Sure, that Central American “caravan” is hundreds of miles from the U.S. border, and it doesn’t present the slightest sort of military threat to anyone, except the fevered imagination of our national headache, Donald Trump. So why deploy thousands of troops, at a cost of several hundred million dollars, against a non-existent threat?
Good question, right? Well, fortunately, as Reason’s Joe Setyon reports, Army Secretary Mark Esper has a good answer. Speaking, appropriately enough, at the American Enterprise Institute, which never met a troop deployment it didn’t like, the secretary said “They are getting training out of that. They are deploying. They are putting their equipment on trains and whatnot or convoying and deploying to a location, and they are offloading,”
See, they put stuff on trains, and they convoy and deploy, and then they take it off again. Excellent, excellent training! And even if it isn’t, it’s great exercise, all that lifting and stuff. Keeps a body young!
What’s really funny about Mr. Esper’s speech is that, according to what I’ve heard around town, everyone at AEI kept a straight face during his presentation. Now that’s training!
