The Worst and the Dumbest
Has the U.S. military been Kudlowized?
Transcript
Has the US military already been Kudlowized? Hi, I’m Paul Krugman. I’ll explain what I meant by that in a couple of minutes.
It’s Friday morning. The war is continuing. A lot of what’s happened in the Iran war has sadly not come as a surprise. The fact that there was no planning, that there was no plan B in case a decapitation strike didn’t do the job, that Trump’s people didn’t seem to have gamed out at all what would happen if their fondest wishes did not come true — unfortunately, that’s par for the course.
There was a famous book in the Vietnam years about how all that went wrong, about how all of the sort of brains trust around LBJ led us into that disaster, and it was called “The Best and the Brightest.” In this case, it’s obvious: Everybody knows that we’ve got the worst and the dumbest. So we knew that the thinking about strategy was going to be nil, that it was going to be all very ill-conceived.
The surprise, and it’s an unfavorable surprise, is that the U.S. military has not been doing too well either. I mean, obviously, you know, they can blow up anything they want. There’s no question that the U.S. has unchallenged superiority in all of the conventional aspects of warfare. There’s no Iranian Air Force for, you know, there’s no Iranian Navy in any conventional sense. Unfortunately, it’s not that kind of war. The failure to have a prepared response to the modern world of drones and inferior powers which nonetheless have the ability to do a lot of damage, has been a bit of a shock.
Now, admittedly, that is something that I, like I think a lot of people who are amateur followers of military affairs, was worried about watching developments in Ukraine. You couldn’t help but wonder whether the U.S. military, with its emphasis on overwhelming force, with its historic superiority in technology, was actually ready for this new world of kind of democratized ability to inflict damage. And there were some straws in the wind suggesting that we were not, that maybe just the historical record of overwhelming dominance had made the US military complacent. But it still comes as a shock to find that U.S. bases in the region appear to be sort of completely unprotected, unhardened, that the U.S. went into this thing sending, you know, multimillion-dollar interceptors to shoot down multithousand-dollar drones.
It’s been really kind of shockingly overwhelmingly, I’m not sure incompetent, but unprepared. It’s just shocking how unready the world’s greatest military seems to have been for a war that was in many ways prefigured by what’s been happening in Ukraine for several years now. So how did that happen?
I was motivated to do this video by a report in The New York Times about what Pete Hegseth has been doing to the military, about the passing over of promotions for officers who happen to be black or female. It’s just been this shocking sort of anti, reverse DEI, otherwise known as racism and misogyny. But in general, I think it’s pretty clear, not just that Hegseth doesn’t like women, doesn’t like non-whites, but also he doesn’t like smart people. He doesn’t like people who are competent at their jobs. He wants people who are into lethality and dumb shows of force, which is not a good thing in a 21st century military. But I had thought that this would take longer.
