The Book About the U.S. Military That Everyone Should Be Reading Now
Key takeaways
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- Flying the senior leadership of the United States military in created considerable expense and operational disruption, but the brass showed up because their civilian superiors had ordered them to.
- The exercise demonstrated nothing about strategy or readiness, and a great deal about the military chain of command—chiefly, that it would hold under almost any indignity.
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On the last day of September 2025, hundreds of generals and admirals from across the world were summoned to the military base in Quantico, Virginia, where they sat on folding chairs and listened to the president and the secretary of defense deliver what turned out to be a pair of campaign-style speeches. Flying the senior leadership of the United States military in created considerable expense and operational disruption, but the brass showed up because their civilian superiors had ordered them to. They sat stoically silent through the political program, as they had been trained to. Then they flew back to their posts.
The exercise demonstrated nothing about strategy or readiness, and a great deal about the military chain of command—chiefly, that it would hold under almost any indignity.