Honor, Courage, Commitment - Will They Survive?

      The Iraq War had been going badly for a couple of years when President George W. Bush fired Donald Rumsfeld and appointed Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense and General David Petraeus as Commander, Multi-National Force – Iraq.  Both men were known not only for professional expertise but also for a willingness to speak truth to power.  Bush deliberately selected who he believed were the best men to solve the problem in Iraq.  He did not choose people who were slavishly devoted to him.  He then approved their new strategy, called “The Surge,” and placed his entire support behind it.       Shortly after this, President Bush gave a speech at the U.S. Naval War College at which he laid out the new strategy.  I was in the audience at that speech.  Prior to it, I had been strongly in opposition to Bush’s Iraq War as much because of the arrogance of the President and his assistants as because of the flaws in his strat...

         Since President Obama’s administration, the United States has been attempting to place greater strategic emphasis on the Western Pacific and Indian Ocean region.   The reason is obvious.   China, as the United States’ newest near-peer competitor, has made no secret about its strategic objectives to reunify with Taiwan, monopolize the natural resources of the South China Sea, and undermine American power and influence in the Western Pacific.         Unfortunately, the United States has been distracted by crises in Europe (Ukraine) and the middle east, making it difficult, in a resource-constrained environment, to move forward in the Indian Ocean-Pacific Ocean (INDOPAC) region.   Still, under President Biden and his first-rate national security team, progress has been made.   Will it continue in a Trump administration?      The most important first step was to reorganize the historically import...

       Military alliances are important because they promote their members’ military effectiveness.   Military effectiveness is a measure of the application of military means and ways, to achieve the goal of peace, at least a peace that is beneficial to the victor.   A successful alliance promotes mutual security by aggregating each member’s military effectiveness into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.   This permits the alliance to better use military power in the service of its strategic objectives.         Alliances of democratic nations also promote the practice of lawful, restrained, warfare.   It should be no surprise that the original signatories of the North Atlantic Treaty also led the international effort to define, through the Nuremburg Principles of 1943, and codify, through the Geneva Convention of 1949, International Humanitarian Law (IHL).   As defined by the International Commi...

        In 1973 in Valencia Spain, Pedro Arrupe, S.J., the Superior General of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) stated the following to a group of Jesuit high school alumni:   Education for justice has become in recent years one of the chief concerns of the Church. Why? Because there is a new awareness in the Church that participation in the promotion of justice and the liberation of the oppressed is a constitutive element of the mission which Our Lord has entrusted to her. Impelled by this awareness, the Church is now engaged in a massive effort to education – or rather to re-educate – herself, her children, and all men and women so that we may all “lead our life in its entirety… in accord with the evangelical principles of personal and social morality to be expressed in a living Christian witness.   Today our prime educational objective must be to form men-for-others; men who will live not for themselves but for God and his Christ – for the God-m...

       My favorite work of fiction is Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny .   It is, without a doubt, the great novel of the United States Navy and a contender for the title of “great American novel.”   It won the Pulitzer Prize and was subsequently made into a Broadway play ( The Caine Mutiny Court Martial ) and a seven Academy Award nominated feature film.   You can find a detailed summary of the novel here: ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Caine_Mutiny ).        The book tells the story of the coming of age of Willie Kieth during his service as a junior officer onboard U.S.S. Caine , a destroyer-minesweeper in the Pacific during the Second World War.   Willie’s most important experience during his time in the Caine is his service under the martinet and apparently cowardly commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Queeg, culminating in the captain’s unprecedented relief during the crisis of a typhoon at sea by his executive o...

Something so few Americans, especially Trump and his supporters, understand. Video: West Point cadet’s answer makes pollster emotional | CNN

        Many in the chattering class are obsessing over President Biden and questions about his fitness for office.  At the White House Press Secretary’s briefing yesterday, Karine Jean-Pierre fielded an hour of questions such as, “Does the President need a nap every day?”  “Why hasn’t he released ALL of his medical records?”  “Why has it taken him SOOO long to speak to Congressional leaders, hold a press conference, or waited so long to participate in an unscripted interview?”       Dissatisfied with the administration’s answers, the chattering class and democratic members of Congress are increasingly calling for Biden to step down so that … what?   They are not very clear on the “what”.   Meanwhile, they forget that President Biden has already been “out there” during a very successful Presidency.   They forget that his legislative accomplishments could not have come about without significant public ...