Sep 3, 2025
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Pentagon chief "Whisky Pete" Hegseth is summoning over 800 top US military commanders to Washington. Meeting like this involving all top military have happened approximately never in the past.
Letting Russia, Iran, China, North Korea, and Venezuela know ahead of time that all top military officials will be as the same place at the same time is a security danger which makes Whisky Pete's use of Signal to discuss ongoing military operations seem like a minor lapse.
Hegseth is an imbecile even by the pathetically low standards of the Trump administration. This upcoming meeting shows what a potentially dangerous imbecile it is.
🚨Iconic Army General DEFIES Trump With SURPRISE BOMB
Retired Army General Mark Hertling speaks out against the Trump Administration for their decision to give former Air Force veteran turned domestic terrorist/traitor Ashli Babbitt a military funeral. Watch the video for more details on the matter.
Across the world, members of our armed forces come together, share a meal, and remember that they are not alone.
Mark Hertling at The Bulwark:
ONE OF MY BULWARK COLLEAGUES recently asked me a simple question: How do soldiers spend Thanksgiving? I’m glad she asked. Imagine a crisp November morning on a U.S. Army post, anywhere in the world. Before dawn, military and civilian cooks—whom we affectionately call “spoons”—have already been at work for hours, making final preparations for a throng of diners coming to what are officially called dining facilities, what the troops call “DFACs,” or what old soldiers know as mess halls. Their labors are really the culmination of days or even weeks of planning and work on the special Thanksgiving meal: turkeys thawed and seasoned; ovens calibrated and humming; decorations arranged; amateur ice sculptures with unit patches or logos emerging from the hands of proud amateurs who do this only a few times each year. On this day, the mess—usually a place for quick meals between duties—transforms into a warm, welcoming restaurant, an American holiday table built far from home.
By midday, soldiers and families begin to arrive. Children are dressed a bit nicer than usual. Spouses greet their unit friends and neighbors with hugs. Retirees who are former members of the unit drop in as honored guests. Officers and senior NCOs, wearing their fancy Army dress blue uniforms, eventually take their place behind the serving line—carving turkey, ladling gravy, and offering jokes and smiles to soldiers and their families who file through. For a service culture that cares deeply about symbols and rituals, this one is very special: Leaders serve the led.
In a peacetime garrison environment, the mission is clear: Bring a taste of home, acknowledge service, and reinforce community. The cooks—soldiers trained in the military occupation called “food service specialists”—stand ready in chef’s whites, quietly proud. Their message to their fellow soldiers and their families is unspoken: We did this for you. You matter. You are seen. Even if you couldn’t be at your grandmother’s table, you are at a table where you belong. Those scenes became, for me, my wife, our children, and countless others, some of the most meaningful days of our service—moments of connection, leadership, and gratitude. Thanksgiving in uniform is one of the traditions I miss most in retirement.
Military duties don’t stop for the holidays, but service members still celebrate. Thanksgiving will find some units deployed in combat, some in the field training, others in remote outposts that are dusty, cold, dangerous, or little more than sandbagged shelters. Airmen are on alert stations, Marines are guarding embassies, sailors are well into a deployment at sea. With all the duties, the decorations might be meager, the tables improvised, but the tradition still happens, and its meaning is usually deeper. During one deployment in northern Iraq in 2008, my battle buddy—Division Command Sergeant Major Roger Blackwood—and I committed to visiting for Thanksgiving twenty-seven forward operating bases, combat outposts, and remote nodes across four provinces spread across an area the size of Pennsylvania in two days. At every stop, we unloaded our personal “care packages”: cases of near-beer and cartons of Twinkies that would supplement the meals that came in marmite cans to forward bases, and these small touches added meaning far more than they should have. Landing on windswept Mount Sinjar, where a handful of young Marines manned a remote communications outpost—and that small team of unsung professionals kept our thirty-thousand-person task force connected—were surprised when we landed. They laughed, accepted the treats, and welcomed us into their small gathering. Their turkey had arrived in ration cans; their décor consisted of sandbags. But the message we hoped to bring was clear: We remember you. You matter. You’re part of this family, too.
Military service often means long hours, unfamiliar places, and the emotional strain of being far from home. Holidays sharpen that ache. That’s why Thanksgiving in uniform—whether in a beautifully decorated mess hall in Texas or a dusty outpost somewhere in the Middle East—becomes more than a meal. It is an act of leadership and community. It’s a reminder that our oath binds us not just to the Constitution, but to each other. In this time when civil–military relations are increasingly strained—when political leaders sometimes use the military as a prop, or question its loyalty, or undermine the nonpartisan ethic that has sustained trust for generations—these Thanksgiving rituals offer a counterpoint. Soldiers piling into mess halls aren’t red or blue. They are Americans who have sworn an oath and who are often asked to spend holidays far from home to uphold it.
Mark Hertling at The Bulwark takes a look on how the US Military celebrates Thanksgiving. 🦃
Trump Orders Nuclear Tests Allegedly Because he saw a scary Movie on TV.
Trump recently announced publicly he thinks everything he sees on TV is real as part of his justification for the Military Occupation of Portland over imaginary riots.
There was a scary movie on TV about Nuclear Weapons and the nonsense he was spouting in justification of resuming testing against all logic not long after that movie aired has lead to speculation these two things are related.
We don't know they are, but Republicans trying to argue for the wisdom of this haven't found any fact based logical reasons, so...
The loyal employee had a not-so-loyal boss.
Curiously coinciding with a fictional TV movie about U.S. nuclear readiness, Donald Trump has taken a sudden interest in testing U.S. nuclea
A yearly ritual helps me reflect on the loss of my comrades and the meaning of their sacrifice.
All of them would be much older today, had they returned home with us. When I watch the movie each year, I often replace the faces of Captain Miller’s small squad with those of the soldiers I served alongside. And after the movie ends, I go outside—alone, as the sun is beginning to set—to offer a bourbon toast to those men and women who will never grow old.
At the end of Saving Private Ryan, with his mission completed and his death drawing near, Captain Miller pulls Ryan close and whispers, “Earn this.” For my money, it’s the best line ever spoken—except one.
During one of my combat tours, when I was an assistant division commander to my friend and mentor General Marty Dempsey, he suggested at a soldier’s memorial service that we all should “make it matter.” He was calling us to consider the excruciating loss of each of our soldiers, and to commit to living a life worthy of everything they sacrificed.
That expression—“Make it matter”—is engraved on a small wooden box I keep on my desk. The box contains 253 pictures of those who didn’t come home with us. Because I can’t walk through all the cemeteries across our country where those young soldiers now rest, I spend a bit of time looking through the pictures after I toast their memory. I wonder where they would be today if they had lived, what they would be doing, how their families might have grown.(Photo courtesy of the author.)
And then, I think of what the much older James Francis Ryan says to his surprised wife at the end of Saving Private Ryan.
“Tell me I have led a good life,” Ryan whispers to her. “Tell me I’m a good man.”
During a time of divisions, of deep resentments and confusion in our country and across the world, I also want to know if I’m a good man—to know if I’ve lived a life worthy of the sacrifice of so many throughout our history.
We must earn it. We must make it matter. On this Memorial Day, and on every day of the year.
The congressman claims military members ‘loathe’ critical race theory, but provided no evidence to his claim
On Wednesday, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff Mark Milley and US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin – the nation’s first Black man to hold the position – were questioned in a congressional hearing by Mr Gaetz about the teaching of "critical race theory" in the US military.
[..]
Mr Austin rejected Mr Gaetz's premise.
"We do not teach critical race theory. We don't embrace critical race theory, and I think that's a spurious conversation," he said. "We are focused on extremist behaviours and not ideology – not people's thoughts, not people's political orientation. Behaviours is what we're focused on."
During the hearing, Mr Milley defended the inclusion of teaching military members about the country's history of racism.
"I've read Mao Zedong. I've read Karl Marx. I've read Lenin. That doesn't make me a communist. So what is wrong with understanding – having some situational understanding about the country for which we are here to defend?" he responded.
He went on to say "I personally find it offensive" that Mr Gaetz and others of his mindset were "accusing the United States military, our general officers, our commissioned, noncommissioned officers of being, quote, 'woke' or something else, because we're studying some theories that are out there."
Mr Gaetz could be seen shaking his head and smirking as the general answered. Later, Mr Gaetz retweeted a video of the exchange, and derided the military.
"With Generals like this it's no wonder we've fought considerably more wars than we've won," Mr Gaetz wrote.
Mr Hertling took exception to Mr Gaetz's comments.
"Hey @mattgaetz, see those stripes on Gen Milley's right sleeve? Each one represents 6 months in combat. SecDef Austin has more, but they aren't on his suit. You really want to do this?" he asked.
Another veteran, former Congressman Denver Riggleman, took a shot at Mr Gaetz for his comment by referring to the ongoing investigation into whether or not the lawmaker had a sexual relationship with a minor.
"Each stripe on Matt Gaetz's shirts represents 6 Venmo transactions," he wrote.
Donald Trump gets his orange ass debunked about NATO from Ret. Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling and historian and journalist Anne Applebaum.
Apparently Trump's understanding of NATO comes directly from Vladimir Putin who spent the latter part of the Cold War as a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet secret police stationed in the former East Germany.
If Putin really regarded NATO as a "paper tiger" then why has he spent the past 50 months fighting Europe's most costly war since WWII to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO? Trump is either a Russian mouthpiece or a mindless idiot. Most likely he's both.