r/politics • u/T_Shurt • 19h ago

Possible Paywall Hegseth Announces Elon Musk and Newt Gingrich Will Help Lead Military

https://newrepublic.com/post/216045/pete-hegseth-elon-musk-newt-gingrich-help-lead-military
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u/supercyberlurker 19h ago

The military partnering directly with the richest man in the world.  It’s the setup for a thousand movies warning why not to do this.

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u/strangefish 19h ago

This has got to be a military takeover, but these three clowns have no idea how to run a military. This is going to end incredibly badly.

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u/jimbarino 18h ago

Fascists are always incompetent. One of the reasons they go evil extremes is to try and cover up their previous failures. People always talk about the Nazis as these cold calculating bastards, but the reason for the 'final' plan was because they fucked up actually achieving every single prior plan. The atrocities are because of the incompetence, not despite it.

Which, you know, doesn't bode well right now...

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u/hellbentsmegma 18h ago

When people talk about the Nazis being efficient, well organised and keeping good records, these are qualities Germany was known for before they gained power. 

The fascist era was a step backwards on all of these counts. Hitler thrived on bureaucratic chaos as it allowed him to maintain power, he had terrible military plans because he thought he was a genius who knew better than everyone, and there are plenty of examples of the Nazis not documenting or destroying documentation when they thought it might make them look bad.

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u/ArrBeeNayr 11h ago

Not to mention that even the holocaust was devised in response to the Nazi's own incompetence. For the years leading up to (and even a few in to) WW2, their goal was to deport minority groups.

As anyone could tell you, relocating millions of people is a logistical and financial nightmare. Their hate made them try anyway, and when it didn't work they shrugged their shoulders and resorted to genocide.

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u/RobutNotRobot 10h ago

The Madagascar Plan was never realistic. Their plan was fairly straightforward after the war started in that the occupied populations in the east would be enslaved and worked to death with many being immediately exterminated.

The part where they didn't think was that killing kids all day would make their military units combat ineffective.

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u/Infinite-Ad4512 3h ago

And then IBM came in as consultants to make sure the operation went smoothly

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u/Speartree 12h ago

Indeed, Germans in Nazi Germany who still kept meticulous records were doing some kind of malicious compliance work.

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u/IrascibleOcelot 6h ago

At one point, the Allies stopped trying to assassinate Hitler because they realized he was fucking up their military strategies with his incompetence. All the people trying to kill Hitler were germans, usually german military.

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u/United-Passage7864 26m ago

Reading the Guns series by Blackburn it's amazing how often the scenario is described as:

  • Allied forces advancing; struggling with supply lines as they get further from Normandy but pressing on
  • German forces: stuck with their backs against another major landmark river because Hitler forbid them to retreat across it

And the Germans take terrible losses and retreat anyway; much better for the Allies than if they'd had to attack across said river. 

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u/Mapeague 7h ago

Just read this on The Guardian a few minutes ago. Gets into how even though they were highly incompetent and corrupt, they were still able to seize power.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/01/hitler-lazy-criminal-slept-until-noon-rise-nazis-wrong

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u/Pisces93 8h ago

Wow sounds familiar

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u/Prize-Bumblebee-2192 2h ago

Not unlike like how mango assessed Iran

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u/brontosaurusguy 17h ago

Yeah you're right entirely but with power they can kill millions before it's over so it's quite horrifying!

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u/ragun2 15h ago

"we'll just shoot the Jews"

"Oh guess we fucked up and it's more expensive than we thought, let's just gas them en masse"

Is that how it went?

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u/jimbarino 15h ago edited 15h ago

Yes. But also that wasn't even their first several plans.

First they campaigned on the idea that the Jews were not German and should be deported back to their home countries. That worked for some, but unsurprisingly people who'd spent generations in Germany were not easy to simply deport and often other countries wouldn't take them.

Then they came up with a series of plans to transport the Jews to a 3rd party country. See for example the Madagascar plan. This was an abysmal failure because it's actually really logistically complicated and expensive to move millions of people.

After relocation and attempts to concentrate Jews into Ghettos failed, they moved on to the shooting you propose, the Einsatzgruppen. And you know what? it actually is more expensive and difficult than you'd think to shoot millions of people. It's a lot of people and a lot of bullets, and it also turns out that most soldiers don't super enjoy shooting children all day every day. It also is fairly public, and it started to look pretty bad even to the most ardent fascists.

At this point, they were out of ideas, facing breakdown of military discipline, and out of resources or options to try for anything else. They couldn't release the Jews--they'd been too mistreated to allow to spread their story at that point--and they needed to do something to resolve it quickly. They needed a more efficient killing method that didn't require face to face contact with soldiers. Hence the Final solution of industrialized extermination.

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u/RobutNotRobot 10h ago

Everything people think exemplifies Germany the Nazis did badly. They designed a tank that was too heavy, frequently broke down, and couldn't fire while moving. They never designed a heavy bomber.

Their military strategy was based a lot on emotion. One story is that after the British conducted their first successful bombing mission over Germany, Hitler got so angry that he stopped bombing the airfields in the UK and started bombing cities as punishment. This unified the people like nothing else and gave relief to the beleaguered RAF.

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u/DueVisit1410 9h ago

While true, both the Axis and the Allies employed Douhet's theories on air bombing, specifically targetting the civilian population, despite this mostly galvanizing the people being bombed against their bombers. It's actually quite telling that dictators and authoritarian regimes seem to hold onto such tactics despite the evidence against them.

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u/careyious 7h ago

If fascists were able to examine evidence they'd not be fascists. Beyond any moral arguments, from a purely statistical and rational perspective, mutual cooperation is the most effective method of winning any situation where you must engage with a group. But when your ideology requires you to oust others and create an ever shrinking in-group, you are ideologically bound to reject reality and evidence. 

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u/wotikuli 17h ago

So, you're saying this is a good thing?

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u/YoureAWinnerBob 19h ago

For everyone too =/

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u/RlOTGRRRL 19h ago edited 19h ago

Musk can literally hack all the Teslas to block all the highways around the world at the same time. 

If the internet went down, his SpaceX satellites would be some of the only ones with a connection. 

His data centers power Anthropic or OpenAI if not both. Aka he has access to the best AI in the world. 

And he also has factories that can shit out killer robots.

When you add all of that up, plus the other tech bros and whatever the fuck is going on in the US government and military, it's not pretty.

Prepare for the worst, hope for the best. 

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u/nukebox Massachusetts 18h ago

If the internet went down, his SpaceX satellites would be some of the only ones with a connection.

A connection to what exactly?

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u/Wickedinteresting 18h ago

The original comment is a tiny bit foil-hatty and I don’t know if I think it’s likely, but: presumably between his data centers and networked equipment he controls. Like a private network basically. The infrastructure is (I think, relatively) there.

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u/RlOTGRRRL 17h ago

Russia has been trying to snip deep ocean internet cables for years. 

Musk supplies internet to Ukraine via Starlink. 

I think Iran is still in the dark. 

In wartime, infrastructure, especially communications, is the first to go. Especially for coups. 

If you turned off the power and the internet, easy to do if you're in charge, you'd still be able to control your killer robots via their satellite connections. 

They would also have a dossier of millions of faces, like they've been scanning with ICE and Palantir, they've got a full list of people to target. 

And they've already passed the executive orders to deem them terrorists. 

If not enough people resist, and they have all the data to know who is resisting, it'd be incredibly easy to surgically remove dissenters. They're already knocking on people's doors now for shit talking on social media.

Anyway I sincerely hope that I'm psycho. I'd rather be insane than right.

I sincerely hope that everyone's right and that Americans can vote their way out of this. 

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u/Wickedinteresting 16h ago

I do see what you’re saying, and I worry about this sort of thing too. I used to work in telecom and we all absolutely take our infrastructure for granted. I just uhhh… really hope this doesn’t come to fruition 😅

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u/lightninhopkins America 18h ago

Lol. Literally none of this is true.

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u/Tirras 17h ago

You've lost grip on reality. The man is a moron, not a super villain, and that list is fantasy craft bullshit.

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u/ProtectionVirtual225 6h ago

It's really unfair for the younger generations who will be stuck with a broken economy and massive federal deficits to pay off.

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u/JesusWuta40oz 18h ago

Well hopefully the guns get pointed the other way by saner miltary men if they try it.

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u/Kipka 16h ago

In preparation for Trump 2028, because who's going to argue when the police and military support him?

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u/single_method_man 11h ago

Elon owns telecomunications, he owns mass social media, he owns his AI company, he wants to build robots and replace humans.

This isn't funny, they are capturing the military, these are not clowns, they are the rulers of the world. This is going to end incredibly badly, FOR YOU NOT FOR THEM.

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u/GooberMcNutly 8h ago

Combine it with the news that they fired the 20% of the Generals and Admirals that wouldn't pass the loyalty test, and find it hard to draw another conclusion.

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u/DauntlessCorvidae 1h ago

Nah bro, i think thats the point. The clowns are the face of the charade. In the background AI  controlled by Palantir slowly takes over the state apparatus.

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u/shaim2 8h ago

Because you only read the headline.

It's a think-tank about "the future of war" - imagining how technology will shape future battlefields.

And they aren't the only ones working on this.

But it certainly makes sense to hear what Elon and Palmer think about the subject.