Figuring out who are the dummies and who are the ventriloquists — When I was a relatively young Army Major in the Pentagon, one day I was informed that (for whatever reason) I had been selected to be one of the Military Assistants to the Secretary of the Army, the Honorable John O. Marsh, Jr. …

How? After all — it’s always been led by Republicans — In July 2021, the heavily opinionated, always verbose, and invariably hypocritical Senator Ted Cruz published an intriguing piece on — you guessed it — Fox News. The topic was defunding the police. In Cruz’s unsurprising view, “Republicans support the police and Democrats have led a campaign to defund the police…

Make his the same as Jimmy Carter’s — Is anyone but me enormously irritated by the lavish security protection being provided to Donald Trump? I thought what was done when he flew for his arraignment in Washington, D.C. …

Such as Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz and you know who — A normal wall decoration in government facilities is a grouping of pictures starting with the president and usually going down to the person running the office being visited. This is especially true in the Department of Defense where almost every organization shows the “chain of command.” …

Do his supporters have to “get hit over the head” to figure it out? — During the 1948 presidential campaign, Harry Truman was addressing a rural audience. Recent polls had indicated that farmers were leaning towards voting Republican, and it understandably did not sit well with the mid-western president — raised on a farm himself. At one point he erupted with one of his famous…

He doesn’t understand the military, promotions, or unit readiness — The “hold” by Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville on senior military promotions has become a significant national security problem. Tuberville seems to feel he is attempting something with benign implications. Such an intervention by Tuberville seems to fit something of a pattern with the former Auburn football coach. …

It hurts unit cohesion, readiness, and national security — When I was on the West Point faculty — shall we say — a few decades ago, I was in the department that taught economics, government, and international relations. In the economics track we offered an elective on Marxism. Yes…Marxism! Did we offer that course to applaud Karl Marx? Of…

But I understand why we had to do it, and what it will mean later — In January 1991, I was commanding a U.S. artillery battalion that had just deployed from Europe to be part of the coming Operation Desert Storm. …

As a senator he doesn’t know the X’s from the O’s…or the zeroes — As of this writing, for the first time in over a century a major branch of the U.S. military does not have a Senate-confirmed military leader. On July 10, 2023, General David Berger, after a forty-year career, relinquished leadership of the U.S. …