Insulting the Troops

Let’s give the real deal on who and what does that.

So in Britain the latest hysteria, after Greenland, after Venezuela, after ICE, after Ukraine, after COVID and after a hundred others I’ve forgotten, is a version of the long running attempt to pretend, in the US, that Trump hates the Armed Forces.

Generally the people telling us this are very keen to get sexual fetishists who wear puppy dog masks in charge of the armed forces, supply those forces with inadequate equipment and insist that they serve alongside women who aren’t strong enough and men who think they are women and are on mind altering chemical hormone treatments, so it should always be taken as bullshit from the get go.

But we have seen things like Trump’s criticisms of Woke Pentagon Generals and Trans Admirals as being ‘against the troops’. We also have seen criticism of treasonous Democrats with a service record cast in the same light, or fictions spread about Trump insulting US troops.

The reasons for this are pretty obvious. The military are automatically going to be a group, especially the lower down the chain of command you get, inclined to support Trump’s non nonsense, plain talking, US interest first approach. This has been reflected again and again in how ordinary troops respond to him. His combination of sanity on DEI and removing woke from the military, his willingness to use military resources in smart and limited ways, and his equal desire to avoid protracted or pointless wars all actually favour military personnel and tend towards making sure both that that lives and wasted and that they aren’t, as a resource either, pointlessly squandered.

All this is a direct challenge to the military industrial complex which profits from them being engaged in fruitless wars of no real US interest.

So you can why this is an area that has to be attacked and why Democrats have always tried to turn the military against Trump.

What we see now, via the Greenland fall out and Trump’s responses in interview on NATO and Afghanistan, is the same attempt to use the military and claims of disrespect to the military to turn people against Trump.

The claim now is that Trump insulted British and NATO troops who died in Afghanistan. As ever, it’s a gross distortion of his actual words.

Trump essentially said that the US didn’t need NATO in Afghanistan. Countries sent troops in support, but the US didn’t really need them. This is absolutely factually accurate. The numbers sent by other nations were always tiny compared to US presence, and the vast bulk of fighting and dying was done by the US. This may offend people, but it’s true, and would be true of ANY NATO engagement at any scale or location.

He also said these troops hung back a little. That’s the bit that really seems insulting, because people have taken it to be calling the troops themselves cowards. But it’s not that at all. Again, the media spin is immediately applied, and thought about whether the dementia is true isn’t.

The fact is the comment didn’t say other troops were cowards. It didn’t even say US troops were better. It said they hung back….and the sad reality is that this is true, not through any fault of those troops, and not in a way that says those there did t fight and those who died shouldn’t be respected.

What the reality on the ground was is that the numbers were so low, and the areas assigned so vast, that gradually most other NATO troops tended to end up either requiring constant US support or being more limited in their operations. Some, like the British, had such low numbers spread over such large areas to control, that they ended up virtually besieged in camp. They HAD to hang back, and were still fighting and dying doing that, because of their low numbers. There was very intense fighting in terms of defending these bases and conducting some patrols, but it’s just impossible for a few hundred men to effectively hold large provinces undergoing insurgency.

That’s the reality. You can lose 400 men and the cold hard fact remains that your contribution was, simply numerically, a fraction of the US contribution.

Trump, as is his style, told the truth in a way that offends people, because, as is their style, all his opponents immediately cast the comments in the worst possible light.

But I’ll tell what actually insults the troops. What really hurts them and harms them rather than hurting or harming the feelings of people trying to exploit them.

What harms the troops of NATO countries, including the UK, is sending them into wars that never needed to exist, based on total fucking lies. Sending them to die in Afghanistan, or doing what Biden did with a spectacular fuck up of a withdrawal, insults those troops and kills them too, as 13 brave US soldiers lost in that debacle illustrate.

Under Trump, there were months where terrorism and insurgency were under control, and there were also zero US casualties at the same time.

So it’s pretty fucking clear that Trump has the backs of US troops in ways his critics don’t. He won’t burden them with trans daycare or frontline Mary Sue’s not up to the task. And he won’t send them to die for corrupt or pointless or purely ideological reasons.

But he’s not responsible for other NATO troops, their own leaders and countries are. And what do we see there?

People who reduced these armies for DECADES. In the UK case, successive governments have had multiple defence reviews that have gutted our military capacity until it is a joke. And we are one of the BETTER examples. The UK has six nuclear subs it can’t put to sea because their repair facilities are themselves being repaired. We can put as little as 13,000 battle ready troops in the field at one time (out of a pitiful 87,000). Russia has 700,000 men in Ukraine at the moment, to put that in perspective.

Scores of historic UK regiments no longer exist. Others have been amalgamated, again and again, reducing numbers.

The rest of NATO is, frankly, a joke without the US. And that’s the fault of OUR politicians and leaders, obsessed with expansion at any cost, but not willing to bear even the FINANCIAL cost (let alone the cost in suffering) of any real support for our troops.

On Afghanistan we sent our guys there, and in Iraq, with inadequate vehicles that could be blown up way too easily. THAT is the sort of thing we have allowed, which should be the REAL scandal, but it was never treated as one.

If we had leaders who acted like Trump…then more of OUR men would survive. And they’d fight in wars for OUR interests too, not bullshit wars that gain nothing. Maybe they might have building blocks and homes that aren’t shit and a disgrace. Maybe they would have salaries commensurate with their willingness to risk their lives for their country. Maybe we would have more ships than Admirals, instead of the other way round. Maybe we would have an army that was of a sufficient size to protect us, or at least patrol our own waters and prevent things like dinghy invasions by third world rapists. Maybe we wouldn’t have so many homeless veterans, and so few soldiers overall. Maybe we would treat our troops with dignity both during and after their service, and they wouldn’t be begging on the streets while others from the nations they fought in get hand outs and help.

I silting the troops? Sending them to die for nothing does that. Reducing their numbers to best to nothing does that.

The UK government claiming Trump has insulted our troops are the same people who are fucking inept enough to have put us in a situation where, in any real war, we have just 10 days before our troops would run out of bullets.

The UK government claiming Trump has insulted our troops are the same people who won’t defend OUR borders and the same people who sign our troops over to EU command without any consent for that.

The UK government claiming Trump has insulted our troops are the same people who would send them into battle with inadequate supplies, inadequate equipment, and inadequate vehicles.

In this country our troops were told not to wear their uniforms in public, for fear of offending people. In this country Lee Rigby was beheaded on the street. In this country our government HELPS IRA, ISIS and other terrorists advance claims and cases against British soldiers.

I think it’s more of an insult to casually throw away their lives, or let terrorists prosecute them, then it is to honestly say they couldn’t do that much in recent wars, in the grand scheme of things, because of their numbers.

Don’t you?