Where is Rambo When You Need Him?

I used to believe that the American military was top-notch, the greatest fighting force in the world. There was an awful lot of evidence to back that up, all those great old Green Beret movies, and some of the more recent ones like Band of Brothers, and don't forget all of those Rambo flicks. Our guys were the best soldiers, and we were the good guys. Not only were our soldiers good looking, but they were brave and true, fighting Fascism and Communism, and spreading freedom everywhere they went. I grew up in a country that never feared losing a war, we had the most firepower, the most destructive nuclear arsenal in the world, and hey, nobody gets past Rambo.

But at some point in recent history, our armed forces really started to suck.

You could say it all started with Vietnam, but before that, in Korea, we never actually won the war, we put a cease-fire in place that we still maintain with a lot of man-power and it's sixty years later. And Vietnam was a huge fiasco, it lasted much longer than it should have, and the threat that Communism posed never materialized. There was a small invasion on the island of Granada in the 80's, and I can't quite remember what threat that tiny island posed to the US, oh yeah, the President was a friend of Castro's, so we had to go in there and wipe him out. There was the first War in Iraq which we won, but not really, because now we're we're back. The war in Afghanistan is still on-going, and it looks like Osama and the Taliban are staging a comeback. So without even adding the catastrophe of the present Iraq war to the equation, the score of the American military is looking pretty poor, even with all of the money we spend on military matters.

So what is the problem with the modern American military?

Even I have to admit, as immoral and useless as the current Iraq war is, if our military had gone in there and done the job, I wouldn't be still bitching about it today. Religion is great. You commit a sin, you go to confession, and boom, you are forgiven, and that's the end of the story. But for some reason, our fighting force was not up to the job of defeating an impoverished third world country. I know, it's confusing, we have all of these great weapons like bunker busters, and Sidewinders, we have cluster-bombs, and we still can't win against a bunch of insurgents with home-made devices and no air-force. It's mind-boggling. We spend billions of dollars, we argue about it constantly, and in the end, the only way we will win, is if we spend billions more, and we stay in the fight for another ten years.

I've come to the conclusion that these guys who graduated from West Point and now command our Armed Forces, have not received a good education. Maybe they spent too much time on the football field, or maybe they skipped classes so that they could participate is some really fun hazing, but it is obvious that they didn't take notes in class. I found this article on the BBC website that truly underlines the reasons that our fighting soldiers are losing the battle. The Army, instead of killing terrorists like they are supposed to be doing, decided to drop soccer balls down to the children with Islamic religious symbols painted on them. Now I'm not a real religious person, but if you asked me to kick a soccer ball that had a picture of the Virgin Mary on it, I wouldn't do it. Maybe if I kicked it by accident, I wouldn't go to hell, but if I saw the Holy Mother on the soccer ball, and I bent it into the net, I'm sure I would be hell bound, even if the goal was good.

If Rambo were in charge of the Army, he wouldn't be fooling around with soccer balls. He wouldn't need bunker busters or even an Air force, he would have killed Osama years ago, maybe with a sling shot, or even with his bare hands. Why don't we fire David Patraeus, and all of those incompetent Joint Chiefs, and put Rambo in charge? He'll win the war. He'll get the bad guys.

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