An Assembly of Generals
It’s rare in peacetime, a meeting of all your flag officers in one place – and even more rare when a country is at war. The first question we must ask our generals and admirals, and our brand spanking new Secretary of War, is “Are we at war?”
This question – frankly pertinent and simultaneously impertinent – would stymie our American generals and those who lead them into harm’s way, and more commonly, down dead end streets, over the cliffs of insanity, and into fire swamps. Like former President Joe Biden, they Simply. Don’t. Know.
Obviously, this one question needs to be answered, and constitutionally explained by the Secretary of “War.” It’s the least we can ask of the young man.
Then, I would imagine that, given Secretary Hegseth is the MAGA man in the Pentagon, he will give the following short speech.
Thank you all for coming. I hope you packed your sh!%.
Putting America First means means change for the Pentagon. Some of you may have noticed that you haven’t won a war in 80 years. And yet, except for the ever-expanding trillions that pad your budgets and enrich you in retirement, not much has gotten better in the warfighting arena in those 80 years. Instead of an industrial capacity that allowed ramped-up production and innovation like the last time Congress declared war, we now have a far less industrial economy, and a changed demography. Fewer people are engaged in the kind of work that makes the kind of war you think you are conducting possible. The US economy today produces 43% of the globe’s weapons – and yet the nation does not profit! US-made weapons today are, as a rule, temperamental, expensive, inelegant, designed by committees and dreamed up by politicians in and out of uniform. What you call war is just another business, and you are pretty rotten businessmen.
You’re adapting as fast as you can, but your pace is somewhere between glacial and geologic. What’s worse, the main thing you’re adapting to is the loss of actual Americans willing to fight and pay for your undeclared yet heavily justified wars. Most of you have never read Catch-22, and yet is it amazing how so many of you were actually in the novel! The undeclared, unpopular, idiotic, expensive, horrendously led and managed, objective-free and poorly fought wars you all have spent your careers extending and nurturing must end. Today is that day.
The brighter among you have noticed that the President changes his mind and his focus a dozen times a day. But have you noticed that we are no longer the MacDaddy of the planet, war pimps for dollars, respected for our military and diplomatic prowess? Your real daddies are David Petraeus and Keith Kellogg, and the last thing on their mind is putting America’s security first. Your handmaidens for future war, at home and abroad, are Alex Karp and contractor operated propaganda management. That’s not innovation, that’s a defense department that has forgotten what defending actually is.
I see many of you are distracted, it has been a minute. Hopefully, as you look at your phones, you will see the termination notices. We texted them to every man on your right and on your left. Two-thirds of you will take your accrued leave when this meeting ends, and we’ll send any belongings to your home of record as soon as we get a chance.
Our President once mentioned that he hoped to cut the Pentagon budget in half, and we are taking lead on that today. Just as the United States is not at war, much of what you and your pet projects have been doing is not warfighting. It is not preparing for war. It is not preparing to win future wars. Because everyone has an excuse, and everybody here thinks their “mission” is just as real and valuable as that of the next guy, we’re cutting spending in half, and the third of you who didn’t get fired today will make it work.
Trump is helping you out, as we are no longer going to fight a war with China, or Russia, and as soon as Israel slaughters and starves the remainder of the Gazans and West Bank Palestinians, we’re not fighting their wars any more either. We are going to focus on protecting just America. Sure, we will continue to sell weapons – but even the President recognizes that those weapons markets have shrunken to mainly a few captive NATO countries, and US weapons are today out-produced, out-designed, and out-performed by just about everyone in the global weapons sector.
Many of you are crying now, and I’m sorry about that. You are asking “Why?” and “Why me?” Let me explain.
For a long time we held to the Reagan Doctrine – Peace through Strength. But we had it backwards. Strength, real strength of economy and spirit, comes through peace. A recent Costs of War study assessed how ineffectual it is to try to make a country stronger by spending excessively in – and obsessively justifying – the military sector. We create wars that make fools of us all. I mentioned Generals Petraeus and Kellogg as products and exemplars of Pentagon circular reasoning, but it’s all of you, and all of us.
A 50% cut in one day is pretty doggone American, where two-income families live paycheck to paycheck, pink slips are everywhere, and jobs scarce. President Trump is trying, in the best way he knows how, to diversify the quantity and quality of things we make ourselves, and broaden the kinds of things we market to others. He wants to open up new markets through his force of personality and dealmaking, and while that’s not enough, at least he is using what he has in his own toolkit to make America better than he found it – something we can’t say about everyone in this room. He’s facing in the right direction, towards peace, because he believes we have made some terrible war oriented investments for average Americans. He is energized and also afraid, because the deep state beneficiaries of war and chaos are bristling, angry and taking aim. But you already knew that part.
Brown University’s Cost of War project has the numbers – money spent on overseas war, war consumables and war technology gives a poor return on investment when compared with other government spending, or keeping more of what you earn to invest in your own families and communities. Americans, in debt and on the brink of civil war, with real declines in health and quality of life, no longer have the luxury of this poor investment.
Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. It’s one-way now.
Well, I hope Pete gives this speech, but if he wants to talk about warrior ethos, I’ve got another one that’s short and sweet, courtesy Sun Tsu.
Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win. Thank you for your attention to this matter!!!!
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2025/09/karen-kwiatkowski/an-assembly-of-generals