WE'RE ABOUT TO KICK SOME A– wait, hold on a second

the military is sort of on the way, more or less, but

I’m going to show you something extraordinary, but give me a minute to establish some context.

When I talked to Tucker Carlson, back in the Pleistocene of a couple years ago, I opened with a story about a local fire department in the 1990s. The firefighters’ union took a vote of no confidence in the fire chief, I said, and I worked at a local newspaper, so I went around to the fire stations and did journalism by hanging out. I also interviewed the chief, repeatedly, and requested thousands of departmental documents.

What I found out was that the fire chief wore a suit to work, was rarely seen in a fire department uniform, didn’t visit fire stations, and liked to tell people that he wasn’t some firefighter — he was a public sector executive. He was proudly leading the department into the 21st century, which put him at least a decade ahead of the prevailing culture; for example, he had banned the use of gendered language in the fire stations. The fire department no longer manned engine companies, because the department now made the extremely sophisticated decision to staff engine companies. See, that’s gender-neutral, and that’s very good.

A fire captain said to me, with a pained look on his face, that the ethic of the fire service is distinctly blue collar and oriented around the use of tools to perform urgent tasks. You’re upside down in a crushed car that’s leaking gas, and you’re bleeding to death — do the people who show up in the big red truck know what to do about it? Can they cut you out of the car before you bleed out, and do it without sending sparks into the leaking gasoline? Are they competent with tools, or are they not competent with tools?

So finally I was sitting in a fire station and I said to a firefighter that I had just talked to the chief, and had heard that the rank and file of the fire department lacked cultural sophistication and didn’t understand the deep ways the chief was remodeling the culture. And the firefighter responded, drawing it out slowly while holding up a hand to make me stop talking, “How fast. Can you put the wet stuff. On the red stuff?”

That, I said, is the conflict of our long historical moment: cultural performativity, e.g. CEO Katherine Maher, versus task focus and mission orientation. People who perform symbols against people who do meaningful work. Can you put the wet stuff on the red stuff, the end.

Now, five weeks ago I sounded a warning about the Biden administration’s decision to send lightly armed U.S. Army transportation troops to establish a temporary dock on the Gaza coast so we could deliver humanitarian aid.

Note the date on that headline. In the bottom half of April, they aren’t there yet, and it looks increasingly likely that they won’t be there anytime soon. Yesterday’s headlines:

They caught fire and went home.

Other ships assigned to the mission haven’t caught fire — let’s take our good news where we can get it — but also haven’t all made significant progress toward Gaza. Update here from the consistently interesting maritime historian Sal Mercogliano:

Click on the link, or just watch the video here:

Five weeks ago, the President of the United States ordered the $883 billion American military to establish a dock on the Gazan coast. It hasn’t happened, and the available evidence strongly suggests that it isn’t going to happen soon. It’s not a complete failure yet, so outcome TBD. Stars and Stripes:

But on Monday, USAV General Frank Besson, which entered the sea April 3, was in port in Crete along with two other Army ships, USNI News reported the same day. Naval Support Activity Souda Bay is located on the island.

A fourth Army ship was transiting west of the island, while a fifth, USAV Wilson Wharf, was in the eastern Atlantic Ocean off the coast of north Africa, according to the USNI report.

MV Roy P. Benavidez, assigned to the Military Sealift Command, also was near Crete on Monday. USNS 1st Lt. Baldomero Lopez was transiting the Mediterranean off the coast of north Africa, USNI said.

The last person to serve as the most senior uniformed officer of the American military spent the last year of his tenure giving interviews about his own amazing political courage, and boasting about the ways he monkeywrenched his elected commander-in-chief.

Then a new Secretary of Defense joined him, and went to work politically purifying the ranks with a bold round of ideological enforcement.

And, of course, our transgender game is quite strong.

Cynical Publius: “Meanwhile, I understand the USAF told Congress today that the mission readiness rate for the F-35 fleet is less than 30%.”

We can have cultural performance, or we can put the wet stuff on the red stuff. The trade-offs don’t seem to be obscure. We’ll see.