Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Everything About Trump’s Massive Military Parade Idea Is Bad
Everything. Would one of America’s top generals please tell Donald “George S. Patton” Trump to chill out?
As I discussed with Steve Hayes and the Washington Examiner’s Sarah Westwood in today’s podcast...
The Washington Post is reporting that President Trump has told the Pentagon to plan a massive military parade in the streets of Washington DC. Trump was reportedly inspired by the Bastille Day parade he saw in France, featuring military tanks, armored vehicles, gun trucks and fighter-jet flyovers. Afterward, he looked around and asked, “Hey—why don’t we do that?”
So now, apparently, we are.
But before we dump millions of tax dollars into the Trump du Triomphe Military March and Motocross Rally (“Sunday, Sunday, Sunday! Watch our monster tanks jump four nuclear-tipped missiles!”), I’d like to answer the question about why we don’t do it.
Because, Mr. President, we don’t have to. If you want to see a French fighter jet in action, you pretty much gotta wait for a parade. But if you want to see an American one? Just look up in the skies over Afghanistan, where US jets are blowing the crap out of the Taliban. No need to wait for Bastille Day to see American soldiers on the march, either. They’re mopping up ISIS in Syria and Iraq right now.
In short, everything about Trump’s massive military parade idea is bad. It’s big government, it’s wasted tax dollars, and worst of all—it’s French! Let’s hope SecDef Jim Mattis knocks some sense into Trump’s head before it’s too late.
Published in Military, Politics
How do we know Trump is planning a parade? An unsourced leak?
Yeah – cause the guys who have been fighting overseas since 9/11/2001 certainly don’t need the recognition.
</sarc/>
From the Washington Post;
What a horrible idea.
This is my reasoning about listening to most podcasts.
Everything, perhaps, except the politics.
And the opportunity to witness another Weekly Standard/National Review antler dance of virtue signalling.
Imagine if Trump took a back seat (hard to imagine I know) and left the starring roles to the country’s military heroes.
His chin jut might not work well with this one.
Note the italicized words. Do you see parade in them? Do you see plan in them? Do you disagree with the concept that Americans should have a celebration to show their appreciation for America’s service members?
If the answer to those three questions are no, what is horrible?
What I see is a bunch of folks taking the worst possible construction on what should be a positive idea . . . because it was put forth by Trump. As Glen Reynolds would put it, “The rubes self-identify.”
Everything, except that it’s not happening. It’s Gallactic-Level trolling.
I know we’re the good guys and everything, but military parades just strike me as creepy, even if they are well intentioned.
I’m all for a celebration of the PEOPLE (and their families) who form our military services.
I said it on a different post, but the healing and comfort of our soldiers and vets come first, so a party is secondary to repairing what’s broke in the VA.
Maybe the celebration can unveil the repairs.
I do feel like this leak draws comments out, so those in charge can see the minefield, and disarm the critics. And listen to what people appreciate about the idea.
A poll without a poll.
The Pentagon confirmed that they had gotten the request and said they were “looking at options.”
Not at all. And we do: it’s called Veterans’ Day, and it happens every year.
If it turns out to be an actual military parade, it’s a horrible idea no matter who proposed it. If we just do a nice celebration of veterans’ day this November, since it’s also the centennial of the end of WWI, and this celebration does not involve running tanks and military equipment down Pennsylvania Avenue for the president’s review, then no one will have a problem with it.
Well gee-whiz, lets close all the military museums, quit doing fly-overs at the Indy 500, and stop showing off military planes at air shows. Let’s also quit shooting fireworks on Independence Day. All that celebrating is just a waste.
My first thought when I read this column was to wonder if I looked up “Party Pooper” in Wikileaks if I’d find the name Micheal Graham.
Thank goodness he hasn’t gone to North Korea yet and seen them put on their people’s games and massive coordinated dances.
That’s in South Korea.
To the extent that the Pentagon plans something that emphasizes the people that make up our military, I’m for it.
To make a celebration antithetical to any North Korean, Chinese, or Soviet-style display, I’m even more for it.
America is great because its founding ideals support thinking different.
Get the right music and this parade can be a lot of fun.
Oh. My. When someone says military parade, those goose-stepping hordes are what I picture.
Those are exactly the images I do not ever want to have of an American Military Parade.
Something like an Inauguration Parade is good…but that date is a long way off.
I think a national call for communities to have July 4th parades would be fantastic.
In person, not on TV.
Your penultimate paragraph, beginning “because..we don’t have to” illustrates exactly why this parade is a good, salutary idea.
Do you think the security we take for granted, (yes, pretty much, even in this age of renewed ideological terror)–
the luxury and plenty and prosperity we take for granted( yes, even at lower economic levels Americans have comforts and pleasures most of the world’s poor could never conceive of)
.. do you imagine we would have those things, that we would keep our manifold liberties,
but for the underlying force of our military?
We can’t, as you say, “look up” and see our planes in action, our troops in action, in Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria.
But we ought to acknowledge the fact, own the fact, honor the fact, that everything we are, and everything we have, depends on them.
oh– have we gotten just too—cool, to look that fact squarely in the face?
Well then: what is more in-your-face than a parade?
Go for it, Mr. President.
A parade of heroes is defensible. A parade of hardware is less defensible.
oh! Think you can dispense with that “hardware”?
Note: None of those goose-steppers have ever actually been in a war.
Military parades should honour the folk who have served, not the hardware and troops that a country keeps in reserve.
This is another one of those issues that I can’t bring myself to care about. It seems like much ado about nothing. If this is a troll job by Trump, it is a masterful job. This kinda puts some of the issues that I get deranged over into perspective. Maybe we all need to lighten up. We’re talking about a parade.
PS: Am I the only one that grew up going to parades where the local ROTC kids and the local National Guard unit marched down the street behind a bunch of cannons and APC’s?
I think it’s better utilized on a battlefield than in a parade.
That being said, I can easily make an exception for vintage and/or decommissioned hardware. I’d have little quarrel with a VFW branch parading with a mobile gun that its members had actually used in battle, nor do I have a quarrel with ceremonial fly-overs.
I do have a problem with soviet-style displays of military bluster. One often wonders if the Soviet fondness for mobile nuclear missile launchers was merely for their propaganda value during parades.
And, in Canada, less conceivable.
I saw them, too, growing up, and it was a highlight of my year. I once got to sit inside a Styker after the parade and the soldiers explained what camoflauge was and how it worked and how to put on camo paint.
Parades are not just for our adversaries, they are for us, too. Too few Americans know what the American military looks like. They don’t know the uniforms, they don’t know the equipment. All they know is the videogames -at best. We should do parades like this more often just so that the American people know what they have and can appreciate it. In fact, I think they should do more than the parade -they should, like the units when I was a kid -do an open house afterwards. Park an M1 on the National Mall and have someone explain to the tourists what it is, how it works, and who the crew is. Nothing classified, just “the gun is a smoothbore, which means that the shell doesn’t spin when it leaves -so to improve accuracy we put fins on the shell” kind of stuff.
File it into the training budget, or the public outreach budget, or the education budget.
The really good stuff is kept pretty far from anywhere you’d want to have a parade. Almost all the tanks, artillery, and fighter aircraft are based in Alberta, Manitoba, and New Brunswick (where they have lots and lots and lots of territory to play around).
Just think of it as taking a Trumpian Rorschach test.
We need to keep ours closer to the big cities.
This is a great idea. How about we do this instead of the parade? More effective communication, less political, no bad optics, and cheaper overall at a time when the DOD budget has been hurting.
“If France can do it, why can’t we?”
Here are some possible answers:
You guys must be a lot of fun to be with on Veterans Day…
Such a parade should only be held in enemy-held sanctuary cities, along the de-fence-less and de-wall-less southern border, or in the nation’s murder capitals. (I may or may not be joking.)