, that we suppose our decisions have no consequences. We’re on a permanent holiday from history. Just look at the two most recent major deployments of the military in 2024: a humanitarian intervention in Haiti and building a pier for a supremacist terror army. We wouldn’t dream of employing

Our politicians overcommit and underfund. And they as a group are fundamentally unable to tolerate civilian casualties of the kind and number that are unavoidable in any winning war effort, especially against an enemy who uses “civilian” casualties as a war tactic.

Just stop and think though: we have in the last 70 years created a standard—for the West only—that any civilian casualties are unacceptable. In so doing, we have turned the logic of war on its head. From this inverted position, we are unable to aim straight through to our war objectives.

Whereas throughout history the home army sought to minimize casualties in its civilian population, such as by evacuating them, provisioning bomb shelters, sounding air raid sirens, fielding missiles defense systems, laying in supplies, and so forth, in modern wars against the West, home armies operate in a continuum between disregard for, and intentional creation of, civilian casualties. And the Western states through their armies attempt to minimize civilian casualties for the opponents, including by restricting the rules of engagement, avoiding obvious strategic targets, and in general exposing their own soldiers to increased danger. But Western states don’t stop at that. They also lead whole-of-society efforts, including via non-military government agencies, NGO charities, religious organizations, and individual charitable giving and volunteering, to coordinate and marshal aid and other forms of relief for the opponents’ peoples and infrastructure. We appear to have internalized the lesson that the fault for any war lies in us, and an enemy is just a friend to whom we haven’t yet been conciliatory enough. We want to understand our opponents’ grievances against us. Since we hate ourselves and our own cultures (at least among the Western elites who call the shots) we are perfectly disposed to validate the hate of our enemies. In the new-age guidance to win the hearts and minds of the enemy, we have forgotten or intentionally ignore every rule of warfare developed from common sense and battlefield results since human pre-history.

In this dynamic, where the Western states care more about civilian casualties than casualties of their own soldiers and put themselves in the position of trying to prevent enemy civilian casualties while the opposing armies try to generate them, an insurmountable bar to victory is erected. We allow ourselves to be manipulated in the most obvious, base way, and then congratulate ourselves in inevitable defeat on our exquisitely sensitive humanity as the enemy civilian population, its obstructive role satisfied, sinks back into stone-age chauvinist obscurantism.

It’s worse than fighting with one or even two hands tied behind your back. Instead it’s more like punching yourself in the head until you score a knockout, while your opponent cheers.

What has the West done to help Israel achieve victory against a terror army that invaded it and took its citizens captive? Constantly grouse, lead chorus of disapproval in the media, set impossible, illogical standards only for Israel and the IDF, demand nothing of the side that started and is abjectly losing the war, and immediately organize international relief for the enemy “civilians”—a non-trivial number of whom directly participated in the invasion, its aftermath and/or the subsequent war effort, and a huge majority of whom support, even celebrate, the terror army and its actions. Relief that is immediately diverted—why this a bad word here because it implies that the intention was to keep the aid out of the terror army’s claws—and which is a pillar of the terror army’s continuing capacity to fight through what should be a complete siege, and thus a major reason why the war continues.

In this we have explicitly adopted the logic that, despite all evidence the contrary, there is a thick, impenetrable wall distinguishing enemy civilians from enemy soldiers. This conceit has been developed to such an extent that we are mentally unable to associate the enemy civilians with the enemy army—that is to say, that they are not our enemies at all, but rather our teammates, who must be held in a sort of captivity against their wills by the enemy army, and, in this sense, we are actually on the same side—their side—of the war. With such logic, of course we want to help our comrades under occupation by a ruthless enemy who compels them to celebrate—with wild uulations—enemy successes on the battlefield, such as the killing of Western civilians—ah, ah, ah there! Don’t tarry at that point and ponder the asymmetry too long—better not to recognize the asymmetry at all: that way lies the madness of common sense, which would indict and explode in Planck time the whole mistaken notion of the new, modern Western way of [losing] war.

Thus the unique conceit in the modern West that any type or amount of suffering—no matter how minor or incidental—imposed intentionally, or even accidentally, on enemy “civilian” populations is an unacceptable moral atrocity. Never mind that a nation’s military is fielded and maintained by its population, and, especially in democracies, reflects the will of the people. A form of that argument was, and is, used post-9/11 to justify terrorist attacks on American civilians. But apparently the same woke set that excuses terror attacks on civilians as righteous responses to their voting for policies uncongenial to said terrorists and their supporters, also argues, out of the other sides of their mouths, that any cost to the enemy civilian population, even in a democratic little terrorstan, represents unfair and illegal “collective punishment”.

This is the idea that it is theoretically possible to fight a war under antiseptic, hermetic conditions, with civilians in the theater of battle going about their normal lives, entirely separate and parallel to the war. And that the activity of said unperturbed civilians (socioeconomic, intellectual, patriotic, religious, supportive, etc) is orthogonal to the great question of which side will win. The belief is either that civilians, qua civilians, can have no impact on their army’s morale or materiel, and thus, disconnected from the army in the field, are not just immoral but illogical, non-strategic targets, or that, even if it might be true that the civilian population voted for the policy of war, gives aid and spiritual succor to their soldiers, and is fundamentally the platform on which the army rests, an indivisible infrastructure inextricably bound up with the question of victory, it nevertheless remains impermissible to place them in harms way, whether by intention, neglect, or forced by the cynical maneuver of the enemy army (viz., human shields and the Hamas Way of War). In such a calculus, we are told, Western states must play by a rarefied, unique, unequal, demonstrably futile set of rules, with an unbroken string of defeats to its credit, even with full knowledge that the enemy is exploiting those rules to manipulate them, and even with the recognition that the rules create conditions for victory that are unachievable and as such guarantee that each and every war will be lost—but worse than surrendering right away, they will first expend prodigious sums of gold and the treasure of their armies’ blood re-demonstrating the truth of that guarantee.

The concept, then, that the collateral damage of civilian war casualties implicates military strategies and tactics as immoral collective punishment and, moreover, illegal (per the nebulous and selectively enforced concept of international law) despite—or, in full candor regarding the woke Western gentry class—*because* that renders achieving victory impossible, has left Western nations in a position where they spend a great deal of money on militaries that have no latitude for maneuver, which cannot act toward victory, and military engagements they cannot hope to win.

It’s also a shorthand way of explaining that one is an idiot, or wants his own country to lose a particular war. For—read your Strauss or Clausewitz or even Polybius or JC (the one being rendered to, not the one instructing on the rendering) or Sherman or Sun Tzu or a hundred other generals, rulers, and political theorists—the point of war is to break the will of your enemy. War is terrible: the most terrible thing in human civilization (though its existence is an ontological fact of the universe and not peculiar to human minds). The goal must be to accomplish that breaking of the enemy’s will as quickly—and thus as cheaply, in terms of blood and treasure, and thus as rationally and wisely—as possible. Anything that delays the visiting of the fatal blow, the coup de grâce, is folly of the highest order. But the West has institutionalized this error and elevated it to a hallmark of its method of war. Thus has the West constructed an impregnable fortress of abnegation that traps its war aims in an underground labyrinth of wrong-way tunnels, none of which lead out of the fortress, through which it fumbles it the dark, afraid to strike a match and behold the self-built prison in which it toils. Worse yet, we’ve given the blueprints for the fortress to the enemy.

At this point, a better metaphor may be the tribulation of doing the same paint-by-numbers scene over and over, forever, as in a scene out of Dante’s Inferno, as Western organizations duly note they are being manipulated by the enemy, yet go right on being manipulable, and never achieving the mental liberation to reject the paradigm, to tear up the scoresheet that has them wailing dirges of defeat.

(Sure, on the margins the vagaries of large scale human conflict entail imprecisions, miscalculations, confounding variables, exceptions, and uncertainties about the past, present, and future that make fidelity to certainty—e.g., around what is quickest or least cost—a fraught principle. But as a general rule, ending a war quickest *is* least cost and therefore best.)

Of course, we don’t hold our enemies to the same standard, which, if it is a universal moral imperative, we really aught to do. But no, our enemies are free to attack civilians, even intentionally, and this is expected and tolerated. The notion seems to be that we deserve such punishment because of a long and unbroken history of sins against our enemies. That is to say, they hate us for good reason, so the least we could do is accept that their consign anger must be vindicated in whatever form they choose to impose.

But perhaps we should chart a different path, one where we admit that this way of war is a dead end, and then proceed in full clarity to choose either to retain our unworkable principles, but at least choose not to enter into voluntary wars we know we will lose, or to return to the past where we hated war, abhored civilian casualties, but were mature enough to confront the reality that sometimes both are incapable, and the best way to minimize both is to win our wars with ruthless and relentless efficiency, which is something like the opposite of the “civilian” “protecting” policy under which we labor, provoking our enemies and prolonging our wars against them.

The way that works best to you is the right way to shoot.

I’m damn sure not gonna tell an armed woman to do much of anything except to politely ask if she will say yes to a date… 😉

“It was inevitable that seeds of TTAG were going to one day start growing here.”

Was that in any way a surprise, Haz?

The same people, the same conflicts, to think any other way was unrealistic…

Ahh…and the brand new SNW has now crossed the rubicon and started Fight Club.

It was inevitable that seeds of TTAG were going to one day start growing here.