The new Trump appointee US Defense Secretary Christopher Miller (doomed to be the shortest serving ever) was in the Philippines making a show of donating war equipment to the Philippines, ironically in the time when it is not needed as it is the time of the Covid pandemic when what we need are ventilators, protective equipment, vaccines and financial aid for economic recovery.
US Defense Secretary Miller’s naughty US spy flights
I said it was just a smokescreen!
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin: A Certain Kind of Diversity
That’s no small thing to my old tribe. While there’ve been real militarists, monsters, and just plain jerks to come out of West Point’s academic departments – Petraeus and Trump’s national security adviser H.R. McMaster come to mind – in my assessment, most TAC-types were less intellectually curious or inclined to challenge prevailing assumptions (with some exceptions). Don’t take just my word for it. “He just doesn’t knock your socks off,” a former defense official close to the Biden transition team told Politico – “I just don’t see him as an independent thinker.”
None of that bodes well in crisis times – think pandemic, climate catastrophe, and reprised Cold War nuclear madness – that demand system-shaking visionaries, not company men. Unfortunately, the company man’s president may have just nominated the first black one.
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 