A little late, maybe, but I won.

It’s funny; I won a war game of the Falklands War quite handily as the Argentineans.

I parked the Argy fleet of ex-World War II rust buckets in three- and four-ship packets at all the Falklands landfalls, and used its modern Air Force very sparingly just to protect the Argentine coast (shorter flights, more missions, better coordination, more loitering/dogfighting capability; most importantly, a final kamikaze reserve kept carefully intact). As I lost ships, I shuffled the survivors around so that Stanley remained a deadly flak trap against low-flying, not-so-fast Harriers I shot down in droves, fouling their bombing runs and eventually chasing them away. I sank the Brit nuke sub in shallow water when it tried to sneak into Stanley Harbor and torpedo my Belgrano flagship (subs are much more vulnerable there, despite their high-tech).

When the British fleet maneuvered close inshore to make a landing, I flung all my ships against it (a short hop: too short for the Brits to react effectively) and sank its pocket aircraft carrier in a conventional gun/torpedo battle. The Brits never made a landing; if they had, my surviving close-support naval artillery would have made their task ten times hotter. That left the Argentine Army and jet Air Force intact, no successful Brit bombardment, no attrition losses. I lost quite a few Argy ships and prop planes in the process, but the UK lost the war, hands down – barring nukes.

No big deal. I just used my Argentine assets so as to optimize their strengths and minimize their weaknesses. Argentina could have done much the same under the command of other than fascist idiots. The USA, now, likewise. When you’re Mohammed Ali, you dance like a butterfly and sting like a bee; you don’t stand planted there with your jaw hanging out for some bruiser to dislocate in his own sweet time.

The thing about “internal security” operations is, it rots out the military from the most brass-laden honcho down to the last common trooper; turns them into bullies, self-serving shirkers, thieves, liars, cowards and tactical idiots. They cannot stand against an equivalent military force uncontaminated by it. They turn into a gaggle of gangsters with no loyalty, trust, sense of sacrifice or focus on the common good; the few remaining good ones among them quit in disgust, throw their lives away on the cheap, turn stoner or stand back and let the rest hang themselves.

Never confound military honor with militarist fascism; the two are self-contradictory. Military honor is a vital strategic benefit for any healthy society; it can rot away at the slightest infusion of fascism. Lose it and you lose for good. Thank God, or by now we would all be corpses stacked in the concentration camps, toe-tagged by the meticulous sociopaths that history seems to produce inevitably; or just nuclear war survivors chipping radioactive rocks for our next meal.

Military honor is the only thing that checks this spiral into chaos. What are categorically anti-military peaceniks going to use? Your good looks? You’re throwing out the baby with the bathwater.