Thank YOU! Much appreciated! Since I was forced to cut ties with Vichy NYT & WAPO, Substack has been an INVALUABLE replacement, and I'm VERY aware that an awful lot of insightful & honestly BRILLIANT writers like you would NEVER be able to find an audience if you were obliged to suck up to petty Queeg-like tyrranical editors. They see talent and want to brutalize you out of jealousy or just plain malice. Worse still, if a hapless writer is somehow able to find a niche DESPITE this hazing, the sadistic ex-boss will claim credit for "mentoring" you. WTF.
Our father was a WW2 USMC staff sgt who served in China, and also had to grow up in depression America as the oldest of 7 children, forced to be "man of the house" in the absence of an alcoholic traveling salesman father. Suffice it to say that his hardscrabble upbringing & subsequent USMC service equipped him POORLY for postwar life as a husband or father. Indeed, growing up in the '60's, what we now recognize as "domestic violence" was kind of a DEFAULT fathering style for hordes of ex-GI's going through life resentful of the crummy jobs they had to take, and the grind and noise of parenting, which they ostensibly "wanted," but in practice probably not. So I always squirm to hear the kneejerk praise lavished on these "Greatest Generation" soldiers. I'm sure it was possible to come out of that cauldron of the Depression & WW2 as a caring & conscious father, but me & my sibs & our classmates saw very little of that.
Thanks to DVD, I've been able to really dig in & internalize the GENIUS of actors & writers interpreting life & reflecting it back to us in a way that profoundly deepens my own insight. Humphrey Bogart/ Queeg was a HUGE example, and "Caine Mutiny" just shimmers on MULTIPLE levels. I won't burrow too deeply here, but there are a few other "war" movies that have also triggered INTENSE top-to-bottom recalibration of my own life experience. "Man in the Grey Flannel Suit", "Gettysburg", "Letters from Iwo Jima" and "Rush" (Ron Howard) also come to mind offhand, and I know I shortchange MANY other OUTSTANDING movies here just for brevity.
I could NEVER endure the casual brutality of military discipline thanks to my father, but I recognize that we're NEVER gonna live in a world where standing armies aren't NECESSARY. Especially RIGHT NOW I fear that our service branches & leadership are rotted out with decades of complacency & institutional rot even more perniciously than the Imperial courts of 1914 were. Layer aggressively incompetent political & militarily leadership on top of ossified & siloed military inertia, and I fear that the USA truly IS NOT the "World's Strongest Military". I absolutely don't have insight you've piled up after decades of service, but I live daily with the fear that we're gonna pay TWICE, first for the incalculable public wealth plundered by the very REAL military-industrial complex, and then pay AGAIN when the glittering aircraft carriers & tanks by tesla get sent down to Davy Jones' locker or get blasted to smithereens in a desert when their software locks up at the hands of an enemy who isn't gonna fight the war we planned for.
Enough for now, but grateful THANKS anew for the hard nudge you deal me (and surely other readers) to rewire our own thinking about our military and politics in this new age of chaos.
You make good points. But, whose job is it to initiate strict CONTROL of “uniform” standards when there exists so much service-wide EXECUTION variation to the uniform that it is neither uniform nor standard. I shared Wilsbach’s frustration with radically differing uniforms and grooming standards on bases across the MAJCOM when he was COMACC. This non-standardization manifestation was a result of long standing neglect and/or inappropriate delegation to base or MAJCOM LEVEL supplements, for which variation guidance bookends were insufficient.
Maybe I’m a dinosaur, but I grew up in a service that valued “oneness”, belonging to something bigger than ourselves; a implied strategic philosophy that has devolved to individualistic focus, not team-ness. I’m certainly not suggesting 4-stars micromanaging uniform enforcement, but I am saying the buck has to stop somewhere and the chief and his senior enlisted advisors should be that standards bookend guidance control backstop with base leadership being the decentralized execution enforcers. It worked well in my day. My NCO leaders made sure we knew what the standards were with implied enforcement sword of Damocles being the incentive.
I liken this to operational combat and training flight standards. They ensure that when folks go from one base to another(including deployment), they don’t experience unit-based execution standard variations that might induce unanticipated execution variation. Some little things matter and we accept uniform clothing and tactics standardization in combat units. Why is that wrong for the Air Force as a whole since every airman contributes to that mission.
There is overlap in how we are thinking about this problem. There is considerable fatigue on my part, having lived through decades of USAF generals who had trouble locating their spines when it mattered but loved changing uniforms, introducing new ones, banging on endlessly about superficiality, and meanwhile doing nothing to actually cultivate the sense of unity and belonging that would make uniform standards take care of themselves.
The squadron is where the USAF finds its feeling of unity and sense of belonging. Without properly resourced and well led squadrons, we will never ever feel again the way we did in the 90s. The story of breaking the squadron by consolidating/sharing manpower, removing organic support, and eroding commander authority is the story of how we went from a disciplined service that looked and acted a certain way to a collection of people with the same insignia.
I’ve never stopped believing this: when you instil values and people buy into them, you don’t need coercion, conformity, compliance, or top-down controls. Things like uniform standards take care of themselves when you have morale. Wilsbach and many others are trying to do this in reverse, and that won’t work.
I flash instantly to "The Caine Mutiny" movie of 1950 starring Humphrey Bogart as petty, fatally neurotic Captain Queeg rattling the ball bearings in his hand when stressed while commanding the ship with vindictive & blatant sadism. Every human alive has had to endure some asshole boss who lusts for command just so they can indulge their worst impulses by punching down on their hapless subordinates. Predictably this is massively corrosive not only in the casual cruelty that gets spitefully inflicted, but also in how it encourages and rewards junior officers who see clearly that the path to promotion depends on their willingness to suck up to the depravo boss through malicious acts of "leadership" lashed across the backs of their own underlings.
We're right now living the consequences of this psychotic mentality fully enshrined at the highest level of government,with craven fluffers like Hegseth, Patel, Zeldin, Sean Duffy, Todd Blanche, etc., elevated to command they are RAMPANTLY unfit for, and serving the whims of a fogbound and degenerate Fuhrer, now in the terminal throes of dung-flinging senility. Complete with a Fuhrerbunker, now under construction.
This is no way to run a government, and rewarding the most vindictive and ruthless with military leadership is no less destructive. I fear whether these norms of barbaric cruelty and supplication to grossly unfit leadership haven't already tipped us into a death spiral.
When voters can't recognize the qualities of human decency and empathy when selecting leaders, "democracy" has failed. At the very least, our United States has willfully abandoned our hard-won leadership of the "free world," and cast us into the chaos of every-man-for-himself barbarism.
One of my favorite movies of all time, and I was obviously influenced by watching it as a young lad. I don’t have many memories with my Grandpa Frank, but my first time watching Caine Mutiny is one of them.
He says to me “let’s watch one of my favorite movies.” I ask him what it’s about. “Strawberries,” he says. He didn’t want my mind to starting spinning like a gyro about the actual substance. I was only 13 or 14, but he obviously knew me better than I knew me.
We watch it on a VHS tape that’s been recorded from TV, then re-watched so many times it’s about to melt. I am entranced the whole time. When it’s over, I sit there ruminating. Then he does something I didn’t see coming. Instead of wandering off for food or a cigar, he sits there with me and we do a debrief.
He puts me back in the scenario and asks me questions to guide me through it as both Queeg and the mutineers. He’s asking me how I would handle things, challenging my answers, making me reconsider or at least understand the consequences of each option.
He tricks me into resignation. “You can’t win,” I say.
Finding his best small town Ohio poetry, he responds “can’t never did nuthin.”
The message stuck with me. Futility isn’t an endstate. It’s a signal to dig down and find the courage to do what must be done, whether you can “win” or not.
Thanks for reading and engaging, Sam. I appreciate our dialogue and learn something every time.
I don’t think our overlap is very comprehensive. I literally grew up in USAF Rescue in the late 70’s and early 80’s, also an enlisted maverick who succeeded in becoming a combat rescue weapons officer who became a weapons school squadron commander. I too, lived through the various good and bad senior leaders in those 4 decades; more bad than good in my career. Contrary to the necessities you cite (adequate resourcing and good leadership) we were always under-resourced, and still are. Imagine a poorly funded insurance policy whose small premiums; always paid late and with complaints, and with disproportionately high deductibles are the standard. That’s the legacy environment Rescue has endured for over 7 decades. Yet through great leadership and an individually-based dedication to the mission both in wartime and peacetime, we found extraordinarily good morale, especially after a successful rescue and even after failing to find our IP or getting there too late, we always gave it our best. Being a part of that bigger whole made us proud. Staying true to something as mundane as uniform standards was just a simple daily task that pride wouldn’t let us neglect. In our endeavors, we each lived by the Kight credo: “…these thing I do That Others May Live”. In my view, when you neglect the little things, bigger things eventually follow. I just see the issue through a different lens TC.
Now if we have a discussion about how recent trends toward careerism; which causes a host of poor career path box checking actions that have nothing to do with Air Power, leadership or mentorship, but everything to do with personal career path self-protection/advancement, then we’ll share a toast and maybe solve all the USAF’s problems.
I'll try to work up a more complete response, but I can tell you right off that these problems are not limited to the Air Force.
Thank you, Tony. This is one reason I left our beloved Air Force after seven years. This was cathartic.
Thank YOU! Much appreciated! Since I was forced to cut ties with Vichy NYT & WAPO, Substack has been an INVALUABLE replacement, and I'm VERY aware that an awful lot of insightful & honestly BRILLIANT writers like you would NEVER be able to find an audience if you were obliged to suck up to petty Queeg-like tyrranical editors. They see talent and want to brutalize you out of jealousy or just plain malice. Worse still, if a hapless writer is somehow able to find a niche DESPITE this hazing, the sadistic ex-boss will claim credit for "mentoring" you. WTF.
Our father was a WW2 USMC staff sgt who served in China, and also had to grow up in depression America as the oldest of 7 children, forced to be "man of the house" in the absence of an alcoholic traveling salesman father. Suffice it to say that his hardscrabble upbringing & subsequent USMC service equipped him POORLY for postwar life as a husband or father. Indeed, growing up in the '60's, what we now recognize as "domestic violence" was kind of a DEFAULT fathering style for hordes of ex-GI's going through life resentful of the crummy jobs they had to take, and the grind and noise of parenting, which they ostensibly "wanted," but in practice probably not. So I always squirm to hear the kneejerk praise lavished on these "Greatest Generation" soldiers. I'm sure it was possible to come out of that cauldron of the Depression & WW2 as a caring & conscious father, but me & my sibs & our classmates saw very little of that.
Thanks to DVD, I've been able to really dig in & internalize the GENIUS of actors & writers interpreting life & reflecting it back to us in a way that profoundly deepens my own insight. Humphrey Bogart/ Queeg was a HUGE example, and "Caine Mutiny" just shimmers on MULTIPLE levels. I won't burrow too deeply here, but there are a few other "war" movies that have also triggered INTENSE top-to-bottom recalibration of my own life experience. "Man in the Grey Flannel Suit", "Gettysburg", "Letters from Iwo Jima" and "Rush" (Ron Howard) also come to mind offhand, and I know I shortchange MANY other OUTSTANDING movies here just for brevity.
I could NEVER endure the casual brutality of military discipline thanks to my father, but I recognize that we're NEVER gonna live in a world where standing armies aren't NECESSARY. Especially RIGHT NOW I fear that our service branches & leadership are rotted out with decades of complacency & institutional rot even more perniciously than the Imperial courts of 1914 were. Layer aggressively incompetent political & militarily leadership on top of ossified & siloed military inertia, and I fear that the USA truly IS NOT the "World's Strongest Military". I absolutely don't have insight you've piled up after decades of service, but I live daily with the fear that we're gonna pay TWICE, first for the incalculable public wealth plundered by the very REAL military-industrial complex, and then pay AGAIN when the glittering aircraft carriers & tanks by tesla get sent down to Davy Jones' locker or get blasted to smithereens in a desert when their software locks up at the hands of an enemy who isn't gonna fight the war we planned for.
Enough for now, but grateful THANKS anew for the hard nudge you deal me (and surely other readers) to rewire our own thinking about our military and politics in this new age of chaos.
TC,
You make good points. But, whose job is it to initiate strict CONTROL of “uniform” standards when there exists so much service-wide EXECUTION variation to the uniform that it is neither uniform nor standard. I shared Wilsbach’s frustration with radically differing uniforms and grooming standards on bases across the MAJCOM when he was COMACC. This non-standardization manifestation was a result of long standing neglect and/or inappropriate delegation to base or MAJCOM LEVEL supplements, for which variation guidance bookends were insufficient.
Maybe I’m a dinosaur, but I grew up in a service that valued “oneness”, belonging to something bigger than ourselves; a implied strategic philosophy that has devolved to individualistic focus, not team-ness. I’m certainly not suggesting 4-stars micromanaging uniform enforcement, but I am saying the buck has to stop somewhere and the chief and his senior enlisted advisors should be that standards bookend guidance control backstop with base leadership being the decentralized execution enforcers. It worked well in my day. My NCO leaders made sure we knew what the standards were with implied enforcement sword of Damocles being the incentive.
I liken this to operational combat and training flight standards. They ensure that when folks go from one base to another(including deployment), they don’t experience unit-based execution standard variations that might induce unanticipated execution variation. Some little things matter and we accept uniform clothing and tactics standardization in combat units. Why is that wrong for the Air Force as a whole since every airman contributes to that mission.
There is overlap in how we are thinking about this problem. There is considerable fatigue on my part, having lived through decades of USAF generals who had trouble locating their spines when it mattered but loved changing uniforms, introducing new ones, banging on endlessly about superficiality, and meanwhile doing nothing to actually cultivate the sense of unity and belonging that would make uniform standards take care of themselves.
The squadron is where the USAF finds its feeling of unity and sense of belonging. Without properly resourced and well led squadrons, we will never ever feel again the way we did in the 90s. The story of breaking the squadron by consolidating/sharing manpower, removing organic support, and eroding commander authority is the story of how we went from a disciplined service that looked and acted a certain way to a collection of people with the same insignia.
I’ve never stopped believing this: when you instil values and people buy into them, you don’t need coercion, conformity, compliance, or top-down controls. Things like uniform standards take care of themselves when you have morale. Wilsbach and many others are trying to do this in reverse, and that won’t work.
I flash instantly to "The Caine Mutiny" movie of 1950 starring Humphrey Bogart as petty, fatally neurotic Captain Queeg rattling the ball bearings in his hand when stressed while commanding the ship with vindictive & blatant sadism. Every human alive has had to endure some asshole boss who lusts for command just so they can indulge their worst impulses by punching down on their hapless subordinates. Predictably this is massively corrosive not only in the casual cruelty that gets spitefully inflicted, but also in how it encourages and rewards junior officers who see clearly that the path to promotion depends on their willingness to suck up to the depravo boss through malicious acts of "leadership" lashed across the backs of their own underlings.
We're right now living the consequences of this psychotic mentality fully enshrined at the highest level of government,with craven fluffers like Hegseth, Patel, Zeldin, Sean Duffy, Todd Blanche, etc., elevated to command they are RAMPANTLY unfit for, and serving the whims of a fogbound and degenerate Fuhrer, now in the terminal throes of dung-flinging senility. Complete with a Fuhrerbunker, now under construction.
This is no way to run a government, and rewarding the most vindictive and ruthless with military leadership is no less destructive. I fear whether these norms of barbaric cruelty and supplication to grossly unfit leadership haven't already tipped us into a death spiral.
When voters can't recognize the qualities of human decency and empathy when selecting leaders, "democracy" has failed. At the very least, our United States has willfully abandoned our hard-won leadership of the "free world," and cast us into the chaos of every-man-for-himself barbarism.
One of my favorite movies of all time, and I was obviously influenced by watching it as a young lad. I don’t have many memories with my Grandpa Frank, but my first time watching Caine Mutiny is one of them.
He says to me “let’s watch one of my favorite movies.” I ask him what it’s about. “Strawberries,” he says. He didn’t want my mind to starting spinning like a gyro about the actual substance. I was only 13 or 14, but he obviously knew me better than I knew me.
We watch it on a VHS tape that’s been recorded from TV, then re-watched so many times it’s about to melt. I am entranced the whole time. When it’s over, I sit there ruminating. Then he does something I didn’t see coming. Instead of wandering off for food or a cigar, he sits there with me and we do a debrief.
He puts me back in the scenario and asks me questions to guide me through it as both Queeg and the mutineers. He’s asking me how I would handle things, challenging my answers, making me reconsider or at least understand the consequences of each option.
He tricks me into resignation. “You can’t win,” I say.
Finding his best small town Ohio poetry, he responds “can’t never did nuthin.”
The message stuck with me. Futility isn’t an endstate. It’s a signal to dig down and find the courage to do what must be done, whether you can “win” or not.
Thanks for reading and engaging, Sam. I appreciate our dialogue and learn something every time.
I don’t think our overlap is very comprehensive. I literally grew up in USAF Rescue in the late 70’s and early 80’s, also an enlisted maverick who succeeded in becoming a combat rescue weapons officer who became a weapons school squadron commander. I too, lived through the various good and bad senior leaders in those 4 decades; more bad than good in my career. Contrary to the necessities you cite (adequate resourcing and good leadership) we were always under-resourced, and still are. Imagine a poorly funded insurance policy whose small premiums; always paid late and with complaints, and with disproportionately high deductibles are the standard. That’s the legacy environment Rescue has endured for over 7 decades. Yet through great leadership and an individually-based dedication to the mission both in wartime and peacetime, we found extraordinarily good morale, especially after a successful rescue and even after failing to find our IP or getting there too late, we always gave it our best. Being a part of that bigger whole made us proud. Staying true to something as mundane as uniform standards was just a simple daily task that pride wouldn’t let us neglect. In our endeavors, we each lived by the Kight credo: “…these thing I do That Others May Live”. In my view, when you neglect the little things, bigger things eventually follow. I just see the issue through a different lens TC.
Now if we have a discussion about how recent trends toward careerism; which causes a host of poor career path box checking actions that have nothing to do with Air Power, leadership or mentorship, but everything to do with personal career path self-protection/advancement, then we’ll share a toast and maybe solve all the USAF’s problems.