Well, It Is Not ...

 ... for off-ramp for Trump or the US, it is for off-ramp for Pentagon geniuses who now are soiling themselves trying to calculate the probability of the wrecking ball of the blame for the FUBAR everywhere, from 404 to Iran, hitting them on their heads, with the proverbial rolling after that. 

Over the last few weeks, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Dan Caine has privately made clear to other top Trump advisers that the US needs to find an off-ramp from the war with Iran — because the military options on the table to escalate the conflict could backfire and airpower alone is unlikely to achieve President Donald Trump’s stated objectives, according to three sources familiar with the matter. “Caine is looking for an off ramp,” one of the sources said bluntly. Caine is not alone in his view that the war has reached a crossroads. He has discussed concerns about the military options for escalating the conflict and raised the prospect of finding an off-ramp from the war with other key Cabinet officials, including CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance, two of the sources said. The top US general has recently side-barred with some of those key, like-minded Trump advisers in an effort to facilitate interagency coordination and ensure they are on the same page ahead of meetings with the president. The aim has been to make clear the limitations and pitfalls of the available military options, including those that do not involve putting US boots on the ground, the sources said. “I think it is just his way of protecting the military,” one of the sources told CNN, referring to Caine’s discussions with other top national security officials within Trump’s cabinet about the Iran war.

They are protecting their behinds because none of them had courage and integrity to resign in protest to the insanity Trump and his Israeli handlers planned. And, of course, we all recall how Trump promised to end the war in 404 "in 24 hours". It is all about who is going to be left holding the bag with excrement. Bunch of losers and war criminals. 

"Joint Vision", LOL))

Mark Milley, leaving his post (and because of that) suddenly recognizes the fact of which I wrote for years--JCS is not really up for such a complex task as planning and fighting a REAL war. Milley went for a jugular and went for offering de facto... Russian model of "harmonization of services" and that created an outcry from grifters from Pentagon. 

Milley’s case for inter-service harmonization is, more specifically, a case for a wholly joint approach to doctrinal, technological and strategic development. It rests not upon new technology, but on technology that came into being during the Cold War. Milley’s point of departure is AirLand Battle, the doctrine that assisted the flowering of operational theory in U.S. military practice. Milley’s criticism of AirLand Battle is that it was insufficiently joint — it never included a naval role, nor did it delineate properly between aerial and ground responsibility for long-range fires. This criticism is telling in that Milley’s argument does not actually rest upon the new technologies he mentions. Rather, it rests on the assumption that the greatest change in modern warfare in the last century is the development of jointness itself, embodied in an empowered chairman and the centralization of force design and doctrinal development in the Joint Staff.  

Oh boy, Seth Cropsey who "served" as a middle level bureaucrat in several administrations as a conduit for incompetent neocon "way of war" is really hurt by the de facto admission by Milley that this whole "Air Land Battle" and JCS structure is designed to "fight" 5 year old kids in the sand box. SMO exposed completely this "flowering operational theory" (LOL, I am still laughing))) as nothing more than PR BS not designed for fighting any serious enemy. Especially the one which actually has world-class air defense, air force and a dramatic advantage in high precision and stand-off weaponry supported by advanced ISR. 

But the fact that Milley essentially calls for the US equivalent of General Staff butt-hurt Cropsey really badly. To the point of this:

Centralizing force design through a “future jointness czar” is not strategic wisdom — it is hubristic, bureaucratic policymaking. The danger is that the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the next Secretary of Defense, are too blinded by their conviction in the arc of technological change that they commit the U.S. military to the wrong transformational program. Jointness is useful in creating a military force whose cooperation in training multiplies effectiveness in combat. But as the author of force design and doctrine for all the military services, it would be a disaster to trade experience for “harmonization.” 

I have news for Cropsey--America's war "experience" within existing structure and what passes in the US for "doctrine" and "joint vision" is one of a sequence of losses of wars and I do not even talk about US Armed Forces losing not just wars but the technological arms race--the fact Cropsey cannot wrap his brain around. But Cropsey shouldn't worry--IF this transition even takes place it will not succeed, because the US has no experience of the warfare of such scope and scale as SMO, not to speak of hundreds of years of the evolution of the General Staff which Russia has. Pentagon exists as a branch of the US military-industrial-media complex and is not designed to fight real wars. 

But then again, I am on record: strategic planning is what Russian General Staff does and it has an incredibly good intel collection and strategic analytical structures (GRU) of its own, not to mention dedicated own Academy of the General Staff, which allow it to occupy the role of a true "harmonizer" for all services of Russian Armed Forces and having a very serious influence on the decision making process of Russian political top. It is a very different organism which grew out of a very different historic, cultural and military experience than that of the US. But I applaud Cropsey's audacity when calling a dismal record of US lost wars a "flowering of operational theory", LOL. But then again, we may admit that when looked at as a theory of how NOT TO FIGHT real war, we may allow for this term of "flowering".