And the entire US Military is collapsing? In a meltdown? As a Marine from the early 80’s thru the Reagan transition i call BS. My first M-16 looked chrome it was so worn out. I had a WWII steel pot and a WWII .45. My tent was a WWI canvas shelter half. By todays standards, the training was utterly abysmal.
We felt superior to the National Guardsmen next door as they hooked up a BBQ smoker trailer to a Jeep to take along on their 2 week summer camp training.
Don’t kid yourself. These kids today would have handed us our ass. Im proud of em. The Marines stun me with their proficiency today. Todays Marines approach a lethality that Delta would have been proud of in 1979. Todays National Guard is a lean, serious outfit.
Our fighters have incorprated long bitter lessons. They are hardened beyond belief.
He may have *been involved* in design of a plane in the late 60s or early 70s, but he is wildly out of touch to say our armed forces are in collapse.
This is the argument of the maroons who whine that war fighting operations interfere with their training and maintinence schedules.
War zone operations have a leaning effect on a unit that nothing else does. The crap is quickly discarded as a deadly waste of time. The dandies are soon weeded out. A great example of this is the USAAF in WWII. Highly acclaimed leaders often turned out to be duds and were ruthlessly weeded out,, other unknowns rose to colonel in a year or two, and created a USAAF that was truly the terror of the skies. No sir, our services are not in melt down. The Wesley Clarks and Gen Sanchez’s get weeded out,,and the Patraeous’s are rising.
I agree that there’s a ‘shock jock’ element to this report. While I’m skeptical of a ‘do all’ for planes, the writer is exagerrating.
God bless you for serving in the armed forces of the USA!
Yep. We were driving around in WWII jeeps, the 16's I was issued had to be babied by armorers, the .45 was older than I was, and I HATED that steel pot.
The best weapon I was ever issued was the M40, and that was VN era tweaked by USMC armorers.
Semper Fi, bro.
L
LOL! I remember going through ITR at Pendleton in 1965 with a M-1 so worn out it was a single shot.
And of course eating C-rats in VN that were made in WWII, while the army got all the good new stuff that mixed with hot water.
Lastly, I absolutely agree the training is far superior now than then. What I have seen of modern USMC bootcamp is lightyears ahead of the rudimentary training we got. The modern Marine is a much better trained warrior than we were from the get-go. We had to learn on the job, so to speak.