Why do we have a military? Train military personnel? Prioritize readiness? To deter and win wars. Why do we promote “radical progressive” or “wokeness” in the military? No excuse. Truth can give offense, but here it is: Our military is best when the objective is – to win.
We have never configured an effective Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, or any other fighting force around the principles “anything goes,” “anyone can do it,” “all can do everything,” “sensitivity trumps training,” “accuracy, energy, strength, and outcomes are secondary,” “everyone gets a trophy,” “feelings cannot be hurt,” or “we will never go to war.”
Truth is, training to win is hard. It’s not for everyone and is not centered on sensitivity. Readiness – as countless studies show – means reverse engineering victory, working to align personnel and equipment to maximize individual contribution to the only outcome that matters: Winning.
Somehow, we have forgotten basics when it comes to warfighting, preparing to deploy into a highly challenging, invariably dangerous, often deadly combat environment – against an adversary determined to win.
Today, as recent accounts note, we are losing the edge. Still best trained, equipped, motivated, and historically capable, we are allowing a preoccupation with feelings, sensitivities, and delicacies of “woke society” to infect and degrade readiness. Objectively, that is dangerous.
Accounts of how Biden continues to downgrade military readiness – surrogate for winning – continue to pour in. Biden started in January 2021, flippantly reversing Trump’s restrictions on deployment for those with gender dysphoria, including those who “identify as transgender.”
Restrictions were not based on bigotry, bias, or misplaced understanding of capabilities. They were rooted in a study of readiness. That study – presented to then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis – showed “transgender individuals …attempt suicide and experience severe anxiety at nine times the rate of the general population.”
For reasons tied to unit cohesion, performance, reliability, and suitability of any individual to the exigencies of combat deployment, that was a factor degrading readiness. Biden blew it off.
From there, the slide accelerated. Biden dictated that active-duty military personnel can take off time to get “sex-change surgeries and related hormones at taxpayer expense.” He threw out a test showing “women were not scoring as highly as men” in physical readiness and allowed HIV-infected personnel to serve in combat zones despite cross-infection risk.
He reduced fitness standards, initiated indoctrination on “safe zones” “inclusive language,” and gender-neutral references, like “hey everybody” instead of “hey guys,” “pronouns” and mandatory “gender identity training.”
The list goes on and on, affecting readiness in ways not obvious. For example, recruiting in every branch of the US military has plummeted, hit by disinterest in being turned “woke” so they can put their lives on the line.
To be clear, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and most of our NATO and Pacific allies – have no such nonsensical, politically craven, readiness-reducing requirements. They do not let men who think they are women serve in combat and they do not change requirements to win votes, not wars.
Our adversaries and allies do not allow “safe spaces” for those too tender, do not imagine timeouts or do-overs in warfighting, and do not think the Chinese offer “safe spaces” on days when a place like Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Normandy, Anzio, Inchon, Vietnam, Fallujah, or any other gut-wrenching battlefield requires winning.
Bottom line: We need to get off the fantasy wagon and stop imagining that wars are fought by Scrabble, Rummy, or Go-fish rules. They are fought by those eager to best us – potentially China, Iran, North Korea, and others watching us degrade ourselves, drooling at self-inflicted wounds to readiness, quietly mirthful.
Our adversaries are not stupid, inattentive, ignorant of how to capitalize on our divisions, nor blind to our preoccupation with wokeness, lost focus on readiness and winning. They are highly attuned to choices we make – and they know that warfighting requires all-in commitment.
As the US Air Force blunders into asking cadets not to use “Mom” and “Dad” in favor of “gender neutral” terms, they are driving readiness, cogency, and our reliance on faith, family, freedom, and common sense – over the edge.
America has not won wars because we are “androgynous,” or think our parents, spouses, or kids are just genderless political pawns, second to government. We did not win because we were hyper-sensitive, assuring everyone was equally soft, pleasant, gentle, and genteel.
We have not won because we excused people to “timeout zones” and “safe spaces” when offended by words, pronouns, prickly shipmates, or hard orders. We did not win because we imagined those who can bench 350, run a 5:30 mile, and hit a bullseye are like those who cannot.
We did not win because we taught people to complain, go easy, excuse themselves from honest work, words, or the wisdom taught from suffering, getting up, putting up, and reaching up.
We won – and can again – by prioritizing readiness, motivating courage, not cowardice, teaching endurance, stamina, clear-mindedness in crisis, calm under pressure, strength, and growth every day, and being willing to do what it takes – no matter what it takes.
We honestly fight for what we believe in – which is the overriding motivation that brought us out of WWI and WWII victors. We fight for truth, ideals, family, brothers, and sisters in arms, and the freedom that resides in America, the freedom that rewards doing the right thing.
In the end, if we are to be our best, we must be true to that mission, motivated by freedom, determined to win. We must prioritize readiness not “wokeness.” Truth can give offense, but here it is: Our military is best when the objective is – to win.
You’re an Ivy League lawyer and Harvard professor who never served a day in your life so I’d think twice before questioning the valor of people who put their lives on the line in war zones.
The U.S. military hasn’t been allowed to win any significant military engagement since WWII. We either deploy our military to do “police actions”, which end in long-term political stalemates instead of long-lasting victories or we drop our troops into poorly defined areas to “send a message” or “nation build”. The sole purpose of the U.S. military is to protect vital American interests and lives under active threat of hostile enemy forces. To eliminate that threat or to so reduce the enemy’s ability to pose a active military threat as to render them a non-threat. In short, to kill enough of the enemy to prevent them from posing an active military threat over the long-term.
As for today’s “woke” training of the military, that is being done to specifically undermine military readiness and unit cohesion. Same goes for the idiotic vaccine mandate that will cost us over 20,000 highly-skilled troops in the near future at a time where we can’t meet enlistment quotas to maintain current operations. All this is designed to degrade our military so it poses less of threat to say China, which is singularly focused on being able to readily defeat us in Asia and the South Pacific in the near future. There are many people in Washington that see the United States military as the ultimate key to weakening our remaining status in the world and thus elevating China to step into that role. Fifty or 60 years ago, that would have been considered treasonist behavior. Today it is simply called promoting a “woke agenda”. The end result however remains the same.
When I was in the military, we trained to be ready, to be swift and to be a deterant. Politicians called the shots and the armed services did their bidding. But like all things run by the government, the military was always reigned in just short of victory, Korea, Vietnam were dismal failures, not of ineptitude, but because of politicians. Dead men and boys were the ultimate price paid by failed policy. Is it any wonder why there’s a downturn in recruitment?
Still, most of our service members play to win.
Since 1962 (leftist ideologue LBJ’s “Great Society” utopian fantasy), winning has NEVER been the objective, when the U.S. had a Democrat run administration. One of the many reasons the leftists want to rewrite or delete our history.
Thanks RBC… I think we’ll get back to what you are writing about with respect to our military readiness moving forward…It will require a change of leadership in the WH & at the Pentagon, that’s just for starters…As it stands right now, young military aged men & women are hesitant about entering the military, all branches & for a valid reason as you have already stated, they have ZERO desires in getting the WOKE indoctrination treatment in the military, not forgetting the Covid scamdemic so-called vaccine mandates…
It’s all a freaking mess right now, I smell change in the air & it is change for the better moving forward, being the eternal optimist I am…
All the best,
Bill… :~)
I being former U.S.M.C. feel that our military is weakened under biden pushing the same perverted crap as obama. When Trump was in the moral was high and our military was strong, now I do not even know if we would win a battle against a formidable enemy.
I served 10 years in the US Army, ending with a tour in Viet Nam. The only thing that disheartened me was the failure of our Command to establish a real objective and then let us achieve it.
The Air Force bombed the jungles, with Agent Orange, while the rest of us just wandered around waiting to be attacked. The function of the Military is to fight and win a war. Everything else is pointless. Korea was much the same.
You train the way you are going to fight. From what I see we are training to lose the fight.
Rush Limbaugh used to say, “The mission of the armed forces is to kill people and break things.” Joe Biden’s idea is: “Their mission is to be woke, diverse, inclusive, and unable to determine which sex they are.”
Biden’s intention when it comes to the Military is to use them against WE THE PEOPLE. He stated this shortly after he was elected if you recall in a speech.
Reinstitute the draft for military service or public service. Minimum term of three year, with a rigorist basic training required regardless of the path chosen. Deferments only allowed for physical or mental impairment.
I joined the USAF in 1960 and was trained as a navigator and later went to bomb school where I was trained to be a Radar Navigator/Bombardier on B-52s. This was during the cold war and we trained with the full knowledge that if we were called upon to bomb the enemy it would be a one-way mission. The prevailing philosophy was MAD; mutually assured destruction. If we were not shot down there would be no home left to return to
None of my class were assigned to bombers and most went to transports; C-124s, C-130s, and C-141s. I was involved in Viet Nam for 10 years. During that 10 years, I learned one profound truth: Politicians do not make good Generals. LBJ publicly stated, “Them boys can’t even bomb an outhouse without my approval”. We lost that war because politicians would not let us fight it!
The mission of the military when in a war is to win, however, then enters the politicians that then tie up the hands of the military and create NO-WIN situations.
Amen and amen!! USAF 72 – 79, I am appalled to hear what’s going on these days. God help us all.
Imagine Rocky wrapping himself in a rainbow flag.
I’m very glad I’m not in the military these days. I retired from the Navy twenty-five years ago and I’m appalled at what is happening to our military and how it is being ruined by that Demetia ridden idiot biden and his corrupt, idiotic polices our advisories are laughing at us now because they know our military is becoming a joke
When you have a “commander-in-chief” that doesn’t know how to command, you get what we have. A free for all approach to anything that promotes the “agenda”.