Thursday, February 02, 2017

A little bit can go a long way.

It's been said that hitting a Major League fastball is, physiologically, one of the most difficult feats in sports.

Even harder, of course, is throwing a Major League fastball. Observers note that one of the biggest obstacles to expansion of Major League baseball is that there are only so many people with the set of skills that make for a big league starting pitcher, and there probably aren't enough to go around as it is.



Similarly, JSOC units like DEVGRU (known to the public as "SEAL Team 6") and CAG (or whatever SFOD-Delta is calling themselves in FY'17) are constrained not by budget, but by the fact that there are only so many human beings with the combination of traits that let them do these jobs.

And for the last eight years, the previous administration used SOCOM and JSOC like they were human drones. Everyplace we were committed to not putting boots on the ground? These guys' boots got put on the ground. The operational tempo for these units was positively brutal.

Got a national security problem? Send the face shooters in and let them take care of it. If a few got killed, well, that was just the cost of doing business, right? They were all volunteers.

Don't think that an attitude like that toward "the hired help" doesn't get noticed.

Which explains this.