The current “woke” Pentagon leadership has adopted and force-fed policies that weaken the morale and capabilities of America’s armed forces. Rather than allowing our fighting men and women to concentrate on deterring Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and terrorists, they, under Biden’s leadership, have made military preparedness a secondary consideration, emphasizing instead political partisanship.
Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fl) and Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tx) have produced a deeply disturbing report, “How Political ideology is weakening America’s Military.”.
On February 5, 2021, shortly after Biden became President, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin signed a memorandum directing all service members and DoD civilian employees to conduct a “one-day ‘stand- down” to discuss extremism in the ranks with their personnel.
Rubio and Roy observed that foreign adversaries like China and Russia loved the stand-down. Their view was simple: the stand-down sowed further divisions in the United States and allowed them to tell their people that America’s government is a failure. Chaired by Democrat Jack Reed, the Senate Committee on Armed Services’ (SASC) bipartisan report on the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) points out that this is “a case rate of .005 percent, one service member out of every 21,000.” The Biden Administration’s “Countering Extremist Activity Working Group” found that “cases of prohibited extremist activity among service members were rare.” In fact, in a force of more than 2.1 million active and reserve forces, there were only 100 cases.
The SASC report goes on to note that more than 5,359,000 personnel hours were spent on the extremism stand-down ordered by Secretary Austin. The SASC report did not mince words on this absurd working “Spending additional time and resources on extremism in the military is an inappropriate use of taxpayer funds, and should be discontinued by the [DoD] Immediately.”
This man who was in charge of the CEAWG was a rabid partisan who routinely denigrates conservatives.
This weakening of the armed forces may continue long after Biden leaves office, since he has mandated teaching race hate in the service academies. The Report found that “The Biden Administration wants to indoctrinate a new generation of military leadership at the U.S. Service Academies with Critical Race Theory.”
One example: An admiral told midshipmen at the Naval Academy that they need to read How to Be an Antiracist – a Marxist book that teaches that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination,” that capitalism is racist, and that people by virtue of their race are inherently oppressive or privileged.
Biden is not content to merely weaken the military through promoting racial division. The report notes that “Focusing on what is different among us, rather than that which unites us, only serves to foster division and discontent among service members. We need look no further for evidence of this than the recent egregious example of an attempt to use taxpayer money and DoD property to host a drag queen story hour for children at the library on Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany to promote ‘inclusivity’ during pride month’.”
Rational opponents of those seeking to abuse the military for political goals are subjected to swift retribution. The Biden Administration has a disturbing track record of punishing those who object to woke ideology and giving license to those who agree with it. It promulgates a strict oppressive standard for those who share its opinions but no consequences for those who toe the party line. This breeds resentment and allows loyalty to an ideology, rather than to competence, or the Constitution, to determine success in our military.
The emphasis on politics over defense has produced a crop of leaders who have replaced traditional values of obedience to civilian authority and combat competence with politics. The report notes that “General Mark Milley admitted he had ‘directly and intentionally undermined the will of the sitting President of the United States, promised to leak highly classified information to the People’s Republic of China that would endanger the lives of American service members, and injected himself inappropriately into the nuclear chain of command.” Miley faced no punishment for his misdeeds.
Photo: DoD