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[–] 73 points 3 weeks ago (9 children)

Yes it absolutely can be.

A, he has fired over 100 senior officers in the chain of command with little to no notice or turnover and promoted up sycophants with no experience and the only requirement is pledging fealty to the king. My father-in-law was a logistics officer in the Marines. When he retired a decade ago, it was required that he have a full two-year turnover with the incoming officer to cover all of the logistical details for the MEF. They flat out wouldn't approve his retirement with less notice than that. When the Log-O in my unit got their promotion notice, it was over a year before they pinned and moved to their next command because of the amount of turnover needed. And this was just battalion level. Under this idiot, turnover is a few weeks. If that.

B, we are 19 months into this shit show. Not 10. And that ignores the 4 years of damage he did his first term that can't be undone. You can't fire officers and senior enlisted with 20+ years of experience and replace them with new ones in 4 years. The linear passage of time just doesn't work like that.

Efficient logistics is the first thing to go with incompetent leadership. It's the single most important and fragile piece of the military. And it's seen not just in the military, but in the commercial side as well. Bad top-down leadership is the quickest way to destroy an organization.

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  • [–] 12 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

    Fair enough. I just didn't think the military was so fragile that a single election could turn it from the world police into the keystone kops.

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  • [–] 13 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    Entropy, my guy. It applies to everything, not just physics. Breaking things is and always will be vastly easier than building them up.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 weeks ago

    Maybe people engaging in such bravado laden claims without knowing the reality along with anyone reading this who didn't know beforehand how fragile complex systems can be, even the US military - maybe everyone will think twice before letting a corrupt evil moron get elected just to "shake things up".

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  • [–] 9 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    Failure of the entire system is almost always is always at critical bottlenecks. Avoiding these bottlenecks is a key component of military and economic competency.

    The U.S. military and economy has been declining for decades. Why? Consolidation of companies into mega-corporations. Less competition = more cost for less results. Less players also means more potential bottlenecks in the system.

    It's been being held together by a shoestring for decades now. It's getting more and more unstable as time goes by. This is where gross incompetence at the leadership level can sink not just an industry but an entire nation.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 weeks ago* (2 children)

    Thanks for the detailed explanation.

    I feel like this applies to a lot of places, and I can draw parallels to prior workplaces where things were going downhill. If you don't give your people what they need to do the job.... It does not get done.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    It applies to every interaction between two or more human beings.

    This is precisely why in the anarchist world, the emphasis on positions of responsibility (as opposed to positions of power within a standard hierarchy) are so goddamn important and the one of the most misunderstood tenets.

    You cannot perform long term planning without a long term view, and you cannot achieve a long term view, without looking from the needed vantage point for a long time.

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