Seriously, they are both former military, my dad was in for like 30 years, how do they like the drunk secretary? I get that he saw combat, but being in combat doesn’t automatically make you qualified for… well anything except therapy and medical care.
Honest answer, as someone in the military:
A LOT of military people lament how “soft” the military has become, and someone coming down on beards, fat, etc, as well as being up front with what the military is for (e.g. Department of War), scratches a whiny itch they’ve always had. Because every old salty sailor and sandy equivalent feels like they came from the Old Guard.
I came from the Old Guard that my peers are nostalgic about. It was terrible and unnecessarily cruel. It was inefficient and left new people floundering instead of supported. The whole thing feels like a cycle of abuse.
But back to the point, they don’t care if he’s underqualified, makes bad and inexperienced military decisions, or has a host of DUIs (“who doesn’t?”). They only care that he’s calling generals fat to their faces and getting rid of beard ememptions.
What’s funny is that nobody alive today was alive and in the military for any major conflict that we were actually victorious in, so what “good old days” are these geezers even pining for? The days where we lost a bunch of soldiers in Vietnam and the ones who survived came back with PTSD and drug addictions?
The good old days where the people in charge could get away with anything, that’s what it comes down to.
There are still a handful of WWII vets kicking around
Also depending on how you want to define “major” and “victorious” you could maybe make an argument for Dessert Storm, and possibly the 2003-2011 Iraq War. (Whether we should have been involved in those wars in the first place, and how those wars were fought are separate issues, and I certainly wouldn’t call them “unqualified” victories, but I do think there are absolutely certain angles you could look at them from and make the argument that the US was the victor in those conflicts)
The wars in the Middle East are tricky, though, because to have a “victory” you would need a clear metric for it, a clear goal. It’s not like the US was looking to conquer and annex those countries
If the goal was to completely fuck up a country with little to no (physical, not financial) damage to our home country, mission accomplished, one helluva victory.
If the goal was to stop Terrorism… that’s like the War on Drugs, there’s no winning that.
If the goal was merely to occupy them in order to (temporarily) prevent them from being a staging ground and financial support for Terrorism… I guess that worked? For awhile?
Vietnam and Korea were about stopping Communists from taking over the country. Huge failure on Vietnam, and apparently a draw in Korea (considering the North/South divide). But it was a clear enough goal. The Middle East? Who knows what the specific goal was (other than trillions of dollars to the Military Industrial Complex).