Thoughts about the Air Force colonel who delivers sanctimonious lectures about institutional racism to his fellow “white colonels.” In you’re an infantry soldier in the US Army, you can distinguish yourself by earning an Expert Infantry Badge. To do that, you have to qualify as an expert with the rifle, then complete a
Yup. Obama drove out all the warriors with this shit. But, in the long run, it’s ok. We don’t go to war anymore to win; haven’t done so since August, 1945, so competency is not required. Not only did we take 15 years and a few trillion dollars to not defeat a buncha illiterates with only small arms and black pajamas, we did a repeat for 20 years when the next team wore white pajamas, then we gifted them $85B in modern equipment and now are paying them $160,000,000 per month for the privilege of having been defeated & chased outta the country by them. Just need men to quit enlisting & we’ll be fine. We’ll still pay about a trillion a year for nuthin, but ... FWIW, I’m USAFA ‘76.
Meritocracy is how everything should work. Now, in reality, almost nothing is a pure meritocracy. The military is no exception, but perfect isn't on the table. We strive for perfection. We rarely get there. When we get close, we're doing pretty damned good. There's always an angle or a hook that some people can work. It's not right, but politics happens. I was never in the military. But I've seen jocks at elite prep schools and universities who were dumber than a box of rocks, and the children of prominent power brokers, who were degenerates. I've seen doctors with big credentials who I wouldn't let take care of my cat. Those of us in the rank and file of smart enough and lucky enough to get into those institutions at the time, couldn't get away with being stupid or degenerate. Today those same institutions are a sad husk of what they used to be. They've beclowned themselves with trite, temporarily gratifying collectivist half-baked ideas which fall apart on even cursory inspection. Why? You tell me. Greed, stupidity, conformity, inertia, baby boomer cosplay radicals trying to relive the 1960's, more factors abound no doubt. Sure, there are still some superstar students and faculty, but there is a lot of fluff in there. And it's not benign fluff. It's fluff coated in the corrosive acid of DEI and other assorted trendy yet harmful ideas that have captured the imaginations of the dilettantes in the power class. The institutions suffer, and good, constructive people who could take advantage of opportunities are left out so that some ridiculous, destructive nonsense can be indulged.
We can't afford this. We can't afford institutionalized stupidity and incompetence, particularly in critical technical professions. The military constitutes a profession with an expansive knowledge repository and stringent requirements for excellence in order to successfully complete complex tasks and missions. Yes, they break stuff and kill people, but it's not nearly that simple. Same idea with Medicine, Aviation, Engineering, Law, many other professions. Putting incompetent, ideologically driven people who can't do the basic thing in there is an instant recipe for failure and degradation of the professional system. And we are well into it throughout the West. Our external opponents not so much. They are not stupid or tired. They are not lazy. They are coming for us.
This is going to get solved, one way or another. If we don't arrest the decline into idiocy, then idiocy will suicide itself and take us with it at some point. It's not if, it's when. I don't know that an inflection point is going to be produced by one signal event. So far it appears not to be the case. Maybe it's not bad enough yet. But the evidence that bad ideas lead to really bad outcomes is all over the place, everywhere.
The Air Force didn't kill George Floyd, obviously. The cop who was mostly guilty of being dumb and being in the wrong place at the wrong time didn't kill him either. George Floyd OD'd on narcotics. His autopsy shows this clearly. Had the police never arrested him, there is a good chance he would have just collapsed and died by himself. The EMT's had a hard time getting through the crowd of angry racialist wokesters hassling/threatening the panicked police. This didn't help the unfortunate Mr. Floyd get some Narcan in a timely fashion, which probably would have pulled him out of his death spiral.
DEI won't save future George FLoyds. But it will kill the Air Force and every other institution that allows it to metastasize. It's already happening. The best and the brightest will figure out how to succeed without the traditional elite pathways, which have been outed as corrupt, mediocre, and hostile to productive individuals. Eventually, the elites will either reassert and champion the idea of individual excellence, or they will pass into irrelevancy. The market decides, whether its the market of ideas or money or any other dimension of human interaction. Where you sell a product or a service, competition never stops. No government can overcome this without rendering itself instantly into obsolescence. Because somebody else is going to attract your citizens, your capital, your future. It's merely a question of how much farther we allow ourselves to fall.
Excellent piece. As a retired Infantry/Aviation officer I can tell you it’s spot on. I failed my EIB 4 times. You see the new Chief of Naval Operations? I’m sure she got the job because she’s super qualified. China and Russia must just laugh their asses off at us.
Dear white colonel,” Col. Ben Jonsson wrote in the Air Force Times, “you and I set the culture, drive the calendar, and create the policies at most of our installations around the Air Force. If we do not take the time to learn, to show humility, to address our blind spots around race, and to agree that we are not as objective as we think and our system is not as fair as we think, then our Air Force will not rise above George Floyd’s murder.”
The air force had nothing to do with that criminal's death. It was the overdose of chinese drugs that killed him.
This DIE nonsense is going to turn our military into a social club filled with inept people.
This piece and the one Chris wrote for The Blaze are great but be sure to read an equally superb piece in The World WarII Museum entitled "United States v. 2LT Jack R. Robinson" by Erin Clancey The link can be found in the Substack by Chris.
Everyone is so racist he made Colonel and going for General. He should be disqualified for spitting on everyone who helped him and blatant idiocy. But he will probably be the next Chief of Staff in our increasingly evil and stupid regime.
Having served right before and after 9/11, I can confirm this.
All my Drill Sergeants were black... I barely even noticed.
They had, however, already started to ramp up the affirmative action - especially in the commissioned officer ranks - and dangling citizenship in front of some third-world foreigners. But even they were a different type of immigrant than we see today. They generally LOVED America, the military, and our history. They mostly just desperately wanted to be a part of our great nation and were willing to do some hard work to earn it.
Most of our problems, including this one, are easy to solve. We have most of the laws and regulations on the books already. Discrimination based on immutable characteristics had been mostly ILLEGAL in America, and definitely in the military.
If America wasn't already the most diverse nation in history BEFORE the institution of ridiculous anti-American diversity laws, then who was?
Why doesn't ANY other country or military seem to suffer from the lack of diversity you claim is fatal to a nation? Why do they always hate when "diversity" goes the other way, like in South Africa or British India? The colonists brought prosperity, technology, and innovation to the countries they colonized while the modern day diversity colonists bring lower wages, crime, and a socialist ideology that has destroyed every country it has infected.
I'm a Navy brat, born in the 50's, and I can tell you that our white household hosted several of my father's black comrades. And he was a southern boy. Belonging to the American military was a prestige job, especially following the depression and WWII, and those jobs were available to everyone who qualified. People assumed that military members were competent and professional. That trust and respect has been practically obliterated in the last 20 years, and much of that is due to this kind of nonsense.
I served for 6-years in the forward-airborne infantry (2/504PIR -2/75Rbat) and was deployed places under pretty wild conditions. I had such respect for my leadership during these deployments.
I DO NOT have that same respect now. Matter of fact, I wouldn’t join today if given that choice. Too high a chance of getting wiped off the board b/c bad decisions by DEI, CRT combat officers placed in leadership roles because of skin color.
In forward-deployed combat situations, IF you make bad decisions, people die.
This is not entirely new. I served (US Army) 1974-78, and back then if there were X number of ranks on the promotion list for the next rank, and not enough were black or Hispanic, the next black and Hispanic soldiers were moved up onto the list, bumping the same number of white candidates off the list (moving them down the list for the next round of promotions).
In the companies I served in (the last in a mech infantry battalion), I had a total of four first sergeants, two at each post, three black, one white. One of our black first shirts was so beloved, we called him "the Chocolate Chip" (and "Chip" was painted in cursive on the frame of his jeep's windscreen). We always tried to do the right thing, not for fear of bringing Chip's wrath upon us, but because we didn't want to "let the Chip down." We worked our butts off for him.
OTOH, the black first sergeant who followed him was an equal-opportunity promotion, and probably had been through most of his career, as his shortcomings were immediately apparent. At the time, the first shirt was responsible for bringing chow out to the field for the battalion's scout platoon (in which I was a squad leader), because on an exercise we could be spread out all to hell across the German countryside. It quickly became apparent that he couldn't even read a map. And it got worse. He was universally unliked, not for his color, but for his incompetence and shortcomings as a leader.
As an aside, I had the distinction to serve (in an armored cavalry platoon) under SFC James Lamarr (a black man), the finest soldier I ever met. A combat vet, he was task-oriented, eminently fair, and concerned for our welfare and the success of the mission at all times. I get choked up just thinking about him.
Growing up as a Navy Junior in the 50s, 60s and early 70s, while my father rose in rank from a lieutenant to a vice admiral, I could see how the military far exceeded the general population in addressing and resolving the effects of racist thinking. It was a conscientious program that provided results that from my perspective far exceeded what the rest of the country was achieving. It strikes me as too facile for persons on either side of the racial divide to resort to racist thinking--whether to excuse any particular person’s lack of progress, or to attribute racism to the reasons behind a superior’s decision.
Yup. Obama drove out all the warriors with this shit. But, in the long run, it’s ok. We don’t go to war anymore to win; haven’t done so since August, 1945, so competency is not required. Not only did we take 15 years and a few trillion dollars to not defeat a buncha illiterates with only small arms and black pajamas, we did a repeat for 20 years when the next team wore white pajamas, then we gifted them $85B in modern equipment and now are paying them $160,000,000 per month for the privilege of having been defeated & chased outta the country by them. Just need men to quit enlisting & we’ll be fine. We’ll still pay about a trillion a year for nuthin, but ... FWIW, I’m USAFA ‘76.
Meritocracy is how everything should work. Now, in reality, almost nothing is a pure meritocracy. The military is no exception, but perfect isn't on the table. We strive for perfection. We rarely get there. When we get close, we're doing pretty damned good. There's always an angle or a hook that some people can work. It's not right, but politics happens. I was never in the military. But I've seen jocks at elite prep schools and universities who were dumber than a box of rocks, and the children of prominent power brokers, who were degenerates. I've seen doctors with big credentials who I wouldn't let take care of my cat. Those of us in the rank and file of smart enough and lucky enough to get into those institutions at the time, couldn't get away with being stupid or degenerate. Today those same institutions are a sad husk of what they used to be. They've beclowned themselves with trite, temporarily gratifying collectivist half-baked ideas which fall apart on even cursory inspection. Why? You tell me. Greed, stupidity, conformity, inertia, baby boomer cosplay radicals trying to relive the 1960's, more factors abound no doubt. Sure, there are still some superstar students and faculty, but there is a lot of fluff in there. And it's not benign fluff. It's fluff coated in the corrosive acid of DEI and other assorted trendy yet harmful ideas that have captured the imaginations of the dilettantes in the power class. The institutions suffer, and good, constructive people who could take advantage of opportunities are left out so that some ridiculous, destructive nonsense can be indulged.
We can't afford this. We can't afford institutionalized stupidity and incompetence, particularly in critical technical professions. The military constitutes a profession with an expansive knowledge repository and stringent requirements for excellence in order to successfully complete complex tasks and missions. Yes, they break stuff and kill people, but it's not nearly that simple. Same idea with Medicine, Aviation, Engineering, Law, many other professions. Putting incompetent, ideologically driven people who can't do the basic thing in there is an instant recipe for failure and degradation of the professional system. And we are well into it throughout the West. Our external opponents not so much. They are not stupid or tired. They are not lazy. They are coming for us.
This is going to get solved, one way or another. If we don't arrest the decline into idiocy, then idiocy will suicide itself and take us with it at some point. It's not if, it's when. I don't know that an inflection point is going to be produced by one signal event. So far it appears not to be the case. Maybe it's not bad enough yet. But the evidence that bad ideas lead to really bad outcomes is all over the place, everywhere.
The Air Force didn't kill George Floyd, obviously. The cop who was mostly guilty of being dumb and being in the wrong place at the wrong time didn't kill him either. George Floyd OD'd on narcotics. His autopsy shows this clearly. Had the police never arrested him, there is a good chance he would have just collapsed and died by himself. The EMT's had a hard time getting through the crowd of angry racialist wokesters hassling/threatening the panicked police. This didn't help the unfortunate Mr. Floyd get some Narcan in a timely fashion, which probably would have pulled him out of his death spiral.
DEI won't save future George FLoyds. But it will kill the Air Force and every other institution that allows it to metastasize. It's already happening. The best and the brightest will figure out how to succeed without the traditional elite pathways, which have been outed as corrupt, mediocre, and hostile to productive individuals. Eventually, the elites will either reassert and champion the idea of individual excellence, or they will pass into irrelevancy. The market decides, whether its the market of ideas or money or any other dimension of human interaction. Where you sell a product or a service, competition never stops. No government can overcome this without rendering itself instantly into obsolescence. Because somebody else is going to attract your citizens, your capital, your future. It's merely a question of how much farther we allow ourselves to fall.
But it's so warm and comforting to know that you've been bombed or tortured by a Latinx lesbian, isn't it!
Excellent piece. As a retired Infantry/Aviation officer I can tell you it’s spot on. I failed my EIB 4 times. You see the new Chief of Naval Operations? I’m sure she got the job because she’s super qualified. China and Russia must just laugh their asses off at us.
Not sure why this particular travesty makes me feel so despairing of what's become of my country.
I guess they're fine with getting us all killed, white, black, red, yellow, whatever. Oh (head slap), I guess that was the idea.
Dear white colonel,” Col. Ben Jonsson wrote in the Air Force Times, “you and I set the culture, drive the calendar, and create the policies at most of our installations around the Air Force. If we do not take the time to learn, to show humility, to address our blind spots around race, and to agree that we are not as objective as we think and our system is not as fair as we think, then our Air Force will not rise above George Floyd’s murder.”
The air force had nothing to do with that criminal's death. It was the overdose of chinese drugs that killed him.
This DIE nonsense is going to turn our military into a social club filled with inept people.
This piece and the one Chris wrote for The Blaze are great but be sure to read an equally superb piece in The World WarII Museum entitled "United States v. 2LT Jack R. Robinson" by Erin Clancey The link can be found in the Substack by Chris.
Everyone is so racist he made Colonel and going for General. He should be disqualified for spitting on everyone who helped him and blatant idiocy. But he will probably be the next Chief of Staff in our increasingly evil and stupid regime.
Having served right before and after 9/11, I can confirm this.
All my Drill Sergeants were black... I barely even noticed.
They had, however, already started to ramp up the affirmative action - especially in the commissioned officer ranks - and dangling citizenship in front of some third-world foreigners. But even they were a different type of immigrant than we see today. They generally LOVED America, the military, and our history. They mostly just desperately wanted to be a part of our great nation and were willing to do some hard work to earn it.
Most of our problems, including this one, are easy to solve. We have most of the laws and regulations on the books already. Discrimination based on immutable characteristics had been mostly ILLEGAL in America, and definitely in the military.
If America wasn't already the most diverse nation in history BEFORE the institution of ridiculous anti-American diversity laws, then who was?
Why doesn't ANY other country or military seem to suffer from the lack of diversity you claim is fatal to a nation? Why do they always hate when "diversity" goes the other way, like in South Africa or British India? The colonists brought prosperity, technology, and innovation to the countries they colonized while the modern day diversity colonists bring lower wages, crime, and a socialist ideology that has destroyed every country it has infected.
I'm a Navy brat, born in the 50's, and I can tell you that our white household hosted several of my father's black comrades. And he was a southern boy. Belonging to the American military was a prestige job, especially following the depression and WWII, and those jobs were available to everyone who qualified. People assumed that military members were competent and professional. That trust and respect has been practically obliterated in the last 20 years, and much of that is due to this kind of nonsense.
I served for 6-years in the forward-airborne infantry (2/504PIR -2/75Rbat) and was deployed places under pretty wild conditions. I had such respect for my leadership during these deployments.
I DO NOT have that same respect now. Matter of fact, I wouldn’t join today if given that choice. Too high a chance of getting wiped off the board b/c bad decisions by DEI, CRT combat officers placed in leadership roles because of skin color.
In forward-deployed combat situations, IF you make bad decisions, people die.
That is all.
This is not entirely new. I served (US Army) 1974-78, and back then if there were X number of ranks on the promotion list for the next rank, and not enough were black or Hispanic, the next black and Hispanic soldiers were moved up onto the list, bumping the same number of white candidates off the list (moving them down the list for the next round of promotions).
In the companies I served in (the last in a mech infantry battalion), I had a total of four first sergeants, two at each post, three black, one white. One of our black first shirts was so beloved, we called him "the Chocolate Chip" (and "Chip" was painted in cursive on the frame of his jeep's windscreen). We always tried to do the right thing, not for fear of bringing Chip's wrath upon us, but because we didn't want to "let the Chip down." We worked our butts off for him.
OTOH, the black first sergeant who followed him was an equal-opportunity promotion, and probably had been through most of his career, as his shortcomings were immediately apparent. At the time, the first shirt was responsible for bringing chow out to the field for the battalion's scout platoon (in which I was a squad leader), because on an exercise we could be spread out all to hell across the German countryside. It quickly became apparent that he couldn't even read a map. And it got worse. He was universally unliked, not for his color, but for his incompetence and shortcomings as a leader.
As an aside, I had the distinction to serve (in an armored cavalry platoon) under SFC James Lamarr (a black man), the finest soldier I ever met. A combat vet, he was task-oriented, eminently fair, and concerned for our welfare and the success of the mission at all times. I get choked up just thinking about him.
Our political system has become a sick old man, like the majority of its leaders.
By contrast, all of our enemies are very much focused on "task competence."
Growing up as a Navy Junior in the 50s, 60s and early 70s, while my father rose in rank from a lieutenant to a vice admiral, I could see how the military far exceeded the general population in addressing and resolving the effects of racist thinking. It was a conscientious program that provided results that from my perspective far exceeded what the rest of the country was achieving. It strikes me as too facile for persons on either side of the racial divide to resort to racist thinking--whether to excuse any particular person’s lack of progress, or to attribute racism to the reasons behind a superior’s decision.