David French

In other words, you would have fighting men of incredible courage, incredible tactical skill, led by political leaders who totally lacked strategic imagination, who totally could not get their nations out of the bloody mess they put them in.

And that's how I feel about the current military.

It's lions led by donkeys.

We've had 50 years of

of a project of reforming and professionalizing the military after the disasters at the end of the Vietnam War, we've turned it into easily the most respected public institution in the United States, capable of remarkable things like the Maduro raid, like the rescue of the two pilots who were shot down.

Every American should swell with pride at the ability to do that in a military that has an ethos that says,

you cannot leave a fallen comrade, that leave no one behind ethos, which is so core to the morality, integrity of the military, to take that force and put it in the hands of this man,

and then have him deploy it so haphazardly on his own impulse in an unconstitutional manner, and then after they have risked their lives, taken large-scale damage to American military facilities.

Americans do not realize how damaged our facilities are across the Middle East.

Billions of dollars lost, billions.

To have Americans die, to have hundreds injured, many of them very severely, and then to just sort of say,

okay, two, it's over.

A, I'm going to threaten to use you to commit a crime against humanity.

And then at the last minute, it's over.

Well, we didn't accomplish some of the war aims that I suggested.

And yeah, Iran in many ways might be immensely strengthened strategically because it's demonstrated that can cause a superpower to back off, that it can take our best punch, and then in response, cause us to suffer pain, that...

That's the textbook, lions led by donkeys.

In other words, valor wasted in so many ways by people who lack strategic imagination, who are grotesquely incompetent and immoral.

It's...

Words fail.