The Enemy Gets a Vote

War is a series of adaptations, conflict and stress make us who we are.

It is not really a secret.

Nature vs. nurture is a real debate.

Personally, I find it hard to take a side on the nature vs. nurture debate. Humans are certainly responsive to their environment; they are receptive beings that soak up experiences – but no human is solely the product of those experiences. As much as your enemy gets a vote in your battle plans, your DNA gets a vote in who you become. I think your DNA, your inherited traits, is where you find the intellect, your “soul” as it were, to filter your experiences into useful things you accept and incorporate and those that are not useful, which are discarded.

When we think about our lives, we tend to think of them in terms of us being in control of them, but the reality is that each of us, no matter how independent, has had at least some part of who we are influenced by others. These interactions can be positive or negative, but they either confirm our decisions and actions or they deny them.

There is a saying in the military that the enemy gets a vote.

That means even the best developed and executed plans can go sideways because the other side will use its own skill, resources, and determination to defeat you and if you want to win, you need to come up with a different plan to execute based on your enemy’s actions.

Let’s consider a situation where your enemies are clear and obvious. They make their opposition and intent clear, if you do not act, they are coming to destroy you. Those enemies you can plan for. The fighting is open, their actions clearly visible and in full view, making it easy to keep score. In a situation like this, it is obvious to anyone paying attention you are influencing the behavior of the enemy as their actions are correspondingly shaping yours.

Now consider a situation where your enemies are not clear and obvious. Consider they are inside your forces, some you have appointed to positions of trust yourself, and they are working as a clandestine force to defeat you. As you become suspicious your enemies are inside your own command structure, would you not change your own perspectives and behaviors to counter this new threat?

My point is that events like what I have described will change people. If it doesn’t defeat them, it molds them into something else, something different. Something that can operate in such situations.

War forges leaders. Battles make warriors.

But it also makes cowards, traitors, and deserters.

The stress of the fight determines what we will become.

Sometimes it creates soldiers who only know the fight. They don’t care about protocol or speaking softly, their only objective is to win.

I was obviously thinking about President Trump and the array of GOP contenders in this year’s RNC beauty contest. What I saw were candidates who attacked Trump more than they attacked Biden and when they attacked Biden, they refused to attack the government that supports and enables him to do what he has been doing.

I like Ron DeSantis, I really do, but he seemed to lose his fire during the campaign even though he has had some significant victories against the radical progressives in Florida. Nikki Haley seems to want to go along to get along. Out of the candidates, Trump seems to be the only one who understands that he cannot make peace with the people who form our government, they can only be defeated, and defeated in such a way they understand they have been beaten. Trump seems to be the only one who understands that the fight is not limited to Biden and Obama, it is against the army they created and embedded in all layers of government bureaucracy.

As I am writing this, I am considering the real possibility that Obama and Biden weaponized our entire government against any 2016 GOP nominee, but intensified their efforts when Trump was chosen. Based on the reporting of Matt Taibbi, Michael Schellenberger, and others, it seems clear the entire intel community was unleashed on both candidate and President Trump and senior member of the intel community may have suggested the Russian “collusion” narrative to the Hillary Clinton campaign.

I’ve long wanted Trump to exact some degree of vengeance for what has been done to him and his family, but one thing I have not really considered and that is, out of the total population of potential candidates we might wish were available, Trump is the only one who has experienced war in this theater.

The Trump of today is a product of the flames of this forge.

There is certainly some of Trump’s DNA that made him who he is today, but it is illogical to believe he wasn’t changed by the events of the past decade. A large part of who he is now is the product of those years.

Perhaps the soldier he has become only knows the fight.