Through a Scope Backwards
13th April 2024
The U.S. Navy recently released a photograph on social media showing a sailor firing his M-4 aboard a ship. No doubt some public relations officer thought the picture looked great—a fit and ready sailor shooting his rifle, with spent cartridges flying. A perfect picture for a recruitment catalog, except for one crucial detail: the rifle’s scope—which the sailor appears to be looking through—is mounted backwards, and its lens covers appear to be closed. A swift social media uproar arose over the bizarre and glaring error. Someone with actual military experience in the Navy evidently noticed what this photo said without words, because the picture was quickly deleted.
Too late, for this image of bastardized military training is already the allegory for the collapse of the military profession and America’s deployment of military force around the world. The glaring deficiencies in this photo go a long way towards understanding the U.S. military in 2024. Outkick has a hilariously tragic rundown of all that is wrong with the picture, but there is a lesson for those Americans concerned about the institutional integrity of a military on the precipice of war in different regions of the world.
Many veterans will recognize the notion and verbiage of a “box check exercise,” that being a colloquial phrase used to describe drills a military unit undergoes to fulfill a prescribed process. Box-check exercises are frequently unrelated to easier or more functional parts of a unit training calendar. From a veteran Army infantryman, one would think shooting rifles aboard a Navy destroyer epitomizes the notion of a “box-check exercise.”