What do you know today that you didn't know yesterday?

[Rev. Rye]

Apparently, Donald Trump thinks the reason we’ve been losing most of our wars since WW2 is because we renamed the War Department the Department of Defense in 1949.

“we won World War I, World War II, it was called the Department of War. And to me, that’s really what it is,” Trump said at a press event with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung. “Everybody likes that we had an unbelievable history of victory when it was Department of War. Then we changed it to Department of Defense.”

Sure, it’s just that. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that most of our wars since then have been against guerrilla forces that the local population sees as, at best freedom fighters and at worst the lesser of two evils. The sort of fight that traditional armies almost NEVER win against without committing genocide.

Also, on that note:

“I don’t want to be defense only,” Trump said Monday in the Oval Office. “We want offense too.”

Evidently, things like faking an attack from the North Vietnamese navy or invading a nation that didn’t attack us on “my source is I made it the fuck up” claims don’t count as offense.

Come to think of it, I don’t think any of our wars since then (or possibly even before) were all that defensive.