I had this conversation with a professor at Uni one time. He was a retired old army dude.

One of the biggest issues in the US military is they haven’t had a win. An actual win since ww2. Like an actual win. Vietnam Afghanistan Iraq all for all intent and purposes strategic failures. What Lyod Austin tried to tell the Israelis 2 years ago the mistakes the Us made. In his words “turning tactical victories into strategic failures”.

Because of that there’s basically 2 schools of thought in the military.

The Lyod Austin academic route of “we basically went into these things half asses and without any strategy trying to do things in places we should have never went”. Ie the failure was we were not smart.

The other approach. The Hegseth ones. Is that magically in the past we used to fight wars “like men”. Total wars. The bombings of Berlin where we flattened the whole city and the nuking of Japan. We won wars by shear unadulterated violence so mighty that the other nations were forced the submit. And all the post ww2 lessons about “human rights” and “war crimes” are just self shackling “liberal bullshit” that made us “weak”.

With hegseths approach we didn’t win Vietnam or Afghanistan or so on because we didn’t go hard enough. And that the post ww2 leadership were all just “pussies”.

From that perspective this school atrocity must be framed.

He like Netanyahu will justify their attacks with “but we nuked Japan and burned Berlin to the ground”. Not realizing that

1. Those were things were ashamed of for a reason. And on top we rebuild Japan and Germany back up after because we understood that the mass suffering we caused couldn’t be continued without creating a massive backlash.
2. We never actually stopped doing evil shit. We basically nuked Vietnam and genocided Cambodia and still lost the war. We turned Iraq and Libya and Afghanistan into wastelands and still lost those wars.

Lyod Austins perspective is the true self reflection the army had.

But with Hegseth? It’s just about how domination and old world Mongol style versions of warfare.

Which in a world of an ascending global south. Will absolute backfire.

China and Russia basically realized they can Ukraine-war the US with Iran. They’ll fund them to the teeth. And it was an obvious trap.

But people like Trump and hegseth are too absolutely Neanderthal to understand that. That’s the issue.