My last deployment was on an old broken cruiser.  Before that, I was on a broken gator freighter with a roach infestation that couldn’t pass INSURV.  Our helicopters, like everything else being flown by the Fleet, often required 2, 3, or 4 aircraft to meet a one aircraft sortie.  During the Obama years, OPTEMPO was outrageous and material readiness was a joke.  There was never anything to show for it.  Nobody said a word.  Sailors died in collisions at sea and other preventable mishaps due to leadership simply not a giving a single f*^k about the people they were sending into harms way.  I guess we never considered having our mommies call CNN about it.  Given the administration throughout those years, it wouldn’t have mattered.  Ships were routinely at sea without port visits, internet, or email for months due operational security.  I remember the shear panic on the CO’s face when he thought we were going to run out of tobacco and Monster.

Middle East wars, like all foreign wars, are a disaster for our country.  They don’t end and run our men and materiel into the ground while achieving nothing.  We need a strong military, but the focus of our national defense efforts needs to be on recovering resources and infrastructure to sustain a viable, WINNING, fighting force like Reagan was able to achieve.  It wasn’t perfect, for sure, but it fixed a lot that was broken after Vietnam.  That has all been dismantled slowly for the past 30 years and replaced with some flavor of mindless urban gentrified wasteland of coffee shops, organic grocery stores and adult juice bars.