It all depends on what billets are emptied. Say this was happening to a battalion or a ship. It’s easier to be shorted a few grunts or deck hands than half your senior enlisted who make things happen. Seems to me that far too many people think everyone in government isn’t doing anything important and is expendable. This thinking will lead to mission failures before long. There will be eggs on faces and significant consequences.
Also, I complained about the left wing bias of mainstream media for as long as anyone here, but I never said we shouldn’t read it. We should understand the bias, left and right, and get past it to the facts. If we only get your information from media with a bias which matches our own and never question it, we will inevitably be misinformed. Those that get everything they know and every opinion they have from Twitter Twits are the most misinformed among us.
The other thing you have to be aware of is the all too frequent move of the media to simply repeat (and occasionally embellish) the same story without doing any in depth research or verification on their own...(which used to be known rather quaintly as "reporting")...
I regularly read multiple news feeds and am aware of the political slant of each one. They all have their own slant and their editors compound that slant...
I watch everything from CNN to MSNBC (for entertainment purposes) to "mainstream legacy feeds (ABC,CBS,NBC) to newer stuff like Newsmax, to even (the horror 😱🙉🙈) Fox...
If it's a big story I routinely hit all of them then head to the internet outlets for their slant (AP, CNN, FOX WaPo, NYTimes, NY Post, WSJ along with whatever pops up on google) I consider myself both well read and well informed... I've left out my military feeds and overseas sources...
All of those sources have their own political slants both left and right (even some of the military ones) as long as that's factored in the mix I figure I've got a decent handle on about 50-75% of the real story...
I've become a bit of a cynic in my old age having read and watched this type of reporting for multiple decades....
If I see something on X that sounds interesting or important I simply do my own fact checking... I've never cited an X story on the Cooler. I think I have questioned a couple of their stories over on the Football site and that's it...
About the only site on X that seems interesting (to me) and routinely accurate is something with the acronym OSINT (I think) but I still don't take their veracity for granted even though I've found them to be accurate so far...
www.newsweek.com
