The Bunker: Bile from the Blatherskite
This week in The Bunker: President Trump despoils the Army by turning it into a prop for a political rally as its generals remain mute; it’s increasingly looking like the ax is going to fall on the F-35 program; base motives when it comes to Army posts; and more.
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This week in The Bunker: President Trump despoils the Army by turning it into a prop for a political rally as its generals remain mute; it’s increasingly looking like the ax is going to fall on the F-35 program; base motives when it comes to Army posts; and more.
FORT BRAGGADOCIO
Where are the generals?
The Bunker was heading south on the New Jersey Turnpike as President Donald Trump unleashed his rant before U.S. troops June 10 at North Carolina’s Fort-Bragg-cum-Fort-Liberty-cum-Fort-Bragg. Your observer was returning from a trip to New England following the inurning of his father-in-law’s ashes at the Rhode Island Veterans Memorial Cemetery. Jack Gould was a Seabee — a Navy builder — for 42 years. He was a resolute Republican, and he readily saluted when his country called. But he would be horrified by Trump’s words at Pike Field.
It was a falsehood-filled political rally in Army green fatigues, complete with pre-screened troops, divisive and derisive comments on domestic issues, and presidential potshots at political rivals and reporters covering the event. Trump proudly led the flouting of the military ban (PDF) on troops attending political rallies in uniform.
Neither The Bunker nor anyone else knows where this bile-inducing blasphemy of the U.S. armed forces is headed. But make no mistake: We are headed down a slippery slope. Ancient cartographers, leery of the world beyond their horizons, supposedly inscribed such regions with hic sunt dracones — “Here be dragons.” The U.S. military is wading ever deeper into seas filled with such beasts, egged on by their commander-in-chief.
What’s most stunning about the entire episode is not this blatherskite’s baleful blathering — can anyone still be surprised by anything that comes out of his mouth? — but by the silence of the generals. They know better. Yet they are choosing to look away just when their service and their nation need them most.
The President and his coterie of silent generals seems to be saying to the late Builder Chief Petty Officer Jack Gould, and the legions of those, like him, who prize selfless service: “Hit the road, Jack.”
F-35 TAILSPIN
Air Force proposes halving fighter buy next year
Common sense has dictated for a long time that the U.S. Air Force was never going to buy the 1,763 F-35 fighters it wants. Four years ago, there were rumbles that the service might get only 800. Such reports got a reckoning with reality last week when the Defense Department said it wants to buy only 24 Air Force F-35s in 2026, down from the 48 it had planned on purchasing.
The is the inevitable result of a plane growing ever more costly as drones become ever more sophisticated. Its high operating cost (roughly $45,000 [PDF] per flying hour) has forced the Air Force to fly its F-35s 19% less than originally planned. That’s actually pretty good when compared to the Navy’s incredible 45% reduction. Both numbers reflect a real, if universally hidden, cost of complicated weaponry. And the F-35 is not aging well: Amazingly, a 36-year-old F-16 is ready to fly as often as a 7-year-old Air Force F-35, according to a June 12 assessment of the Lockheed-built plane by the Congressional Budget Office.
“Even with near-term plans for full-rate production, the program continues to experience ongoing and new production challenges,” the Government Accountability Office noted (PDF) in a June 11 report. Certain parts are in short supply. “The contractor is building around the missing parts” — surely the ultimate in radar-eluding stealth technology.
Nonetheless, as of now, the Pentagon still wants 2,470 F-35s for the Air Force, Navy, and Marines. Buying and flying them until 2088 will cost taxpayers more than $2 trillion, the most costly weapon system ever. Never gonna happen. The Bunker bets that this halving of the Air Force’s 2026 proposed F-35 buy marks the beginning of the end of the U.S. military’s last major crewed fighter program.
POST-NAMING MORTEMS
How about focusing on the big things?
President Trump came into office pledging to end the war between Russia and Ukraine within 24 hours. Meanwhile, the conflicts between Israel and Gaza, and, as of Friday, Iran, are blazing. One might think, given these challenges to global stability, that he would have more important things to do than re-rename seven U.S. Army posts originally named to honor Confederate traitors on June 10.
But you would be wrong.
In a charade that makes “The Apprentice” look like Macbeth, Trump and Pete Hegseth, his performative Pentagon potentate, have made renaming Army posts a key element of their push to restore a “warrior ethos” to the U.S. military. Actually, based on conversations with troops past and present, they’re imposing a “warrior pathos” — an emotional appeal ungrounded in reality — on the U.S. armed forces.
For the past decade, The Bunker has pushed to change the names of Army posts in the South, named by southerners early in the 20th century, to honor their rebel forebears. There was nothing gallant, or galling, about this effort. It was — and remains — simply the right thing to do.
To undo the right thing, the Trump administration is engaging in name games. First of all, the president is blaming his predecessor for the initial renaming. “Few places loom larger in Army lore than where we are gathered today, the one and only Fort Bragg,” Trump said during his June 10 visit there. “But remember, it was only that little brief moment that it wasn’t called Fort Bragg, it was by the Biden administration, not Trump.” Actually, it was Congress that ordered the names changed. It created a bipartisan panel to find honorable names for the nine posts, which were announced in 2022 (Trump vetoed the 2021 defense authorization bill over the issue; Congress overrode it).
Secondly, the Trump administration didn’t restore the original names. Instead, the Pentagon sifted through reams of historic documents looking for ex-troops luckily enough to be named Gordon, Hill, Hood, Lee, Pickett, Polk, and Rucker, and who never wore the gray uniform of the Confederate States of America. (North Carolina’s Fort Liberty had its name changed back to Fort Bragg in March, and Fort Moore was re-rebranded Fort Benning the same month.)
“He’s choosing surname over service,” Ty Seidule, who served on the congressionally-appointed naming commission, told CNN. “Rather than going with the names we chose over a 20-month period that reflect the communities and the mission of each individual Army base, he’s choosing ones that just have the last names.”
What a travesty.
WHAT WE’RE READING
Here’s what has caught The Bunker’s eye recently
The Army’s sniper-training range at Fort Benning isn’t long enough to handle the service’s new MK22 Precision Sniper Rifle, Task & Purpose’s Patty Nieberg reported June 12.
→ “Subdue the enemy without fighting”
Former defense secretary Robert Gates said that’s the only way to rise to the challenge posed by China, in the Wall Street Journal June 13.
Air Force troops can now hole up inside MindGyms — $100,000 “shiny mirrored cubes”— to encourage relaxation, Hope Hodge Seck reported June 9 in Military Times.
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