The Misery Will Continue Until Morale Improves

According to an old military maxim, amateurs talk about strategy, professionals talk about logistics. But these days we need a third category: Immature, insecure guys think that war is about acting tough and looking cool.

Hi, Paul Krugman with a podcast update for today. I want to weigh in on the incredible rash of stories about how Trump and company are eviscerating the military. It is truly remarkable. If there’s one thing that we thought that the United States was still kind of number one at, it was that we had the world’s premier military. Now, of course, we managed to rather quickly effectively lose the war with Iran, although current management will never admit it.

But also just a series of stories, some of them related to that war, some of them going beyond and to other areas that just are truly shocking, even for somebody like me, who had no expectation that this administration would be doing any good for the nation.

Just to remember the story: So first we had the big warning that the U.S. military was basically running out of ammunition. That the precision missiles that are so essential to waging war were largely gone, expended unproductively against Iran. And clearly the cost benefit calculus was a disaster because the Iranians were sending cheap drones and we were using multi-million dollar weapons in an attempt to counter them.

After that, we got the story about the horrific conditions on board the USS Lincoln, the aircraft carrier that’s been stationed for a very long time without, it appears, adequate resupply and with toilets flooding. Apparently just horrific conditions, which turn out to be not unique to that ship: Other ships are having problems. There’s the USS Boxer, an amphibious assault ship, which apparently has run out of feminine hygiene products, among other things.

Okay, so we have those horrific stories. And then we have the stories about Trump intervening. Demanding, first, that the Navy construct a whole new class of ships, Trump-class battleships, which are useless and would be sitting ducks. Then demanding that the Navy replace modern catapults with steam catapults, which he thinks are cooler. And then demanding that they relocate the command tower on aircraft carriers because he wants them to look more like the way they looked during World War II.

Is this America? I mean, think about the American way of war. We are not a warrior nation, which is fine. We are a lot of other things.

We were a nation that was supreme in the arts of peace. We were a nation of know-how. America won its wars by doing the arts of peace right, by.building better and more stuff than other countries. By getting our act together in ways that didn’t necessarily involve fighting.

Of course, you always need courageous warriors. You always need people able and willing to risk death in the service of their nation. But what America was supreme at was logistics. If you ask how did America and its allies pull off D-Day, well, a lot of it was being able to deliver supplies to the beaches of Normandy in a way that the Germans never thought was possible.

America was always the place, the country that was really good at logistics. For us to be not feeding our sailors, not able to keep ships that are not, after all, under fire all the time, to keep the plumbing working, that is incredible.

The idea that the president is imposing his personal aesthetic preferences to undo design decisions that were made by military professionals is also basically incredible.

Okay, what is this all about? And what happened? Some of it is specifically military, but mostly it’s not. I think these military failings should be put in the same context as the frantic and disastrous destruction and redesign of Washington, D.C. The demolition of the East Wing. The disastrous attempt to refurbish the reflecting pool to reflect Trump’s aesthetics. Even the gold leaf and gold lettering that is polluting the White House. All of this is really part of the sa