Fighting the Last War

 

March 11, 2026, the American aircraft carrier, U.S.S. Ford was disabled and had to withdraw from its post to 200 miles away from combat by a $2,000 Iranian drone, which flew over the water at an altitude for 15 feet, evading the carrier's radar, then jumped up the the flight deck where sailors where refueling an airplane and exploded.

Thus a $13 billion dollar weapon was disabled by a $20,000 drone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH50tJNE3tU&t=122s

Pete Hegseth keeps telling us we are bombing them back to the Stone Age, and the Pentagon is releasing videos showing us playing a video game with Iran, but Mad Dog remembers the war in Vietnam where the U.S. had air supremacy over Hanoi and the whole of both Vietnams, north and south and it didn't matter a damn. The North Vietnamese still beat the U.S., and United the country.

Images of LBJ, standing on the bridge of an American carrier watching the launch of American jets which pummeled targets in Vietnam, dropped napalm, roared louder than lions, all without any effect to win the war.

Crowds cheered as cavalry rode off to fight in the First World War, looking fearsome and proud. But machine guns, barbed wire, trenches and tanks ultimately rendered those horse mounted warriors ridiculous.

Iranian drones may be making American jets and surface ships look impotent and ridiculous.

The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong had multi-leveled tunnels with hospitals and HVAC built in concentric circles around Saigon. None of them were the least bit impeded by those jets roaring over LBJ's head.

Americans: We make a lot of noise, build expensive machines, but we haven't won a lot of wars against really smart determined enemies--not in Afghanistan, not in Vietnam and not, apparently, in Iran.

Backlash

Donald Trump, it has often been said, is simply a backlash to the election of Barack Obama. 

The swing of the pendulum.

Watching the folks lined up behind Mr. Trump at his Kentucky rally a few days ago, it was easy to see the point. Right here in Hampton, watching people arrive to vote at the polls for the recent town elections, we have people in New Hampshire who look just like those Trump backdrop people.

They have stepped right off the pages of "What's the Matter with Kansas," the Thomas Frank 2004 book about how conservatives won the heart of America. One of the portraits Frank presented in that book Mad Dog has never been able to shake was the invective from a man who said his son, who can competently re-wire his home, who has rebuilt truck engines on his farm, who changes out the water heater, uses a computer to plow the fields and who can hit a 90 mph fast ball, could never get into Princeton because his SAT scores aren't high enough and he barely eked out a "C" in Spanish and he flunked calculus.  So his son, according to Princeton, just doesn't have the smarts to merit admission to Princeton.

Nicholas Lemann, now a professor at Columbia, writing in the March 16th New Yorker describes his father driving him as a little boy to Princeton: 

"We'd stand on Nassau Street and drink in the magnificence of the campus, as if it stood for everything great, and also distant in the world. Today Princeton is even more magnificent, with beautiful modern buildings scattered around the Colonial and Gothic ones, and elegant stores lining the street across from the Campus."

Students on campus tours with their parents absorb the message: This is the place where success is made, where the tickets to high paying careers are handed out, where superiority reigns, where merit is rewarded and where lack of merit disqualifies you from a future among the aristocracy. It is the classic embodiment of, "If you work hard and have God given talent, you will prosper. If not, it's your own damn fault."

It is where the tyranny of meritocracy reigns.

Barack Obama was the epitome of all this--the child of a Black man and a white woman--who raised him as a single mother--who, through hard work got from Hawaii to Occidental College in California, then to Columbia University in New York City, then to Harvard Law.

His father was not a rich real estate icon. Obama, a physical specimen, lithe, graceful, played basketball as men play basketball, and he was eloquent, inspiring, everything Mr. Trump is not.

But then, under Obama's administration his Department of Education went off the rails, and he did nothing to rectify that. The Department intervened in the operations of universities, insisting that on campus sexual assault allegations be handled by new protocols which stripped the accused boys of their right to question their accusers, to due process and a fair trial.

At Brown, an engineering student in his third year, found a drunk co-ed in his bed in the wee hours of a fraternity party and he had sex with her. The details have been scarce, but apparently, as reported in the Brown Alumni Monthly, they awoke the next morning, exchanged telephone numbers. When she got back to her dorm, her roommates heard the story and told her she had been date raped. Nobody ever asked if the boy had been drunk, and nobody ever said whether, if he had,  that would have made the slightest difference to his defense before he was expelled, losing three years of hard work in the Department of Engineering, having to pick up the pieces of his shattered career.

This became part of the cloth of "Believe the Woman," where due process went out the window.

At Penn, a male swimmer, who had an undistinguished career, underwent transgender therapy and then competed as a woman swimmer, smashing all records and winning Ivy League championships. Nothing wrong with this, according the the great minds in the Ivy League.

When the President of Harvard was asked by a Harvard alum (Rep. Elise Stefanik) whether she would tolerate on campus calls for the genocide of the Jewish people, the President, Claudine Gay, replied it would depend on the context. In what world is the advocacy for genocide of any people a matter of context?  This is not a difficult or trick question Stefanik said. Of course, you do not need a Harvard diploma to know that much.

After thousands of people lost their homes in the financial crisis of 2008, men went to jail for their roles in the scams which precipitated the fiasco, in Iceland, Denmark and Scandinavia. But President Obama did not send a single man to jail in the United States.

Speaking together, in "The Wire," two political campaign managers throwing down drinks at a Baltimore bar bemoan the choices made by their successful candidates. "You work so hard for them. You may even come to believe in them. But when they win, they always disappoint you."

So, do we have the failures of Barack Obama to blame for the successes and excesses of Donald Trump?

Yes, partly we do. We see the failure of the winning liberal coalition to discipline and moderate its own members, to prevent those who worked for the winning team from doing really stupid things.

 

But, in some measure, Trump may have been inevitable after the triumph of liberalism--it was bound to go off the rails, just as Trump has been doomed to go off the cliff. 

The problem now is, how do we get the pendulum headed back in the other direction?

How Wars Are Won

 

As any YouTube addict will know, World War II was won by brave and determined soldiers, good generals and competent armies using high tech devices like proximity fuses to shoot down airplanes and, the ultimate high tech device, that product of really abstruse minds, the atomic bomb.

During that war, the US produced 9,000 airplanes a month and Hitler said that was simply impossible.

It produced 150 aircraft carriers during that war, swamping the Japanese Navy, which, by the end of the war had only 5 functioning carriers.

Despite the Japanese ethos of war, despite the willingness of soldiers and kamikaze pilots to die rather than to surrender, the United States methodically turned warfare from a test of courage and physical endurance into a contest between the manufacturing capacities of nations.

During this current war with Iran, American airplanes and Israeli Iron Dome missiles have been shooting down Iranian missiles and drones and we have been told the Iranians have shot their wad and that rocket launchings are down 90% as they have run out of missiles. So, America, we are told, has again simply overwhelmed its enemy with industrial and technological power.

But, the truth is, we are likely seeing a classic example of David slaying Goliath using a weapon which may look unimposing (a slingshot) but which can be used at a distance, with some stealth and which is superior to a sword which looks fearsome but is simply not as effective for the type of conflict a warrior of small stature can use in asymmetric battle.

A recent analysis of a simple "kill mission" involving an RAF high tech stealth fighter plane accompanied by two other war planes, shooting down an Iranian missile is both illuminating and sobering. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVyAiZnvQhE&t=210s

The airplane was successful in destroying the drone, but the cost of the missiles, the cost of keeping the airplanes in the air was in the millions, all to destroy a $50,000 missile.

And Iran is nowhere even close to having exhausted its supply of drones and missiles. In fact, the United States and Israel have had to import Ukrainian soldiers knowledgeable in drone warfare to help them. After abandoning the Ukrainians in their fight against Russia, the US is now begging them for help, something which the Ukrainian drone warrior interviewed on the PBS Newshour had a hard time not crowing about--he managed to suppress a smirk and said only that he was glad he could help the US in our hour of need.

It turns out the cost of keeping a high tech warplane in the air has been costed out per minute of flight and that is a major Achilles heel in the United States' war planning.  Sure, we can hunt down a ten cent missile with a thousand dollar missile, but who wins that war?

The spectacle of Mr. Hegseth crowing about how we are reigning down death, destruction and mayhem on the Iranians and pounding his tattooed chest about how badly we are skunking our opponents reminds Mad Dog of watching his son step off a wrestling mat, having just pinned his opponent, who looked so overwhelmingly muscled and intimidating at the start of the match.

"Oh, how I love to destroy those jacked up [muscular] guys. They come stomping out looking all fearsome, but they have to be helped back to their chairs looking like little boys crying for their mothers."

Why that memory surfaces now, watching Mr. Trump's chest thumping boys do their frat boy taunting is something to ponder.

Wither to War?

 

Constitution of the United States

Article 1

Section 8

Paragraph 11: The Congress Shall have the power to declare War, grant letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water.

NB: Letters of Marque and Reprisal are legal documents allowing private citizens, e.g. captains of sailing vessels, to seize ships belonging to another nation, i.e. to make privateers legal, the forerunners of "contractors."

Stephen Decatur & Barbary Pirates

Congress declared war for the first time in 1812, voting to approve President Madison's request for war against Britain, which had been kidnapping American sailors and pressing them into service on British war ships, and which had been fomenting Indian wars against the United States along its western borders.  

Only on four other occasions has Congress declared war:

1. War against Mexico 1846 (Mexican-American War)

2. Spanish-American War 1896

3. World War 1

4. World War 2

No Congressional approval was enacted for the War in Vietnam. 

Neither did it vote a declaration of war against Iraq or Afghanistan, but in these two cases it voted an "Authorization for Use of Military Force."

The Iraqi war authorization happened after a year long campaign by President Bush and his Secretary of State falsely accused Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein of marshalling "weapons of mass destruction" in preparation for an attack against someone, presumably someone the United States wished to protect. No such weapons were ever found nor likely ever existed. 

The Spanish American war was launched by a newspaper magnate, William Randolph Hearst, for unclear reasons, although it clearly sold newspapers. An American warship, the Maine, had blown up in Havana harbor, likely owing to a boiler explosion, but Hearst claimed the Spanish Empire had bombed the ship. Famously, an American  reporter in Havana had told Hearst he could see no reason for war, but Hearst told him all he wanted was photographs of the aftermath of the explosion: "You give me the pictures; I'll give you the war!"

You Give Me the Pictures; I'll give you the War

The Mexican-American war was even worse: the United States was swept by notions of "Manifest Destiny" which meant the entire continent should belong to the United States, and that meant California and New Mexico and everything down to the Rio Grande. Texas, meanwhile had Americans who wanted to be separate from Mexico and they wanted to establish slavery, which was illegal in Mexico. The rest is all Alamo and myth and Davey Crockett and might makes right.

Manly Hero

Thomas Jefferson, who did not at all like the idea of a standing army or an American Navy, finally realized if his young country wanted to be able to trade with the world, he needed to protect his trading ships, which the Barbary pirate nations of the North African and Mediterranean coasts simply confiscated, demanding "tribute" (ransom.)

It would be cheaper and more efficient to simply send an American navy to attack these pirate states, and Jefferson did that, without a declaration of war.  Meet force with force. Commerce demanded it.

U.S. Soldiers Spanish American War

Then the world changed, and the American military became the De facto policeman of the world, and America became the prime target of every fundamentalist wacko group. President Obama looked at this new world and realized there was no practical way to get an authorization of war out of Congress every time he wanted to kill some kingpin of every homicidal group or rogue head of state. 

U.S. Soldiers Manila Manifest Destiny

So, Obama joined a NATO raid on Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, 2011, and he launched a drone against Anwar al-Walaki (Yemen, 2011) and he launched a raid against Osma bin Laden (Pakistan 2011) who most people assumed was behind the 2001 World Trade Center attacks--and if he wasn't the trigger man, he surely did celebrate those attacks and call for more.  Then Obama got Mullah Mansour, leader of the Afghan Taliban, in Pakistan in 2016 with a drone attack. Hakimullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban got drone struck in 2013.

Obama, a constitutional scholar, argued that executions like these did not require a trial or Due Process or a declaration of war because these were non state actors (except for Gaddafi, whose "state" was dubious.) 

None of these guys engaged in actual "war" wearing uniforms, operating by the Geneva convention rules of war, taking prisoners and providing for Red Cross visits. 

The ACLU actually challenged this practice in Court but got nowhere.

President Obama's drone strikes and especially his operation to kill Osma Bin Laden were notable for their surgical precision, and "collateral damage," i.e. deaths of civilians not targeted but in proximity to the attack were limited. Nevertheless, there were 540 drone strikes over the 8 years of his presidency.

So, now we have Mr. Trump bombing Iranians for reasons which are opaque, and keep shifting: Iran was a week away from an atom bomb after we obliterated their nuclear program; no, wait, Iran was threatening to assassinate Mr. Trump; no, that's not it; Iran was killing its own citizens; no, wait, it was going after Israel; no, wait, Iran is still a threat to world peace. 

"They weren't very nice to me," seems to be Trump's main thing.

As Paul Krugman has noted, sending in the fleet with aircraft carriers, missiles, drones, airplanes is costing $1 billion a day, money which Ukraine could surely have used to great effect, not to mention medical insurance programs, food for the poor, American homeless, infrastructure repair.

History helps us understand: This one ranks right around the Mexican-American war, except we get no land from it, and the Spanish-American war, but we get no naval bases or a nearby island to abuse.

The difference in Trump's attacks on Iran and Obama's targeted drone strikes seems to be one of precision and clarity. 

Obama said we have to fashion our use of force to the enemy we face--in his case shadowy strongmen who target innocents at markets or office buildings or embassies and then slip away, often without explanation--"You figure it out," seemed to be the terrorists' modus operandi--and so we respond with stealthy, targeted surgical strikes and let the Taliban, ISIS, Hamas or Hezbollah figure out what they did wrong.

In Trump's case, he kills the Ayatollah and some of his friends, and announces it's time for the Iranians to rise up and change the regime, as if that is going to happen automatically.

After the Atyatollah's boys killed somewhere in the neighborhood of 7,000 protestors, few in the West will mourn his passing.  And if Trump had said, "Well, this is what I do to people who offend me," and left town, then maybe we'd all shrug, the way we did with Maduro. Neither one of these gems garners much sympathy.

Trump, it is well known, is a great defender of protestors--just ask Renee Good or Alex Pretti.

But Trump's "move fast and break things" method only works occasionally. Just ask Elon Musk.

And wars are usually easier to get into than to get out of.