Donald Trump the Megathread part II - Mod Warning added to OP 10/1/26

I think you’re jumping to conclusions here. The obfuscation and selective provision of plans that Manic Moran mentioned meshes with a number of accounts I’ve recently read about US war planning and command & control. Basically, the US military has a long history of showing any civilians only a highly sanitised version of their actual plans, even when they claim to be providing full access.

The two sources that I’m primarily drawing on here are The Doomsday Machine - Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg (of Pentagon Papers fame) and Command & Control by Eric Schlosser. Both books focus primarily on nuclear war planning, but both are in agreement that ever since the 1940s, the Pentagon has gone out of its way to resist any civilian control or oversight. One episode that sticks in my mind actually directly involves Daniel Ellsberg. In his early days as a defence consultant at RAND in the late 1950s, Ellsberg got to read a document called the Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan (JSCP), which outlined not just US nuclear posture and force disposition, but also the conditions for the use of nuclear weapons and the actual war plans. The Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP), the Cold War era “script” for nuclear war, is simply an annex to the JSCP.

As Ellsberg outlines, it was standing Pentagon Policy to never disclose this plan to the secretary of defence or even the president himself. It would be alluded to, but it was never named or even confirmed to be an actual document. Later on, in the early days of the Kennedy administration, Ellsberg delivered a briefing to McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser to JFK, in which he mentioned the existence of JSCP and suggested that Bundy ask the JCS (Joint Chiefs of Staff), the actual driving force behind JSCP to provide him with a copy, given that he had the appropriate clearance. Bundy did eventually get briefed on JSCP, but the document he received afterwards, and that he passed on to Ellsberg to read, had nothing to do with JSCP itself. The document was simply a transcript of the briefing he’d received.

If you take this and add it to the recalcitrance to any attempt at mechanical or electronic release control for nuclear weapons that Eric Schlosser outlines in Command & Control, Moran’s suggestion that the Pentagon brass only release a sanitized version of their China war plans to Musk seems less “conspiracy theory” and more like a prediction about what’s actually going to happen, especially since any war plans to deal with the PRC must, by its very nature, deal with Beijing’s nuclear weapons and thus have a nuclear option of its own. Musk might be driven by radicalism, but the US Department of Defense is a whole different kettle of fish to the government departments that his DOGE bros have taken on so far. And the senior commanders and civilian staffers will have decades of experience in seeing off ”nosy” civilians.

I really need to do something about my obsession with nuclear weapons & planning, don’t I? 🤔

You're working on the assumption that they have to whip up such a plan. Given what I outlined in my reply to thatsdaft, it's safe to say that such "sanitised" plans already exist, have existed for some time, and can be distributed to interested outsiders if requested. DOGe won't be dealing with a low-security organisation like the Veterans Administration, etc.. The Pentagon and the JCS have been doing this kind of obfuscation since the days of the Eisenhower administration, and they've faced much stronger scrutiny than whatever it is that Musk and his ketamine connection can muster. I feel that this is going to be a nut that is going to be too tough for Elon to crack, even with a SecDef that's supposedly on his side.

So there is a modicum of ‘YES MINISTER’ in the pentagon as well . Praise be the Lord and a big relief if that is the case