What happens when there’s a bad war — so bad everyone knows it?
Everyone knew the Trojan War was going to be bad. Who wanted to go fight to win Menelaus’s wayward wife back? Menelaus and his brother Agamemnon were rich, arrogant, inattentive, spoiled — difficult guys to like.
They had to go pressure their allies to show up. When they went to Ithaca, Odysseus feigned madness. They found him plowing with a mismatched team — an ox and a donkey — and sowing the furrows with salt instead of seed. Odysseus pretended not to recognize Agamemnon and Menelaus and almost avoided “the draft.” But their adviser Palamedes, known for his wisdom, snatched up Odysseus’s infant son and put the toddler in the way of the plow. The madness act fell apart.
Odysseus was part of the crew that had to hunt down Achilles. Achilles’s mother, Thetis, had put the young man in a dress and hidden him among the girls of the palace. When Odysseus sounded the alarm, one of the “girls” shed clothing and grabbed a spear and shield. Achilles was impressed into service.
Bad wars are not new. People who choose military careers know them and study them.
It seems to me that the first job of the republic’s top military minds is to tell the president and congress when a war is simply not worth fighting.
If you’ve been wondering what the professionals think, remember that the White House has already been purging the top brass.
By the time the Army’s top general, Randy George, was ousted earlier this month, more than a dozen military leaders had been ousted. You can draw your own conclusions about whether their replacements were chosen for their ability to say yes.
There’s nothing new about this either. The Nazis wouldn’t have been able to run over the Soviets in 1941 had not Stalin purged the Red Army of professional soldiers in favor of politically pliable ones.
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