"Peace is our profession" was the official motto of America's Strategic Air Command (SAC) in the 1950s under the command of Gen. Curtis LeMay. "War is just something we do for kicks" was the unofficial second half.
LeMay made his reputation during World War II, particularly after August 1944 when he was put in charge of our strategic bombing campaign against Imperial Japan.
While LeMay might not have been quite as hard-talking as Admiral William F. Halsey Jr. — whose war strategy, in his own words, was, “Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs!” — LeMay did have two nuclear-armed B-29s do his talking for him over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So when President Harry Truman put LeMay in charge of SAC, our nuclear bombing command, it sent a powerful message to Joseph Stalin in Moscow.
The message was, "I've got this attack dog on a leash, but I don't know what might happen if you make me let it go." It's a nice strategic posture to pull off and it helps if you have somebody believable in the role of the attack dog. For all his faults, LeMay played the part with frightening ease — as Truman (and later Eisenhower) intended.
Flash forward to 2025, and our strategic posture is almost as rickety as the small and understaffed bomber force LeMay was tasked with forging into the fearsome SAC. I won't bore you with all the nitty-gritty details yet again. But I will remind you that Communist China is an international bully under Xi Jinping and is building up its air and naval forces — particularly its navy — at a breathtaking pace. Xi means to reunify with Taiwan (by force if necessary) and dominate the Pacific at least as far as Midway.
Meanwhile, we haven't even begun the process of restoring our naval strength to where it must be, and it starts with rebuilding the basic shipbuilding infrastructure that we've let melt away these last 30 years. We are in a period of strategic vulnerability that invites aggression.
Enter one Donald J. Trump, stage right.
So the President-reelect started in with crazy talk about annexing Canada, taking back the Panama Canal, and buying Greenland. Then Trump upped the stakes even more by saying he wouldn't rule out military action. When faced with an actual expansionist power like Communist China, the crazy-like-a-fox move is to talk like an even bigger expansionist power yourself.
Nobody can out-Trump Trump, just like nobody could out-LeMay LeMay. Trump, in other words, is his own best attack dog — and there's nobody holding the leash. "I'm nuts!" is a sound position to take when our current military forces might not be enough to deter a war.
Might not be enough? They aren't enough. After Barack Obama nearly cleared the upper ranks of warfighters and Joe Biden wussified the lower ranks with DEI and wokeism, war broke out along a semicircle stretching from Eastern Europe through the Middle East to the southern end of the Red Sea — and China is waging low-level and just-short-of-war actions from the Baltic to the Himalayas to the South China Sea.
"Panama Canal?" Trump could announce tomorrow. "America needs to control the Suez Canal! And when Crimea is the 52nd state, I'll build resorts there so beautiful Putin will stay in one. I might anoint Don Jr. as King of Mexico or nuke Luxemburg. You just never know."
Maybe Xi — or even Vladimir Putin — soon will see the wisdom in backing off and talking peace with Trump before he does something really crazy. War is his profession, he's making them wonder. Peace is just something he does for kicks.
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