Space Force Guardians: Wardrobe Malfunction?

So there's a an image. It went up on Truth Social in September of twenty twenty six,

the year of our Lord, from the account of the sitting president

of the United States, and it shows a next generation Space Force uniform.

Black, grey, high collar,

and down in the corner of this thing,

like a designer's mood board, there's a label that says design

inspiration. And what it credits in writing on project.

Purpose is quote, the discipline and functionality of the Starship Trooper uniform.

Starship Troopers, the 1997 film.

The one Paul Verhoven made after growing up in Nazi occupied Hague,

where his family moved in nineteen forty three when he was five years old.

No one where the costumes were sort of built ~ was

Unaware that this was Nazi propaganda aesthetics on purpose,

as like a joke, at the expense of exactly this kind of guy.

The one where Neil Patrick Harris shows up in an SS officer's coat

and the crew reportedly starts calling him Doogie Himmler.

That is the cited inspiration in the design notes of a real proposed uniform

for a real branch of the American military that this same sitting president signed

into law in twenty nineteen.

Now here's what you want to sort of reach for an easy explanation,

and and I'm not gonna do that because the easy explanation is that somebody

in the White House social media shop got a cute AI image,

didn't really know the movie or whatever,

fine, except the label is the whole problem.

Nobody actually writes design inspiration and then names a movie.

Like that's a

Person who watched Starship troopers saw the black uniform

and the propaganda newsreels and the new recruiting slogans and came away thinking,

strong look, aspirational, let's get some.

And that's not even the strangest part.

The strangest part is that the Space Force already has uniforms,

like real ones. There's a document called SPFI 362903,

issued in January 2026. It's a dark blue jacket,

silver buttons, gray pants, mandatory purchase for personnel transferring in.

Two hundred to four hundred dollars out of pocket.

And there was a wear test. General Chance Saltzman put on the all black mess dress

himself at the Air Force Weapons School graduation in Las Vegas

on June twenty third, twenty twenty six.

Years of Guardian feedback, an actual process run by the actual service.

And then a picture generated by a machine showed up on a website and made

all of that look optional.

So the question I want to chase is not whether the president understands satire.

He doesn't. We can stipulate that from the get go.

The question is what happens to an institution when its identity gets decided

by a guy who's good at scrolling?

And how do you end up wearing the costume from a movie that was made to make

fun of you?

This is the overlap, Will. ~ I've been waiting to talk to you about this

one all week.

And I've been watching Starship Troopers on repeat,

so which is the strangest sentence I've said in a while,

but I did it for you, buddy.

Right, that's love. So here here's what's in this episode,

right? In September of this year,

the president posted an AI generated Space Force uniform that credits

in its own design notes a movie made specifically to mock people

who like uniforms like that. And we're gonna follow that all the

way down because the paper trail on that black uniform goes somewhere kind

of bleak and somewhere mostly funny all at the same time.

And just to say it up front, the interesting part here isn't the gaff.

Everyone got the gaff. The gaff was in every outlet in about six hours.

So Adam Kinzinger, Jonah Goldberg,

both of them Republicans of various vintages,

both of them dunking. ~ Derek Guy,

the menswear guy wearing in ~ weighing in,

sorry, wearing in. ~ that's the easy layer.

Right. And and the dunk is fun,

but it's not like information.

No, the information is that the black uniform in that movie was not invented

by a custom department in 1997.

It was rather designed in 1932 by two men who we can name here,

Karl Diebitsch, a painter, and Walter Heck,

a graphic designer, who also drew the SS double lightning bolt insignia

in nineteen twenty nine. So, you know,

there's his portfolio. They were doing brand identity.

And the company that manufactured what they drew in Metzingen,

Germany, was one they may have may have heard of.

~ by the name of Hugo Boss.

The suits Hugo Boss

Which by the war years was running those factories on forced labor.

So by the end of this, you will know the names of the two guys who actually drew

the thing, the president graphic in two moves basically is copying.

You'll know what the real Space Force uniform costs a guardian out of pocket

and who ordered it. You'll know w what the June 2025 tank parade ran in its range,

25 to 45 million, and you'll know that six in ten American adults told AP N

O R C they didn't want it. You'll know

what the Department of War rename costs and that number is the least funny thing

in this episode.

And you'll know one thing I haven't seen anybody say out loud in the coverage,

which is that this post didn't just misread the purpose or the intent of the movie,

it stepped on a live, in progress,

wear tested uniform program that the Space Force's own chief was walking around

Las Vegas in three months earlier.

That's a bureaucracy that did its homework here.

Nobody's talking about them.

Well nobody ever talks about them.

So yeah, let's talk about them.

So, of course, as as always, we start out with the machinery first because there

are two machines running in parallel here that are not talking to each other.

Machine one is the Space Force Uniform Program.

It's pretty boring, and and boring is the point,

right? You stand up a new entire branch of the military in 2019,

and one of the first really hard problems is what people wear.

Because

A uniform is the entire visual argument for why your service exists.

So you run wear tests, you get feedback from the people who have to like live

the thing in 200 days a year, right?

So you you iterate, and on January thirteenth through 15th,

2026, the Space Force actually issues dress guidance,

which is the SPFI 36-2903,

which formalizes the actual service dress uniform.

Dark blue jacket, silver buttons,

gray pants.

And in case you've never had any dealings with the military,

~ these are mandatory purchases.

It's not optional for you to dress like everyone else.

It's called a uniform for a reason.

and anybody who transferred into that service or started out in the space force

was estimated to pay a two hundred to four hundred dollar cost for that uniform.

And that is out of pocket.

And if you'll you'll ~ take a look at the pay grades for modern soldiers,

you'll know why we brought up why we emphasize the fact that that's out of pocket.

But that's normal for the military.

Don't you mean guardians? Guardi Space Force Guardians.

Guardians, yeah. So pardon me.

our department of war. I didn't

know if to if guardians worked for the department of war,

you know, that sounds like more of a department of defense kind of move,

but anyway. ~

We'll find out.

yeah. so but that's normal for the military,

right? And also worth remembering later because we're gonna talk about a two billion

Mr. Joshua?

Ba ba ba billion.

That's right. Sign replacement project in a minute.

And I want those two numbers in the same room.

Yeah, so the rollout started in November of twenty twenty-five.

First two recruiters, training instructors,

and senior leaders and ROTC graduates.

Optional for most guardians for now,

there's a a senior master sergeant,

Brandy Gonzalez, who is actually photographed modeling it for the announcement.

And that's the process. It's real people,

real fittings, real feedback loop,

real document with a real number on it.

In the same way that that the Army,

the Marines, you know, the the Air Force,

the Navy have done.

Generation after generation with the rollout of new uniforms.

And fast forward to June twenty-three of this year,

General Chance Salzman, Chief of Space Operations,

as we kind of touched on a little bit,

wears the very first wear test,

all black mess dress at the Air Force Weapons School graduation in Las Vegas.

Mess dress means the formal

Say that three times fast.

one, right? Yeah. I was trying to get it out once.

I'm not even

going for

Ha ha.

three. ~ but mess dress, in case you again,

in case you don't know, is the formal dress,

like it's the black tie equivalent.

The name mess may throw you off a little bit there,

but it's it's dress uniform. So the service is at that very moment actively testing

a black formal uniform through its own channels with its own people on the record.

Which is important because it means that the fact that it was black really wasn't

the whole scandal of this thing.

Right. This is not about the the shock troopers or whatever,

you know, is showing up in black and looking scary.

~ it's that black mass dress is not unusual.

Roughly half of the world's militaries wear black in the evening.

The Navy's dinner dress is functionally black.

I mean most people not most people,

but many people can't tell the difference between Navy the US Navy dressed uniform,

color navy and black. But this is not

If you're colorblind.

a case of someone it right, ~ or to varying degrees.

But this is not a case of someone inventing a a sinister color.

That's more than that.

Yeah, so the the the machine one is is running fine.

It's slow, it's expensive, it's a little dorky,

but it's functional, right? Like it's the government doing the thing government

is supposed to be doing, which is grinding through a design problem with committees

and a waterfall process until you get something that fits.

Machine two is just a guy with a phone.

Nowhere test here.

No. no fitting, no guardian feedback,

no document number. Machine two generates an image with AI and posts it,

and the image depicts a black and gray design that this service had not announced.

It does not have it in its program,

in the pipeline, and as far as anybody can tell,

nobody's ever seen it before that morning in a true social post.

Well, to be fair, you know, they have if they've seen Starship

To be fair.

Troopers if they've seen Starship Troopers,

they've seen the uniform roughly.

~ but you know, and also to be fair,

it does say incorporates the functionality of the Starship Troopers uniform,

which is hilarious to me because I never saw anything in that movie about

functionality, right? When Patrick Neopatrick Harris shows up in the black uniform,

nobody says, Wow, that's really functional.

I should get me one of those. but anyway.

We talk about those details a little later actually.

Yeah.

So let's be pedantic about why this matters institutionally,

because this is the part that gets lost when the story becomes a joke about a movie.

there's a chain of authority for what an American service member wears,

right? It runs through the service chief,

through the dress and appearance boards,

through the guidance documents.

Saltzman owns all of that. It's one of the few genuine prerogatives

a service chief has.

And it was overruled by a retweet,

like a an executive tweet, if you will.

Yes, and nobody in the chain can say anything about it because

the person who ordered it happens to be the commander in chief.

So you get this silence where the institution just sort of stands there like,

okay, what do I do now?

So let's talk about this image itself,

because the design inspiration label is doing something specific here.

That's not the language of a military procurement document,

right? That's the language of a pitch deck.

It's a PowerPoint slide, somebody made like a mood board.

Board for National Armed Service.

The thing about a mood board though is that it tells you what the maker thought

was cool. That's like the whole purpose.

So when a mood board says the discipline and functionality of the star trip stip

starship trooper uniform, we now know something true about the person

who created it. They watched that movie and the key takeaway

was discipline and functionality.

Which is, I want to note, not what that uniform does in the film.

As we talked about, the uniform of the film is not functional.

Nobody in Starship Troopers is protected by what they're wearing.

It's a running visual gag. They send teenagers in the movie against giant insects

in what amounts to a safety vest and a helmet,

and the bugs go through them like tissue paper.

Bearhoven is making fun of you for thinking the outfit is armored.

And the outfit is not armor. It's recruitment,

right? Like the their their logo,

their motto in this is service guarantees citizenship.

That is the propaganda that they're spewing out on television and newspapers,

right? It looks badass two thousand on a recruitment poster.

Correct. And the actual armor,

when you go back to the Source novel here,

which is a Heinlein novel from nineteen fifty nine,

their actual armor in the the novel is a exoskeleton suit like a big mech,

like from Alien or something. mobile infantry.

Like actually cool.

Yeah, actually cool. ~ although I didn't have to visualize this,

so that helps a little bit when you're in nineteen fifty nine.

But also being that much closer to World War Two,

I think everybody knew what his inspiration would be drawing from if

he had drawn those. Anyway.

~ Verhoeven deliberately so well in addition to the exoskeleton suits they've

got mobile infantry, jump jets,

all the latest tech. Verhoeven deliberately took the cool suits out.

he read the book and decided the politics were ruled by military elite,

dressed up as adventure, and made a movie where the soldiers wear stylish

but non functional play clothes and then get shredded on the battlefield.

So the design inspiration credit is citing the least functional uniform

in science fiction for its actual functionality.

Deliberately non functional, yes.

So that's that's pretty damn funny.

I and I wanna give that its moment.

Take a moment.

So so here's here's the the the mechanism question,

right? Does this image actually become a uniform?

Because there's a version of it where it's a a Tuesday,

right? It's content and it evaporates by Friday.

The Gish Gallop, like last week's episode about flooding the field

and and filling it with bullshit.

There's a version where somebody at the Pentagon reads it as an executive order,

though.

And based on our last eighteen months of experience,

which version would you bet on?

So that's the thing. Look at the pattern of how decision has moved

in this administration. June 14th,

2025, a military parade in Washington for the Army's 250th anniversary,

which just so happens to fall on the president's 79th birthday.

Right? Roughly 6,600 soldiers,

24 M1 Abrams tanks rolling down Constitution Avenue.

And six and ten adults in the AP North Pole,

~ opposing it.

Right. So which for you math nerds is a sixty percent disapproval rating.

And it happened anyway. And it cost somewhere somewhere between twenty five

and forty five million dollars,

which I think is a purposeful range so wide that it actually tells

you nobody was counting the beans in the bean counter area.

Are there beam counters left in the administration?

~

they're counting something.

Well the tanks needed metal plates on the road,

by the way, because Abram's tanks are not meant to drive on on asphalt.

Surprise, surprise. ~ and they'll tear it up.

So I'm sure that's a real line item somewhere.

There's still a line item because apparently it had to

be repaired afterwards because of how much it had been torn up.

So then, fast forward a little to september fifth,

twenty twenty five, executive order renaming the Department of Defense

to the Department of War. And Pentagon workers started pulling the sign lettering

on the exact same day.

Somebody probably advised them ahead of time,

I'm imagining. They didn't just show up to work and say,

I think I'll take down the defense part of the Department of Defense.

Sign. But that tells you the sequencing,

right? The order is signed and the maintenance crew is on a ladder with

a pry bar before anybody's done any costing analysis on it.

So whatever whatever the

And the cost

Office of Congressional Budget or Congressional Budget Office does.

No, never mind. Go ahead. Yeah.

They don't CBO doesn't do anything anymore.

It

just it signs the checks. The cost estimates

Right.

actually for that that whole name change,

by the way, are have run from about ten million to two bi billion,

depending on whether you're reading

Talk about a range.

the the Congressional Budget Office or you know the National Broadcasting Service.

That is not an estimate range.

That is a 200 200x spread. That is two different organizations answering

two different questions and nobody in the middle reconciling them.

Because the $10 million is signage and letterhead and the two billion

is every contract, every legal instrument,

every treaty reference, every uniform patch,

every email domain, every piece of software with a hard-coded department name

on it across an organization with roughly three million people attached to it.

And that's again the mechanism.

That's the whole flabby, coughing,

smog generating engine in one gesture.

A decision gets made as an aesthetic,

announced like a spectacle, and then the institution just eats the cost

of making that brand change real.

Nobody prices it out first, because putting a price tag on it would kind

of spoil the moment.

And the Space Force uniform graphic is then the same motion at a smaller scale.

Someone made an image. If it becomes policy,

the Space Force absorbs a redesign it didn't ask for,

on top of the one it just finished.

If it doesn't become policy, then the president of the US publicly overwrote

his own service chief for content,

and everyone agrees to pretend that it didn't happen.

Now both possible outcomes actually cost us.

One costs money and one costs the idea that the chain

of command actually means anything.

So who's holding the bag on this one?

Let's do the people. And I want to start with the guy who has

the strangest position in the whole story,

which is Paul Verhoven.

The most vindicated man in Hollywood right now.

The most vindicated and possibly the least happy about it.

Here's his situation. 1943,

he's five years old. His family moves to The Hague,

which is under Nazi occupation.

He has said directly that this is the biographical source of the fascist imagery

in his films. Not an influence.

The source. He grew up watching German soldiers in the street,

and then he became a filmmaker whose recurring subject is how appealing that looks

from the outside.

And he creates starship troopers as a trap.

He builds it as a trap, technically,

sure. He casts it like a Lenny Raf Riefenstahl film.

Beautiful blonde people, symmetrical,

glowing, Casper Van Deen at his peak.

Denise Richards, Dina Meyer,

Patrick Muldoon. He shoots the propaganda news reels in a Riefenstahl grammar.

Puts Nil Patrick Harris in a coat so close to an SS officer's uniform that

the crew starts calling him Doogie Himmler.

On set. You can actually look that up on IMDb.

Hm. Monset.

Yeah. The casting crew, they got the joke.

The critics unfortunately did not.

So in 1997, the film comes out,

and Janet Maslin in the New York Times and Roger Ebert both essentially read

it as the thing it was mocking.

Ebert, who I I love or respect the guy as a critic,

was as good a reader of film as any America's produced,

took it as an empty brutal spectacle.

And Verhoeven's line about the whole thing,

which is the most devastating six words in this episode,

is no one saw it at the time.

And the truth is it it underperformed with adult audiences and it cleaned

up with teenage boys, becoming somewhat of a cult classic.

I can't imagine why, but what which is the joke inside the joke?

The satire of military recruitment propaganda became successful military recruitment

recruitment propaganda for fifteen year olds.

It played straight to the exact demographic it was warning about.

So I actually I I saw this movie when I was thirteen,

right? In nineteen ninety-seven I was thirteen years old and I thought

the uniforms were cool. I did.

~ I I mean, I was not doing ~ like a

The whole movie was cool.

it was. I was not doing like a critical reading of Riefenstahl,

right? I was watching Neil Patrick Harris look sharp and thinking,

damn. But even then I thought it was funny.

Everyone did.

Everyone who got it. And that's Verhoven's point,

right? And it took me a long time to realize this as an adult.

So I want to hold a little grace for the 13-year-olds like me who missed it,

like little baby Gerbil, Stephen Miller,

or the 51-year-old like Donald Trump,

who even then didn't have enough hair to catch the joke going right over

the top of his head.

So I wanna hold zero grace, however,

for the White House communications office in twenty twenty six.

Boy, if there was ever a more a worse misnomer.

Because the difference is in the label.

A teenager thinks that looking that the code looks cool is the mechanism working

as designed. The mechanism is supposed to catch you.

Writing design inspiration on a slide and sending it out from the office

of the president is not getting caught.

That's endorsing it in writing after twenty-nine years of people explaining

the joke.

Gross. Nineteen ninety seven was almost thirty years ago.

Blah. Twenty

Yeah.

nine years of of think pieces.

There is a cottage industry.

There are dissertations. You can get a degree in this now.

And so Verhoeven's outcome in september twenty twenty six is that

a sitting American president promoted a uniform whose own design notes,

sorry, his own design notes cite the anti fascist parody costume he built

to warn people. That's the outcome.

He set a trap twenty nine years ago and the president of the US walked into

it holding a mood board.

Okay, so who else's back is this actually falling on?

Because Verhoeven is fine. Verhoven's right,

he's got like a a cool story to tell at parties now.

But who actually pays for this gap?

Well, it seems like Chance Saltzman pays pretty directly.

Like this is where it gets less funny.

Saltzman is chief of space operations.

He oversaw a multi year uniform program built on guardian wear test feedback,

which means this is what the people who are actually going to be wearing

the uniform say about it. it's the correct way to do it,

right? He personally wore the black mess dress in june twenty twenty

six at graduation in public as part of formal wear testing.

He did his job the way his job is designed to be done.

Right. And then three months later,

an AI slot picture makes the whole thing just look like a suggestion.

And Saltzman can't say anything.

That's the cost. Not money. He can't hold a press conference and

say the president has no role in this.

He can't correct the record because the record belongs to his boss.

So the cost to Saltzman is the difference between having authority

and having the appearance of authority,

and that is a cost paid in silence.

Which is why nobody's covering it.

Except us.

There's

right, today. There's there's

Mm-hmm.

someone else here too, so David Madsen,

apparently a design lead connected to the mess dress work.

Right, and that's a person whose actual craft is being compared unfavorably

and in public to an image an LLM made in four seconds for three gallons of water.

If you've ever done skilled work and had it overruled by somebody something

a boss saw and liked, you know that specific feeling.

Multiply it by the entire US military and put it on the news.

Then there's also Master Sergeant Brandy Gonzalez,

who stood there and modeled the real one in photographs in a magazine.

Like

For the

November 2025 rollout. Caution here because I don't know what she thinks about

any of this, and the article doesn't cover a sourced quote.

What I can say is that she's the human face of the uniform that exists,

and there's now a competing uniform that doesn't exist,

promoted from a higher altitude,

which she has nothing to do with.

And modeled by a man on the mood board.

And then

Course.

the actual Space Force Guardians,

the rank and file. Who are the actual ones with a mandatory purchase requirement

of two hundred to four hundred dollars if they're transferring into

the Space Force from another armed service?

Right, and that's where the line in the sand is drawn for the money.

I mean the people at the bottom of this pay in cash for their clothes.

That's how it works. That's how it's always worked.

There's a uniform allowance and it doesn't always cover it and

you eat the difference. So when the aesthetic changes from the top on a whim with

no process, the question every enlisted person in America immediately asks

is Am I buying this twice?

Do I own two coats now?

Well to date nobody has answered that because there's nothing to answer.

There's no program. There's an AI slot post.

So circling back though, ~ we brought up Hugo Boss in the intro,

so we should probably finish that part of it out.

Go for it.

1929, Walter Heck, graphic designer.

He draws the SS double ~ sea Gruna,

the two lightning boats we talked about earlier.

I'm sure you've seen it tattooed on Pete Heggseth's body somewhere.

1932, Heck and Carl Diebitsch.

Diebitsch, that's the best way I can spell it.

D-I-E-B-I-T-S-C-H.

He's a painter, right? ~ he becomes an SS Oba Fjora co-design.

And i the all-black SS uniform is co-designed by him.

So two professional clothing designers,

not like the kind that Tim Gunn would be like designers,

designers, doing a branding exercise for the actual Nazis.

And the manufacturing goes to Hugo Boss's company in Metzingen,

which is also produced SA uniforms and Hitler youth uniforms and

During the war ran both of those factories essentially on slave labor.

There's a portfolio nobody wants.

So the actual human cost at the bottom of this aesthetic lineage,

the very first time, was people conscripted into sewing rooms to produce

the clothes that made the men who conscrip conscripted them to look magnificent,

right? So you're making your captors look better by sewing them fancy new clothes.

Right. And that's that's the thing about a product design,

right? Like somebody has to make it.

Somebody sits at a sewing machine or sits at a plate factory or whatever

and like they have to produce these shitty goods.

And Debich's other job, which also was also very deranged,

was running the SS Porcelain Works at Alec.

He designed dinnerware. Same guy,

same eye, same project. Make this beautiful so people want to be near it.

So the chain is Heck and Debitch in nineteen thirty two,

manufactured by Hugo Boss on slave labor,

absorbed into film iconography for fifty years,

weaponized as satire by a man who watched the originals march past his house

as a child in nineteen forty three,

and then in September twenty twenty six pulled off the shelf by

an AI image generator and captioned with discipline and functionality.

Four steps.

Four steps and one of them is a joke,

and everybody somehow skipped the joke.

Alright, so I think there are three things in this story that don't hold up,

and one of them is is ours.

Start with ours.

So ours is going to be the the word fascist,

right? We all have heard it as a descriptor about this administration,

these this president, all of these elected leaders,

but this uniform specifically.

And I want to be careful because a black uniform is not a political ideology.

The salon headline said the uniforms,

quote, scream fascist supervillain,

which is fine. I mean it's funny.

And it's super accurate as like vibe criticism.

But a coat is just a coat, right?

Italy's ~ carabinieri, they look incredible if you've checked out their uniforms,

and and Italy is a parliamentary democracy.

So if our claim is that the aesthetic is the danger,

then our claim is pretty weak,

and somebody smarter than us will pull it apart in about 30 seconds.

I mostly agree, and here's how I see it.

The uniform isn't the offense.

The uniform is diagnostic. The question a uniform answers,

which is what does this institution want you to feel when you see us?

And Debitch and Heck had a very specific answer in nineteen thirty two,

which is they wanted to mess their pants.

Fear plus envy in the same glance.

The combination is the design brief,

and that's what the black was for.

Right. Fear plus envy. Like mean girls without the glitz and the glamour

and the makeup.

Well every day we wear black. Right?

Get it? 'Cause on Penn Wednesdays they wear pink.

Hmm. Took me a second, I was like,

what kind of accent is that?

Alright. You want the population?

They all want me to wear

the black clothings.

On every day. Alright, you want the you want the population

Alright, enough of that.

frightened of you. Yeah, let's ~ Yeah.

you want the population frightened of you and simultaneously wishing they were you.

That's what makes it work as recruitment,

right? 'Cause Verhoven understood that so precisely that he reproduced

the whole apparatus. And twenty nine years of teenage boys wanting

the code proves he nailed it.

So the graphic kind of just tells us the vibe.

Well, somebody in that building wants the American military to produce fear plus

envy. Somebody in that building.

And

Mm-hmm.

reached for the most efficient known template for it and cited their source,

which is unusually helpful of them.

Sure, but they forgot the peer review.

Anyway, second thing that doesn't add up,

the stated justification, discipline,

and functionality.

Which we've established is false at least on the functionality part.

So fifty percent that's an F, right?

And the American grading system.

But I hear the the Asian grading system is a lot harder.

So let's ask what would have to be true for that sentence to make sense,

right? You'd need the Starship Troopers uniform to be a functional garment.

It isn't. It never was. It's a costume built to look good on camera

and fail on screen while the cameras are rolling.

You need this movie to be.

presenting that military as disciplined in a way that you'd admire.

But it presents them as disciplined the way like a cult is disciplined,

which is the point of the scene where they all cheer while a guy gets executed

on live reality television.

And there's a recruitment ad in the film that ends with children stomping insects

while an adult says, Everyone's doing their part,

are you?

So for discipline and functionality to be an honest take,

you'd have to actually have watched the movie with the sound off.

Which and I say this with sincerity is my leading theory.

My theory is that nobody watched it at all.

My theory is that somebody typed a prompt.

Well, mm, what do you mean by that?

Like, spell it out.

Here's what I think happened, and I want to flag clearly that this is inference,

not documented. It's an AI slot,

so the process was somebody wanted a cool future uniform.

They typed a description into an image model,

and the fastest way to get a cool future uniform out of an image model is

to name a movie. You write in the style of Starship Troopers,

because the model has seen 10,000 stills from it.

Then the model returns something and someone builds a slide around it,

and the design inspiration line is just the prompt cleaned up and given a font.

Yeah, that's worse, but not I I mean,

not far off from where I think the average AI user is right now in terms

of prompt mechanics and prompt engineering.

Right, but for the administration it's much worse because it means nobody vibe

checked it at all. There was no meeting,

nobody said we want fear plus envy.

Somebody wanted a picture, the picture needed a reference and

the reference was whatever the closest to hand was closest to hand

in the model's memory.

Yeah, I guess ~ what's closest to hand when the request is make

the space soldiers look scary,

right, is ninety years of imagery descended from two guys who just

so happened to work for the Nazis in nineteen thirty two.

Right, that's the mechanism. The model isn't being fascist,

the model's being average. It's giving you the statistical center

of imposing military uniform as rendered across everything humans have ever

put on film, and the statistical center of that data set is downstream

of Heck and Debitch because they were extraordinarily good at their jobs,

and everyone's been copying them since.

So the danger isn't that a machine has politics.

Not in this case. In fact, in this case the dis the danger is that

it doesn't have politics. It has an average,

and the average is contaminated.

If you use it without knowing anything,

you inherit the contamination and put it on a slide.

Yeah, I think I'll go f one further and say that the part that actually concerns

me about how this stuff is is sort of getting used in government,

and it's not really the whole like people usually worry about kind of thing.

Everyone's braced for AI to make something up.

Fine, right? Like that's that's manageable.

You check it, you c we call it guardrails or or grounding,

right, in the in the computer tech space.

But what I don't actually see anyone braced for is the AI giving you the most

conventional possible answer, like literally statistically,

visually average. Just as like a fresh idea and and nobody in the room having enough

history to recognize where that statistical average came from.

Because it looks new.

Well the timestamp is new, right?

Because it was generated four seconds ago.

But it's a ninety four year old design.

And it arrives with a con a confidence that a human designer wouldn't have,

right? Nobody would put this out there as their work and be proud of it.

A human costume designer in nineteen ninety seven knew exactly what he was quoting.

That was the job. The model doesn't know it's quoting.

Yeah. Third thing that doesn't add up and this one's just a straight missing number.

Like what does this actually cost us in the long run?

No idea.

Well, you have no idea yet. But that's not an oversight.

I mean, that's just the way Republicans have worked for years.

Look at the pattern of the numbers we already have,

right? The parade twenty five to forty five million.

That's a twenty million dollar uncertainty band,

right? For an event that already happened.

It's not like we can unspend it,

right? We renamed the Department of War ten million to two billion dollars.

Those are I don't know, ~ with dollar signs attached.

Just like the Lake Ontario to Lake America and and Gulf of Mexico

to Gulf of America and now apparently New Mexico to New America.

I it's so it's so mind boggling if we're being honest.

But

And

yeah. And in each of these

No, it's fine.

cases the announcement the announcement comes before the accounting

by a wide margin. September fifth,

twenty twenty five, order signed,

letters coming off the resolute desk that afternoon.

So when a uniform pick, right,

goes up with no program, no wear test,

no number, the only honest look at this is that the number is going

to be produced later by whoever gets stuck putting it into place.

And the range will be embarrassing for all of us because we pay those with

our tax dollars.

And here's what none of us know at this point.

nobody outside the administration knows.

We don't know if this becomes real.

We don't know whether there's a follow-up memo.

The research we did didn't have one.

~ it's possible that this is a post that dies as a post,

right? In six months the SPFI thirty six dash two nine three uniform

is the only uniform in the graphic is a trivia answer.

think I'd rather it be the inscription on the tombstone of this administration.

How about you?

I'd take that outcome. But I'd note that we survived because the decision

was too dumb to implement. It's not a governing structure anyone should

be comfortable relying on.

Haha I would agree with that. So here's what I think this is really about,

and I think the movie stuff is both a gift and I think the movie stuff

is also a distraction at the same.

In the familiar words of our former pr press secretary,

both things can be true at the same time.

Right. A uniform is a promise,

right? It's it's the ethical content of it.

When you put a person in a uniform,

the institution is saying two things at one time.

This person acts on our authority,

and this person is accountable to us,

which is a claim of both legitimacy and a claim of restraint

in the same exact uniform. That's why

An unmarked goon with tactical gear covering his face with a with a sock puppet

and no name on his his badge or his uniform is really scary.

So much more so than a police officer in a uniform with a name and

a badge number and a business card that they can actually hand you.

And this one tells you that the consequences belong to a mood board.

Right. Because the space uniform that does exist,

that the SPF thirty six twenty nine three,

I think we should we should come up with an easier name for it.

That's just it's SPFI

Mm-hmm.

thirty six dash two nine zero three.

But that's how I mean that's how not far along they were in

the uniform selection process.

It just still has a classification number,

right? But it was a promise made by an institution.

And it came out of a process with names on it.

Saltzman signed off and and Guardians have

Tested this so far, Brandy Gonzalez stood there and modeled it in November of 2025.

That is boring, but it's legitimate,

right? And it's also accountable to us as the people who are paying

for these uniforms and paying for these armed services.

The graphic itself is a promise made by nobody,

right? There's no signature, there's no board,

there's no process. And the design credit really goes to just kind of a funny movie.

And I think that's what actually unsettled people this week.

It's not the black uniform, it's the unaccountability of it.

You look at that image and there's nothing behind it.

It's an outfit for a military with no institution attached.

Right. So look, we don't really have anything for you to pay attention to this time,

right? We don't have like a list of things that you should do,

not including calling your senator.

Nothing that caught us off guard or anything that we keep coming back

to because this is all starting to feel like just a giant joke.

We wanted to be a little lighthearted this week and,

you know, point at the big stupid shit coming out of Washington

and hopefully laugh along with you without getting too serious.

Hence the terrible German accent.

Right.

we aren't great at that because we like the history and when you're looking

at the parallels between current dark times and relating them to the past dark ages,

it can sometimes feel all too serious.

Yeah, I think we're both a little guilty of that.

Did any of you know in our audience that servicemen and women had to

buy their own work uniforms? Joshua,

did you know that?

Well, I think I vaguely remember something about that because there is an allowance,

right? Like you get an I think and I think it's just like one.

You know, and I think you have you get one in so many amounts of time.

But if you're if you're enlisted full time,

like you need to wash them because they're gonna get dirty

Exactly.

in the same way that you have,

you know, a couple of suits. ~ if you were working in an office.

I is that what people do? I don't work in an office anymore.

D do people show up in suits still or is it just like jeans and t shirts?

No. But y you need more than,

Some do.

you know

w one t shirt or one pair of jeans anywhere you go and so they have to

pay for those completely out of pocket.

Right. So here's our stake. We're saying that by March thirty first,

two thousand twenty seven, long after AI AGI has arrived,

~ the

Mm-hmm.

Space Force will not have adopted the black and gray design from that Truth Social

graphic as an official uniform.

And SPFI, should leave it at that,

the dark blue jacket with the silver buttons and gray pants will still

be the service's actual dress uniform of record.

We really hope this one actually dies as a true social post.

I I mean I have to be honest. But look,

if we're wrong, we will let you know and we'll say it while looking

at a photograph of an American service member a a Space Force Guardian wearing

a doogie Himmler coat.

Which I would like on the record as an outcome I would bet against.

But hey, you know,

Noted.

at least we have work one thing we have working for us is that Donald Trump hasn't

shown up by anybody's bedside at a hospital and miraculously cured them.

So some of these posts die on the vine.

N

no one has miraculously showed up at n at Donald Trump's bed at a hospital yet.

Right.

So no one has shown up yet. We're we'll we'll still wait on that.

That's why we're we're starting to

Okay.

we're trying to collect the receipts here,

right? We're gonna we're trying to make predictions and see what happens later on.

We'll include it in a another post or something like that.

So look,

Sounds good.

thanks for joining us today. You can visit us on the world wide

web at FOF.foundation, not dot com,

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It's ~ it's basically a a pop up for,

you know, other people so that they can laugh with us.

Or cry, you know, K Sarah Sarah.

So Will, thank you for watching that movie twice,

I think you said, and thank you for being co host with me on another episode.

I do it again. So in fact I'll probably watch Stormtroopers again Stormtroopers.

Starship Troopers again tonight.

So ~ I actually might see Stormtroopers,

but maybe I'll watch Star Wars.

I

you know, it it still holds true for the graphic.

Right, which I you know, one thing we didn't talk about and I know it's

not your favorite movie, that's why I didn't bring it up before now,

but the Star Wars movie, like the Empire in Star Wars,

also has very similar uniforms to the the Nazis.

But

I thought were white.

the the stormtroopers are white,

but the the

Okay.

admin like the officers all have that sort of similar look with the

Okay. I guess they were black.

the like crisp lines and yeah.

yeah, sorry guys,

I'm not a I'm not a warzy. I'm a Trekkie,

so I I prefer, you know, space utopia over trailer park space opera.

Not a huge fan, but Will is, so.

He actually likes both, right?

Nobody's perfect, Joshua. I do.

You you're a bother. Yeah, and that's fine.

I'm both there. I'm equal opportunity fantasy.

Yep, I just not good on the

Space fantasy.

space trailer park. Anyway, ~ you guys should all watch Stormtroopers

or Starship Troopers or

Whatever, the Federation. Yes,

Super troopers if you like. Meow.

if you

not the second one. but if you could use some lighthearted humor,

because I think we all probably could.

Make sure you take care of each other.

Bye.

Bye.