“A Deeply Troubled Institution”

Oh, sorry — I meant the military!

***My usual note that each and every time that I use quotation marks it is because I am lifting content directly from the text of the document, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise 2025. I am being very careful to use their content directly, making no allusions, so that you as readers understand the language the writers there are choosing and why.

It’s Veteran’s Day. A perfect day for this post as I work my way through Project 2025, all 900+ pages of it, for those of you who now want to know what the playbook for the next 4 years looks like before the next administration is sworn in on January 20. Sorry to be a downer, but this one is…not great.

Once upon a time known as the War Department, the Department of Defense as it is now known was designed to be a mechanism by which the U.S. could actually secure peace. The Heritage Foundation believes that neither the Department of Defense nor the Department of State, tasked together with national defense and foreign affairs are living up to expectations and that “the success of the next presidency will be determined in part by whether they can be significantly improved in short order” (p87).

Former acting secretary of defense Christopher Miller (he held the role for just 2 months, from November 2020 to January 2021 after the…