... they start drilling. 

This time it's the incompetent Secretary of War calling together effectively ALL of the flag officers throughout all branches of the military into a single meeting, in ONE WEEK, publicly announced.

I can't even BEGIN to address all of the reasons this is stupid beyond easy belief, and also highly concerning in other ways, but... holy Jebus. 

First of all, wherever the meeting is held -- barring it being a hidden conference room in Cheyenne Mountain, maybe -- you have just created the biggest damn military strategic and tactical target the modern world has EVER seen. You literally have gathered the ENTIRE chain of command, minus the President (who in this case is worse than useless anyway), into ONE ROOM. A single attack could literally behead the USA's military machine in a few seconds.  

There's a lot of jokes about how the top brass are expendable, and there's always a few that are, but the fact is if you take away HUNDREDS of people at the top of a regimented, strictly-organized military you will create chaos. There's SO many parts of that machine that assume a reasonably smooth flow of information from top to bottom and back up with carefully-designed succession backups. 

But not succession backups fhree or four deep. The PRESIDENT is like a dozen deep, but most officers have one or two people who can step into their places and reasonably well catch the load. A lot of THOSE are people at or near that officer's level. 

If you're taking away ALL the people at the top several levels, there's no backup or precedent for that kind of "beheading" strike. 

So that's ONE level of stupid. 

A level of CONCERNING is that we have no idea of the REASON for this meeting. Why the hell would you suddenly summon every single ranking officer to you? 

I can't think of any reason that's GOOD. This could be a "show us this loyalty" moment, where they basically want to make sure every one of the top brass are behind Trump--- or are removed from office and replaced. 

This could be a global strategy meeting (recognizing that Hegseth's idea of strategy will be barely superior to Trump's) in which they're going to plan some ridiculously overarching plan to get rid of *ALL* of "America's Enemies" in some bargain-basement James Bondian scheme. 

I don't THINK it could be a Vlad Tepesch situation -- we're not quite back in the quaint era of executing all your enemies in a single ballroom -- but I am absolute stymied trying to imaging a halfway sane reason for doing this. 


Our current government, ladies, gentlemen, friends, foes: a government of the grifted, by the grifters, for the grifters, run by clowns that would embarrass Pennywise and the Joker. 

There was an ongoing problem with Amazon's listings of my space opera, Demons of the Past (Revelation, Revolution, Retribution), making the three of them have the same cover and confusing would-be purchasers. 

Finally it's straightened out, and here's the proper links:

#1, Revelation: https://www.amazon.com/Demons-Past-Revelation-Ryk-Spoor-ebook/dp/B0DN6Q6ZZ7
#2, Revolution: https://www.amazon.com/Demons-Past-Revolution-Ryk-Spoor-ebook/dp/B0DN6SVXF6
#3, Retribution: https://www.amazon.com/Demons-Past-Retribution-Ryk-Spoor-ebook/dp/B0DN6PL1ZT

This is the work I spent the most hours on over the years, rewriting it at least five times since its first draft in about 1982 or so (and the idea having been first thought of in the late 70s).