Politics & Power Quote by David Hackworth

Hackworth is doing what career soldiers rarely get rewarded for: calling out the gap between patriotic theater and the lived reality of the enlisted. The language is pointedly classed. "Generals" and "Beltway politicians" sit above the mud line, fluent in "a good game" and "moralistic fervor" while "grunts" do the bleeding. That contrast is the engine of the quote: it frames support for troops as something powerful people perform, not something they deliver.

The verb choices matter. "Talk" and "bay" are sounds, not actions. "Bay" especially turns politicians into a pack animal, driven by instinct and optics, not responsibility. Hackworth is also suspicious of the moral register itself. When support gets packaged as virtue-signaling, it becomes politically useful precisely because it is vague. Everyone can "support the troops" in the abstract; far fewer will fund veterans' care, fix rotations, demand honest metrics, or accept accountability for bad wars and bad procurement.

Context sharpens the indictment. Hackworth came out of Vietnam with credibility earned the hard way and spent decades as an internal dissenter, arguing that institutional incentives protect careers more than infantry. So the target is not just hypocrisy but a system: generals rewarded for briefs, politicians rewarded for slogans, and grunts used as proof-of-seriousness. The subtext is almost a dare: if you really mean it, stop worshipping the uniform as a prop and start treating the people inside it as citizens owed competence, honesty, and care.