Norman Ornstein

Generals? What Generals? The bar for becoming a general officer is in the fucking basement. You can see a trend in my posts as of late. I've gone full bluntness on this topic since nothing else seems to work. We spent twenty years losing wars while rewarding the people who learned how to survive the system that was losing them. Strategic failure became “complexity.” No victory became “persistent engagement.” Nobody got fired, everyone got another star, and the bureaucracy learned the oldest trick in Washington: rename failure until it sounds like expertise. Then came the cultural surrender. The same generals who couldn't produce victory abroad stood almost mute while the formation was carved up at home by race, sex, identity, extremism stand downs, demographic targets, and an expanding DEI bureaucracy. They watched warfighting institutions absorb the language and priorities of academia and HR, then called the corrosion “leadership.” That's the stunning indictment nobody wants to touch: a general is supposed to protect the formation from threats outside it and rot inside it. Too many did neither. We promoted custodians of decline and called them strategic leaders. I'm sick and tired of having to pretend the system isn't absolutely cracked in half by people who serve themselves over the nation. No more.