What does it look like when Flyover Country fights back?
The Swamp’s empire-builders got a brief glimpse earlier this month, when Sooner State Sen. Nathan Dahm (R-Broken Arrow) “filed a resolution to reject the insertion of Ukrainian troops in Oklahoma.” His press release came a day after the AP reported that about “100 Ukrainian troops will head to … Fort Sill … to begin training on the Patriot missile defense system, getting Kyiv closer to obtaining a long-sought protection against Russia’s continued missile attacks.”
The thought of the “Scud Buster” being wielded by none other than Volodymyr Zelenskyy surely puts hearts aflutter in McLean, Malibu, and Manhattan. But Dahm has a different perspective:
These America Last policies of the current regime should not be tolerated in Oklahoma. We saw how recently the Ukrainian military fired a rocket into Poland killing two innocent civilians. We certainly don’t need them practicing here in Oklahoma where our citizens could be under the constant threat of a similar failure.
Okay, close supervision will probably guarantee that the Ukrainians don’t accidentally attack Lawton. But give Dahm credit for accomplishing two useful acts of consciousness-raising. First, he brought attention to how regularly America’s “allies” send their warriors to train here. Second, he defied the “wisdom” that any Pentagon dollar spent for any reason in your district or state is an unalloyed good.
Germany has “been training its aircrews in the United States since 1958.” Kessler Air Force Base’s International Military Student Office instructs “over 300 international students from approximately 30-45 allied countries per year.” In 2022, Maxwell Air Force Base’s International Officer School graduated “126 students [who] have already been identified as future senior leaders and approximately 10% will go on to serve as air chiefs or higher in their respective countries.”
There are never any problems with all this “education” — right? In 2011, a congressional audit revealed that while expenditures for the International Military Education and Training program “increased by more than 70 percent since fiscal year 2000, the number of students trained … decreased by nearly 14 percent.” In 2020, several months after “a member of the Royal Saudi Air Force … entered a building on the grounds of Pensacola Naval Air Station and killed three U.S. sailors and severely wounded eight other Americans,” the Pentagon admitted that “the training and procedures it has in place for insider threats did not specifically take foreign military students into account.” Just weeks ago, an inspector general report found that foreign “troops bound for study in the U.S. have slipped through the vetting cracks.” The military “doesn’t always follow regulations in clearing incoming personnel from abroad,” and thus, unsupervised access “to DOD facilities for people who seek to inflict harm on American service members or their families” could occur.
The Ukrainian trainees are likely to behave themselves while at Fort Sill. After all, their nation has been the recipient of “approximately $27.5 billion in security assistance,” courtesy the American taxpayer, and there’s every indication that the largesse will continue to flow.
With all those bucks sloshing around, one would assume that every local and state pol connected to a military community would be delighted to partake. Well, not Dahm. His resistance to the Patriot training isn’t merely out of the ordinary — it might be unprecedented. Oklahoma is a major harvester of military-industrial-complex loot. Fort Sill is joined by Altus Air Force Base, the McAlester Army Ammunition Plant, Tinker Air Froce Base, and Vance Air Force Base. The facilities employ tens of thousands of servicemen, civilian workers, and contractor employees. And to “protect” those jobs, politicians in the Sooner State do what their colleagues from from California to Connecticut do — fiercely fight for funding.
For opposing a proposal that delivers more “defense” dollars to his state, Dahm received condemnation from seven members of his chamber’s GOP caucus. Oklahoma’s “rich history of training programs with different countries,” they explained, is eternal, and inviolable. Cutting such “ties” is “akin to jeopardizing our national security.”
Hysterical poppycock, and sadly, entirely predictable. That’s why Dahm’s placement of principle above both politics and brain-dead jingoism was so gutsy. The nation will need many more like him, if Washington’s foolhardiness is to be fixed. Endless wars, unsustainable entitlement spending, excessive taxation, insane regulation — none will be curbed until a critical mass of elected officials, from lowly village councilors to power brokers in the distinguished U.S. Congress, value the common interest more than reelection.
The Fort Sill Rebellion never stood a chance, of course. But perhaps it’s a harbinger of things to come.
Brings back a memory of being surprised when I was stationed at Fort Dix in the 70's and when I went out with other friends to go dancing, we encountered a bunch of pilots from Iran training at McGuire AFB!
OK State Senator Dahm's real objection seems to be further supporting Ukrainians by training them anywhere. He skirts this objection in his brief press release, short on reasoning. Is it really "America Last" to train Ukrainians, or Taiwanese, or Guamanians or Filipinos or Japanese to protect themselves and not break the equipment we're giving them anyway? If the real issue is the escalating war, Dahm should so state, or am I missing something? The next steps are providing F-16s and then sending American troops. That objection might resonate. Your other 10th amendment states-rights links seem to be more fruitful.
In 2021 we visited the grave of Geronimo and his wives at Fort Sill and enjoyed OK, oft overlooked.
https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/military/2023/01/18/fort-still-oklahoma-ukraine-ukrainian-soldiers-patriot-missle-training-what-to-know/69815482007/