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I have been an observer of Nebraska conservative “Republican” Chuck Hagel, President Barack Obama’s choice for secretary of defense, for over 15 years. At various times during a week I am a libertarian, a communist, an economic conservative, a flaming social liberal, a socialist, and an old curmudgeon railing against what I think is stupidity, arrogance, and ignorance. What I like about Hagel is that when he didn’t have any power he still spoke the truth to it—and when he had power he continued to speak the truth to the other powerful. Actually, Hagel is no longer a Republican. Republicans have become radical, ridiculous, raging, rancid rednecks. They believe that every zygote at conception should get a Glock or Bushmaster. And many of the GOP have turned into Greedy Old Pfarts. Hagel believes in science, balance, proportion, intelligence, research, and education. He essentially is a born-again human, a leader in some enterprises, a servant in others. And he throws bombs once in a great while. Look at his record.
   Perhaps the one thing that impresses me the most about Hagel is that he doesn’t suffer fools for long. He quit the United States Senate three years ago because he found he was surrounded by fire teams of fools. Not a good place for a person who actually researches problems. Several Republican “friends” have recently attacked him. One of them is Senator John McCain, who constantly proves why he was near last in his Naval Academy class. An old Arabic saying fits McCain perfectly: “He who knows not, and knows not that he knows not, is a fool. Shun him.” Anyone who picked a vice presidential candidate whose only foreign policy knowledge was that she could see Russia from her Wasilla, Alaska, home doesn’t have much intellectual capacity.
    Another one of the fools is Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a one-time Air Force reserve lawyer who is so afraid the Tea Party is going to run a right-wing wacko against him that he soils his Fruit of the Looms at least three times a day while trying to prove he is the toughest wacko in Strom Thurmond’s state. Good luck, Lindsey. Then we have Independent Senator Joe Lieberman, a politician who could discover a TV camera deep in the Marianas Trench or on top of K-2. I call them the Three Pompousities, each one eligible to replace Senator Claghorn as a symbol of political excess.

“Not Tho’ The Soldier Knew
Someone Had Blundered”

   There are some idiots who have suggested that an Army sergeant like Hagel could never learn how to handle the generals and admirals in the Pentagon. I immediately thought of some lines from Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade”:

    “Forward, the Light Brigade! Was there a man dismay’d? Not tho’ the soldier knew
     Someone had blunder’d: Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why,
     Theirs but to do & die, Into the valley of Death rode the six hundred.”
   
   This cavalry charge by Brits took place during the 1854-56 Crimean War. Of the 637 who made the charge, 247 men were killed and most of the rest were wounded. A general made a mistake. In World War I, British troops charged “over the top” at the Battle of the Somme and were scythed down by German machine guns. British generals had not recognized the effectiveness of machine guns that could fire 500 rounds a minute. Over 20,000 grunts died in that battle—in one day. Hagel’s Vietnam and other lifetime experiences tell me that here’s a leader who will not suffer fools, stupid Congressmen, loud-mouthed pundits, and political generals who are only skilled at fighting the last war.

   Would Hagel have approved of General David Petraeus’s use of 28 motorcycle cops as escort to a party in Tampa? I don’t think so. Would Hagel have approved the contracts and payment for 2,500 F-35 fighter planes, some at $412 million a copy (the Marine and Navy carrier model), before they had even passed 25 percent of their fight tests? I don’t think so. At present, we have twice as many generals and admirals as we need. Most of them are political generals and admirals who love extended wars so they can win more promotions. And they see that their every need is taken care of by “horsemen” and “remoras.” Horsemen are part of the generals’ team. They hold their reined horses, walk dogs, say “yes” when asked, open doors, buy groceries, and serve drinks at parties. Admirals have the same team, except they are called remoras. Remoras are the suckerfish that attach themselves to sharks. Each of our top generals and admirals have staffs that cost us millions. They each have chefs, drivers, guards, secretaries, shoe shiners, and trouser ironers.
   The last general killed in a war was General Keith Ware, killed in a helicopter crash near the Cambodian border during the Vietnam War. We still don’ t know whether the copter was shot down or suffered mechanical failure. The highest ranking officer killed in combat in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars so far was an Army colonel. During World War II we lost 417,000 KIAs; only 40 were generals and admirals. Generals and admirals have a different perspective about life and death than privates and sergeants.

General “Chesty Puller,”
U.S. Marine Corps: “First,
You Kill Everybody In Sight...”

   I was extremely lucky to have Lt. General Lewis “Chesty” Puller as commanding general when I was in the 2nd Marine Division. Chesty knew the military and the Marine Corps from many angles because he rose from private to general over many years of fighting in Latin America, Saipan, Korea, and other Pacific hot spots. Chesty was a tough little guy with five Navy Crosses on his chest. He always looked as if he had just gotten off liberty after having too many—but what a leader. He knew war as Chuck Hagel knows it. In one memorable lecture, he tied his philosophy about war in a neat bundle. Chesty said, “War is Hell. If the politicians tell you we need to go to war, tell them OK. But also tell them: This is the way we fight. We kill everybody in sight and then we ask you to come in and sort out the mess.”
     That’s the only way to fight a war. We have lost Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan because we didn’t know who we could kill or who we could give chocolate bars to. Ridiculous.  Counterinsurgency in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan? The failure of the century. McCain implied we had won a “victory” in Iraq because of the “surge,” while criticizing Hagel for being against it. The Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds still car-bomb each other every day while fighting their 1400-year civil war. Doesn’t anyone in D.C. understand tribal and religious conflicts? What is going to happen in Afghanistan when we leave that tribal country, whether it’s in 2014 or 2041? The Pashtuns, Taliban, and others will be killing each other for another century—as they did again this morning. Hagel is right about both wars. We have spent $2.5 trillion so far and gained nothing except grieving families.

Let’s Take A Look
At Hagel’s Resume

   After graduating from the Minneapolis Brown Institute for Radio and Television in 1966, Hagel joined the Army and served a tour in Vietnam. His first days in Nam were spent trying to burn 50-gallon drums of latrine waste. Hagel said, “The humidity and the stench... I was physically sick to my stomach.” He had gone to war with his brother Tom at his side.  His brother later said, “Both of us were very, very good at killing.” The head of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America said about the Hagel brothers, “Being an enlisted infantry grunt is one of the most dangerous jobs in a war.” Tom and Chuck Hagel were both severely injured in an ambush, suffering shrapnel wounds that required a decade to fully heal. Chuck, who still cannot grow a beard, has two Purple Hearts.

    Then Hagel used his GI Bill to earn a BA in history from the University of Nebraska. He joined the Veterans Administration through an appointment by President Ronald Reagan after working on Capitol Hill. He soon quit in disgust because Reagan was cutting VA funds instead of increasing them.
   The rest of his story tells me he is used to being around the big boys. He sold a used Buick, cashed in a couple of small insurance policies, and created Vanguard Cellular, a small phone company. He sold Vanguard to AT&T in 1999 when it was the largest independent all-cellular company in the country, making himself a millionaire several times over. He then ran the McCarthy Group, an investment company in Omaha. While Hagel ran the firm, it owned a voting machine company that was widely used in the Midwest. When Hagel ran for the Senate in 1996, he was accused by Democrats of rigging his election through the voting machines. No voting irregularities were ever found.
   Hagel was elected to the Senate to two terms (1997–2009), the second term with 80 percent of the vote. He served on the Foreign Relations and Finance Committees. Since his Senate experience, he has been selected for several business boards, including Corsair Capital and  Chevron Oil. He also is an advisor to a number of Wall Street hedge funds. We need a grunt with his war, political, and business experiences to kill some of the sharks and alligators in the Pentagon lagoons and swamps.

How Will Hagel
Handle The Nut Farm?

   When Obama nominated Hagel for secretary of defense, he asked current secretary of defense Leon Panetta to say a few words. I think Panetta’s most memorable were when he said he was going to his nut farm in California—from another one in D.C. Panetta and his family run a nut farm.
   Charles Krauthammer of Fox News and Washington Post fame is one of the nuts Panetta is happy to be rid of. He accuses Hagel of having foreign policy views that “are at the fringe of the entire Senate.” Actually, Krauthammer has the views of the Paul Wolfowitz, the Jewish lobby, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, and the Weekly Standard neocon crowd who have superpower plans of ruling the world. These are the real “fringe” people.
   Since 1949, the American taxpayer has given Israel about $180 billion in direct aid and untold billions in indirect and military aid. For some reason or other, we have resumed the task of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian question. All presidents since Carter have tried. Both sides play us like a Jew’s harp, each throwing tantrums when there might be an actual resolution. My position: a plague on both your houses. The Jewish-Israeli lobby has sucked up enough of our billions playing us for suckers. Each time the two parties come close to a two-nation solution, the Israeli government starts to build an apartment on what is considered Palestinian land. Then another tantrum starts. Perhaps even our evangelicals who support the Jewish lobby will decide their “Rapture” can start without Israel. The Likud Party, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and our Jewish-Israeli lobby should be told, “Finish that $75,000 apartment and we will tear up your $3 billion check we give you each year.” That’s my position—and I think it’s Hagel’s also. The Israelis have too much of our money now.

We Need The Pentagon’s
Money Because That’s
Where The Waste, Fraud,
and Abuse Really Is

   Do we really need over 1,100 bases scattered around the world and over 4,000 at home to protect the U.S.? We spend $170 billion just staffing the foreign bases. Should we charge the taxpayer $1.2 million a year for every pair of boots on the ground in Afghanistan? So far, each family in the U.S. has a $12,000 bill just for the Afghanistan War. Hagel doesn’t have the support of the neocons and their Republican cohorts because he has concluded, “The Defense Department... in many ways is bloated.” And that is an understatement. Do we need 2,500 F-35 fighters to protect us from Russia and China? Why are we spending half of what the entire world spends on defense when we have only five percent of the world’s population? Who decided we are the world’s Inspector Javert? What does a hollowed-out, bankrupt superpower look like?

   Why should the Pentagon be the only government agency incapable of passing a federal audit? We are spending $313 million in 2012 to keep bases in Kosovo and Bosnia. Why? The Pentagon has a budget of $51 billion for “classified” purposes, and none of it can be spent for domestic spying. It’s estimated the cost of maintaining just one average base in the U.S. would provide 260,000 children health care for a year.
  The Marine Corps requires officers to have two specialties (MOS). I was an infantry officer and a fiscal officer, so I did serve one year as a regimental fiscal and supply officer with an $85 million budget. Luckily, I had about half a dozen enlisted staff who actually knew what they were doing. They kept me out of jail. I had just enough fiscal knowledge to be dangerous.