The Social World

Tag: Air Force

  • Why the Army needs the cavalry

    Why the Army needs the cavalry

    A generation ago, I was an officer in the US Army National Guard and later in the Army Reserve. I did absolutely nothing important, and never saw any places more exotic than Fort McCoy, Wisconsin, and Camp Atterbury, Indiana. I then spent a dozen years working for the Army as a civilian employee.

    I had already decided before these events to devote my academic career to the study of the Army. I loved (and still do love) it in an abstract and historical sense. However, only after my personal association with it did I realize how profoundly shortsighted it was. I observed this myopia daily and marveled at its immensity. Veterans may remember the adage that there is “the right way, the wrong way and the Army way.” The Army way is usually just plain dumb.

    Veterans may remember ‘the right way, the wrong way and the Army way.’ The Army way is usually plain dumb

    Where am I going with all this? You may have seen the Army’s recent decision to eliminate all its horse-mounted ceremonial units in a cost-saving measure. Many will immediately attribute this decision exclusively to President Trump and the Department of Government Deficiency (DoGE). I know better, and so does anybody who served in the Army but retained a healthy sense of skepticism. While there has certainly been an emphasis on cost-cutting and savings, this decision was made by someone much lower in the food chain. Some one- or two-star general or some Deputy Assistant Undersecretary of the Army for God Knows What decided that for a mere $2,000,000 of savings (the Department of the Army’s total annual budget for 2024 was $165.6 billion), the Army would eliminate one of its few historical vestiges and an example for relatively cheap positive public relations.

    Every other branch of the armed forces has its quirks. The Air Force has been described as an organization staffed with businessmen in flight suits. The Navy is an organization that will sacrifice anyone to save face (do a Google search on how often ship commanders are relieved because of a “loss of confidence.”) The Marine Corps not only takes pride in being the physically toughest branch of service but also seems to enjoy suffering in an almost strangely masochistic way. The Army, however, owing to its status as the first American armed force and almost always the largest, doesn’t seem to have a true ethos of its own.

    Its advertising campaign could almost be (paraphrasing the internet) “Not smart enough for the Air Force? Don’t want to be trapped on a ship with 1,000 other people? Not tough enough for the Marines? Well then, what about the Army, you don’t have any other choices…”

    When it comes to history and public relations, the Army’s incompetence truly shines. There is scarcely a ground combat situation in our history where it was not present. Yet it seems unable to inform the American public about this storied history. Even among people who know scarcely any US history, I would be shocked to find those who do not know about the Marine Corps and its role in World War Two. Why? The Marine Corps treats history more like hagiography, and they have lovingly wrapped their history and public relations together.

    The Air Force maintains the Thunderbirds ($35 million annual budget), and the Navy maintains the Blue Angels ($40 million), both of which go around the country providing examples of aerobatic excellence, which enthrall crowds and entice young people to join their services.

    We have already mentioned the Marine Corps’s brilliance in merging history and public relations. Where does that leave the Army? Ironically, the mounted units, which it has now decided to get rid of, are one of the few examples of effective public relations without explicitly recruiting – generating goodwill and positive feelings among the public. Yes, the horses were a throwback to a bygone era, but isn’t the Army proud of its history?

    So, here it stands, shooting itself in the proverbial foot for the savings of 0.00001 percent of its annual budget. Unlike the Navy and the Air Force, the Army is an institution whose backbone is people, not aircraft or ships. The Marine Corps is organized similarly to the Army, but it seems to understand what it is and how to relate that information to the public.

    There was a memoir written back in the 1980s by a man who served in the cavalry during its final years. He told the story of how an Army officer and a sergeant violated regulations to allow an old cavalry horse to live out its final days in a pasture rather than be sold off for dog food. He then contrasted that behavior with what he saw when he later served in the Air Force in the 1950s.

    For him, the distinction demonstrated the different service cultures and why he preferred the Army’s. Unfortunately, I think that culture no longer exists in the Army. Can it be revived? I certainly hope so, but this latest decision gives me very little hope.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

  • Why the left wants you to be weak

    Why the left wants you to be weak

    For much of my life, fitness wasn’t optional. I was held to very specific standards and tested to confirm that I was adhering to those standards. I was a hockey player. In college, and briefly, in the minor pros. Most seasons began the same way: a searing battery of strength and conditioning tests – on-ice sprints, off-ice endurance runs, bench press, squats, pull-ups, all to termination. Scores aggregated and ranked, from first to last. Personal value was assigned to the scores. Coaches took notice. I trained accordingly and drew a portion of my self-worth from being fit.

    That mindset would serve me well after school, when I joined the US Air Force as a Pilot Trainee. I was medically discharged before commissioning, but while I was in, fitness wasn’t optional. Meeting minimums was required to stay in the program, to keep my shot at serving.

    I never saw a problem with any of this. And I certainly never detected anything political about maintaining high fitness. The first inkling I had, of something shifting culturally, was during a relationship I had in my 20s. I was dating an art school graduate from Denver. She didn’t understand why I worked out every day. I was training to meet Air Force standards. But she suspected vanity. She put me in a position I’d never been in before: justifying my fitness.

    That seed of fitness-skepticism I sensed in my girlfriend ten years ago caught me off guard. But it was a harbinger of a wider trend, which blossomed fully during the pandemic, entrenching itself as a bona fide leftist worldview in which fitness is held to signal vanity, privilege, ableism or even conservatism.

    Where did this worldview maligning fitness come from? The inception point likely begins with the body positivity movement. The movement wasn’t without merits, promoting confidence in a wider variety of body types, suggesting that desire and worth could be attributed to those whose physiques fell beyond the parameters of Kate Moss or Arnold Schwarzenegger. But body positivity went too far, embracing obesity, an oftentimes fatal condition, and fueling the skepticism I detected in my then-girlfriend.

    If body positivity was the inception point, the pandemic marked the crystallization. A line was drawn in the sand. Conservatives wanted to bullheadedly forge through Covid. Liberals meanwhile committed wholeheartedly to safetyism, policies that prioritized physical safety at all costs (social distancing, masking, vaccinations), and embraced a broader suspicion of physical risk and exertion altogether.

    But the point isn’t who was right about Covid – it’s that one political tribe embraced policies that promoted physical strength while another tribe, almost reflexively, embraced policies that dwelled in physical fragility.

    Perspectives towards fitness have sorted along the same ideological faultline. Conservatives embrace fitness, whereas a cultural current on the left, already suspicious of several fit cultures (soldiers, survivalists, jocks) increasingly reject fitness.

    Obviously, the divide isn’t universal. The left has its yoga teachers and thru-hikers with single-digit body fat, just as the right has sedentary pre-diabetics. But when fitness is assigned political value, the left skews toward unfitness, the right toward fitness.

    And that’s not to say conservatives have taken a universally admirable approach. Gym bros. CrossFit cultists. Roid ragers. The whole MMA thing. The right’s embrace of a performative, macho brand of fitness alienates large portions of the population, myself included. But when you strip away the tastelessness a core fact remains: to be fit is better than to be unfit, no matter the culture through which the fitness was attained.

    On most things, reasonable people can disagree. But not fitness. It leads to lower healthcare costs, to crisis response preparedness, to national readiness. Fitness extends lives and keeps people sane. To spurn fitness is to spurn a biological imperative, something no political framework can rationalize.

    Through much of human history, in most places and societies on Earth, fitness wasn’t negotiable, it was a survival mechanism. And being weak wasn’t a political position – it was a prospective death sentence. Ironically, the left suggests that fitness is a form of privilege.

    But to be unfit is the privileged position, to disdain fitness is only possible when danger and physical hardship seem far away – luxuries much of the world’s population cannot relate to.
    Yet, increasingly, the progressive left’s view on fitness is consistent with the progressive left’s wider worldview in which citizens are deemed too weak to do anything. Indeed, the embrace of weakness just seems to be the physical extension of a worldview in which every individual shortcoming is ascribed to an inherent and unavoidable weakness, which society at large must then accommodate. In this world view, weakness isn’t just tolerated – it’s a creed.

    And in the contemporary left, helplessness itself has social value. Being perceived to be disadvantaged confers currency. Increasingly, that same logic is being applied to the physical body, whereby weakness becomes a form of virtue, while strength is treated with suspicion. The trend here is plainly self-defeating: to build a society around weakness, physical or otherwise, is to build a society to fail.

    The downstream effects of embracing physical weakness are more profound than love handles or shortness of breath. People are dying. Obesity is an epidemic. The healthcare system is collapsing. Citizens are losing their resilience. Children are softening. The civilian-military gap is widening. National readiness is reduced. These are medical, cultural, and strategic failures – the root of which a portion of the leftist population has embraced.

    Fitness is a biological maximization that unlocks health, wellbeing, and happiness. We can argue about tax rates, foreign policy, and gun control. But there is no rational debate over whether strength is more desirable than weakness. The idea that general fitness is a vanity project, or a conservative ideal, needs to be dismissed wholesale. Our collective aim should be to field citizens who live healthier and happier. Who require less health care. Who are resilient and who raise their children to be resilient. Who, if required, could defend the nation. These are the ideals of a functional society, north star ideals for much of human history – and they require the acceptance of fitness as a civic virtue.

    I’m in my late 30s now. No hockey coaches or military recruiters yelling at me to do another pullup. The external incentives to keep pushing myself are less obvious. But I still wake up at four am to skate hard with my friends. I still sprint stairs and grind the stationary bike. I do it because I’m a better version of myself when I’m fit – not just a better hockey player but a better husband, father, and citizen. And there’s nothing political about that.

  • How did the men who bombed Hiroshima live with themselves?

    Eighty years on, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima continues to provoke fierce debate, reflection, and deep moral inquiry. How did the thirteen men aboard the Enola Gay – the US aircraft that delivered the bomb that killed at least 150,000 people – live with the knowledge of what they had done?

    The morning of August 6, 1945 began like any other on the Pacific island of Tinian. That was, until the Boeing B-29 Superfortress lifted into the sky. Its destination: Japan. Its payload: “Little Boy,” the first atomic bomb ever used in warfare. Piloted by Colonel Paul W. Tibbets Jnr. and manned by a crew of twelve, the mission forever altered the course of history. The explosion over Hiroshima ushered in the atomic age, marked the beginning of the end of the Second World War, and created a moral legacy that haunted and defined the lives of those aboard.

    Some defended their actions unapologetically; others expressed private doubts or lingering sorrow

    The men of the Enola Gay were highly trained and mission-focused, yet none could fully comprehend the historic and human weight of the operation they had executed. After the war, these men returned to civilian life or continued military careers, each navigating the public scrutiny and personal reckoning that came with their roles in the atomic bombing. Some defended their actions unapologetically; others expressed private doubts or lingering sorrow. But all of them lived in the long shadow of that moment.

    Colonel Tibbets Jnr., the aircraft’s commander and pilot, remained the most visible and vocal member of the crew throughout his life. As the man who had selected the Enola Gay, named it after his mother, and led the 509th Composite Group, Tibbets carried the weight of command. Unapologetic to the end, you can only admire his message discipline, consistently defending the mission as necessary. In a 2002 interview, he reflected:

    “I viewed my mission as one to save lives. I didn’t bomb Pearl Harbor. I didn’t start the war. But I was going to finish it.”

    Tibbets served in the US Air Force until his retirement as a brigadier general in 1966. He never expressed remorse and, anticipating potential protests, requested no headstone after his death in 2007. His ashes were scattered over the English Channel by his French-born widow, Andrea.

    Major Thomas Ferebee, the bombardier who released the bomb, shared Tibbets’ view. A seasoned airman who had seen combat in Europe, Ferebee also showed little inclination toward public reflection or regret. He returned to service after the war and retired as a colonel, keeping a low profile for much of his life. Like Tibbets, he believed the bombing had ultimately saved more lives than it had taken.

    Navigator Captain Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk was responsible for guiding the aircraft to its target. His recollections offered a blend of historical realism and quiet resignation. In a 2005 interview, Van Kirk said:

    “War is war. And in war, you do what you have to do to win. It was a different time and a different place.”

    After leaving the military, Van Kirk worked in private industry, remaining relatively quiet until his later years, when he began to speak more openly about the mission. He maintained that the bombing, tragic though it was, had likely prevented an even greater catastrophe. He passed away in 2014, the last surviving member of the Enola Gay crew.

    Co-pilot Captain Robert Lewis, in contrast, expressed deep emotional conflict shortly after the mission. In his logbook, written during the return flight, he famously recorded:

    “My God, what have we done?”

    This single line became one of the most quoted responses from the mission, often contrasted with the stoic tone of Tibbets and others. But his crew members have called into question the veracity of that account. According to Van Kirk, who was sitting behind the co-pilot, as they gazed at the giant mushroom cloud enveloping the heart of Hiroshima, Lewis exclaimed: “Look at that son of a bitch go!”

    Lewis, a civilian airline pilot before and after the war, wrestled with the event privately. Though he never publicly condemned the mission, his writings and interviews reflected a more complicated emotional legacy. He died in 1983.

    Sergeant George “Bob” Caron, the tail gunner, was the only crew member to witness the blast directly through a rear-facing window. He captured the famous photographs of the mushroom cloud that have since become emblematic of the bombing. In his 1995 memoir Fire of a Thousand Suns, Caron defended the mission as a necessary military action and expressed pride in his crew’s professionalism. After the war, he lived a relatively quiet life and worked in sales.

    Lieutenant Jacob Beser, the radar specialist, played a role not only in Hiroshima but also in the second bombing mission over Nagasaki. A physicist by training, Beser was deeply involved in the technical side of the weapon’s delivery. In later interviews, he was frank about his participation, stating that he had no regrets, though he did express concern over the uncontrolled spread of nuclear weapons in the postwar world. Beser passed away in 1992.

    Several crew members chose to step away from public life entirely. Staff Sergeant Wyatt Duzenbury, Sergeant Robert Shumard, and Technical Sergeant Joseph Stiborik all returned to civilian life without engaging in public commentary. These men had played crucial roles in maintaining the aircraft and monitoring its systems, yet their postwar narratives were largely defined by silence. Their private reflections, if any, were not widely recorded.

    Captain William “Deak” Parsons, the mission’s weaponeer, had the grave responsibility of arming the bomb during flight. A naval officer and ordnance expert, Parsons ensured that the weapon was live before it reached the drop zone. He continued to work in nuclear weapons development and held high-level roles in the Navy and at Los Alamos. Parsons died in 1953, before the larger public reckoning with the bomb’s legacy fully unfolded.

    Ensign Morris Jeppson, Parsons’ assistant, was the man who removed the bomb’s safety plugs mid-flight, allowing it to arm. After the war, Jeppson became an electrical engineer and worked in private industry. In later life, he occasionally gave interviews in which he offered a calm, pragmatic defence of the mission. He expressed neither regret nor triumph, focusing instead on the technical precision and professionalism required for such a complex operation.

    Their reflections were often grounded in the logic of the time: a brutal war, a feared invasion

    As the Cold War intensified and nuclear weapons proliferated, public sentiment around Hiroshima became increasingly divided. The 50th anniversary of the bombing in 1995 brought renewed scrutiny to the crew of the Enola Gay, particularly when the Smithsonian Institution’s planned exhibit on the aircraft was met with controversy. Veterans’ groups clashed with peace activists and historians over how the bombing should be remembered. Tibbets and other surviving crew members criticised what they saw as a politically skewed narrative that cast them as villains rather than soldiers following orders during wartime. The exhibit was eventually revised, displaying the aircraft without a strong interpretive stance.

    While many of the men maintained personal pride in their military professionalism, few glorified the destruction itself. Their reflections were often grounded in the logic of the time: a brutal war, a feared invasion, and the perceived necessity of demonstrating overwhelming force to end the conflict swiftly. These were not bloodthirsty men; they were professionals who had been tasked with delivering an incomprehensibly powerful weapon, under orders and in service to a broader strategic objective.

    As the years passed, the crew of the Enola Gay aged into a world that changed dramatically from the one in which they had taken flight. They watched as the power they had unleashed became the centrepiece of global geopolitics. Some lived long enough to see the fall of the Soviet Union, the debates over arms control, and the shifting global consensus about the use of nuclear weapons.

    Yet through it all, the men remained tethered to that day in 1945. Whether in silence or speech, pride or doubt, they carried the memory of Hiroshima with them. Their mission was history’s turning point, but also their personal burden. They did not ask to become symbols of victory, destruction, or moral ambiguity, but that is what history made them.

    Their story is not one of monsters or saints, but of men caught in the furnace of global conflict, making choices within the brutal logic of war. They dropped the bomb. And then, for the rest of their lives, they lived with it.

    ‘The Hiroshima Men: The Quest to Build the Atomic Bomb, and the Fateful Decision to Use It’ by Iain MacGregor is out now.