The Military in Crisis: Day Five, The End is Near.

It has been 123 hours and counting since the United States Military ceased to function as an effective fighting force.

On Thursday a Pentagon spokesman stated that

"Requiring the Department to cease all enforcement of DADT, immediately and worldwide, will cause significant disruptions to the force..."

Little did he realize just how right he was -- that an entire planet organization had just been terminated with extreme prejudice brought to its knees.







Looked at another way, with little more than a toss gavel, Frodo Judge Phillips, on March 25th, 3018 Third Age Tuesday, October 12th, 2010, had reduced the mightiest military force ever known to ruin:

... rising swiftly up, far above the Towers of the Black Gate Pentagon, high above the mountains Washington, a vast soaring darkness sprang into the sky, flickering with fire. The earth groaned and quaked.... the Black Gate Pentagon was hurled in ruin; and from far away, now dim, now growing, now mounting to the clouds, there came a drumming rumble, a roar, a long echoing roll of ruinous noise.

And as the Captains White House minions gazed south... there rose a huge shape of shadow, impenetrable, lightning-crowned, filling all the sky. Enormous it reared above the world, and stretched out toward them a vast threatening hand, terrible but impotent: for even as it leaned over them a great wind took it, and it Secretary Gates was all blown away, and passed; and then a hush fell.

Or so it should have gone. Like in all heroic epics. But evil is not so easily destroyed in our galaxy on our right-of-center Earth.

Tomorrow Judge Phillips will likely set sail into her own West when she either issues a stay of her injunction -- or refuses to -- in either case moving the action to Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and ending her role in this drama.

But it will not have been in vain. For at least five days, Don't Ask, Don't Tell was no longer the law of the land. And, despite today's and yesterday's essays' suggestions to the contrary, nothing happened: No towers fell; no planets ceased to exist; no units ceased to function because of lack of cohesion, the military did not decohere.

History will look kindly on Judge Virginia Phillips for this. The same cannot be said for others.