Part two. Well worth the time too. At 33:04 Col MacGregor makes a point about our officer corps that I have held for a long time.
COL MacGregor makes an excellent point about the idiocy of going 6,000 miles away to take care of a European problem rather than solving our issues at home.
Can I get an "Amen" when I say "Southern Border?"
And you are correct about the officer corps. They know how to pronounce the words "critical thinking" but don't exercise it.
2LTs come out of OCS or ROTC with a great education (or use to) but are kicked in the ass every time they try to make a decision and are scared shitless every time they make a mistake in training rather than being encouraged to learn from it.
One does not get promoted by "thinking outside the box."
Ian Fleming came up with the idea of taking a dead guy, dressing him up as a British Officer, planting fake information on him and putting him the ocean where he could be discovered as a way of getting that information to the Germans.
At first the idea was rejected but later accepted and acted on. Operation Mince Meat was the product of "cork-screw" thinking that Churchill asked for.
I had the opportunity to meet and talk with some of Doolittle's Tokyo Raiders back in the 1980s. They told me a story about practicing short field takeoffs at Kelly AFB. Everyone could see what they were doing; which looked unusual.
So when they would go to the Officers Club the question was always asked about what they were doing.
Their answers were always,
"We're going to go bomb Japan."
That would bring on roars of laughter from everyone else who knew there was no way a B-25 had the range to make it to Japan.
Yet, the idea of a medium bomber taking off from an aircraft carrier at that time was a culmination of critical thinking.
Someone might have a better chance of stopping the wind with their hand than to exercise "critical thinking" in today's military.