Hegseth: Starving Our Troops While Feasting on Steak And Lobster

Update: thank you again Steve in Manhattan for including this article in Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! 

The USA Today headline doesn't spell it out, but the lede does and the story gets even worse from there (via Cybele Mayes-Osterman):

Dan F. was alarmed when his daughter, a Marine aboard the USS Tripoli, a warship deployed to fight the Iran war, sent him a photo of a meal served on the ship. A lunch tray, two-thirds empty, carried one small scoop of shredded meat and a single folded tortilla.

A picture of a mid-April dinner on the USS Abraham Lincoln, shared by a service member with his family, was similarly unappetizing – a small handful of boiled carrots, a dry meat patty and a gray slab of processed meat.

Dan and other military family members worried that their loved ones deployed to the Middle East are going hungry are filling boxes with items they hope could help service members ride out prolonged deployments in the Middle East – homemade fudge, Jolly Ranchers, crossword puzzle books, playing cards, toothpaste, Girl Scout cookies and fresh socks. But mail delivery to military ZIP codes across the Middle East has been indefinitely suspended as of April, and packages in transit now hang in limbo.

Dan asked to go by his first name only to protect his daughter from retaliation.

It's less about the lack of shipping personal items to their loved ones abroad, and more about the U.S. military under Secretary of Steaks and Lobsters Pete Hegseth absolutely unable to run the army in any competent fashion.

I noted this last month when word got out our military strikes against Iran were running out of missiles, ammo, and other equipment:

So the money is there - you would think - for a lot of weapons production and resources getting shipped out to our armed forces. And yet, we're getting warning signs from our own Pentagon officials that things are amiss, that they're not getting all these weapons and material to fight the wars they're being asked to fight.

This is a serious question: Just where the hell is all our defense spending going to these corporations that are supposed to be manufacturing all this shit? What happened to all the resources that are supposed to be pouring into our munitions factories to pump out the missiles and bullets and body armor and helmets and battlefield supplies?

Now we're witnessing the other failures at simple logistics - logistics, one of the most vital elements of any great army - affecting our own armed forces, unable to feed our troops and sailors at the very battlefronts trump and Hegseth want to wage their wars. The U.S. military used to be great at logistics, putting us at levels of preparedness and effectiveness that no other military on the planet could achieve.

Within two years of trump getting back into power, and within two years of Hegseth purging our armed forces over "woke" and "diversity" in ways that have clearly disrupted our chains of command and ruined morale at the worst possible time; we can't even feed our frontline people. 

There's an old saying - attributed to Napoleon, but it's probably been out there since the days of Roman military might (the guys who perfected logistics to a science) - that "an army travels on its stomach."

From the USA Today article
The only recognizable food on that half-empty tray are the carrots

You feed any army that and you are going to bring that army to its knees.

WHERE THE HELL DID THE BILLIONS IN THE MILITARY BUDGET FOR FOOD GO, HEGSETH??? YOU are starving our people, this is YOUR accountability, YOUR responsibility running the armed forces, YOU better have a GODDAMN solution for this ASAP.