It's a fucked up cycle that is necessary in some ways. There is a strategic reason most 03's are ~19... because it's a cycle designed as a numbers game, and by the time you have seen some shit it's time for some other dumbass to take your spot so you can get out or move to something else (I learned after I got out that my MSG package had gotten approved last minute, and nobody told me...) and hopefully pick up the pieces.

My big problem is that while I understand the strategic need for this cycle, and even have some understanding and sympathy with the general officer level thinking that some kinetics are good for learning hard bloodlessons to apply to the next conflict, if we let that dumbass gungho'ery infiltrate too far up the ranks sooner or later those GO's are gonna bite off something for us we don't wanna chew, that will make Iraq/Afghan look like a day at Sea World in comparison.

Quite a bit of this lies at levels even higher than the GO's though, the intel community, the diplomatic community, NSC, etc, and the usual response by brass is "we just do what we are told", but I don't think that will always be an acceptable answer.

Bottom line for me is that both AUMF's and the War Powers Act are arguably unconstitutional and we need to bring the totally corrupt congress back to a mandate of declaration of war, and the CiC only using article 2 in local threat neutralization. Alas, the problem is almost the entire diplomatic (State Department) and warfare (war colleges) schooling system has already been infiltrated and indoctrinated in Wilsonian, Chatham House interventionism ideas that are quite antithetical to what I believe the founders intended. Even G Washington warned us about entangling alliances for example.

We swore an oath to the constitution, but almost every person in government on both sides of the isle shits on it daily. Really makes you wonder, who is the greater threat? The foreign enemy or the domestic one?