America’s military is the finest fighting force in the world, but its strength isn’t inevitable and can’t be taken for granted. It’s an inheritance from past generations of patriots, who created its culture and traditions on the battlefields at great cost. Maintaining this inheritance takes sweat, money, and above all respect for our forefathers and our country.
Sadly, there is ample reason to believe our military’s traditions and combat effectiveness are declining, thanks in part to Democrats’ woke obsessions, which put divisive identity politics before cohesion and which smear America as a force for evil not worth fighting for. The Democrats’ political correctness is neutering the military—and it must be stopped.
Across the military, warning lights are flashing red on the dash.
The Army just missed its annual recruiting goal by 25%, or 20,000 soldiers. The Navy missed its target for officers by 200. The National Guard came up 9,000 recruits short. The Department of Defense stated in a report that failures in recruitment are driven in part by "social unrest."
SERVICE MEMBERS SOUND ALARM AGAINST ‘EXTREMELY WOKE’ MILITARY
Applications to service academies also are way down, tumbling 12 percent at West Point, more than 20 percent each at Annapolis and West Point, and one-quarter at the Virginia Military Institute. During the same period, the number of college applicants rose more than 20 percent.
Seasoned warfighters are raising the alarm about even more trouble ahead. When I encouraged military whistleblowers to share their concerns privately, we were flooded with hundreds of messages about declining standards and degraded capabilities. In some cases, essential training in weapons systems, navigation, and ship handling is falling by the wayside, while commanders are forced to prioritize woke "diversity" trainings you’d expect to see on a liberal-arts campus. In some cases, these trainings aren’t merely harmful. They’re illegal under civil-rights law. But that hasn’t stopped "the agenda-driven people" in Washington, as Marine Corps General John Kelly once called them.
Fact is, these troubling changes aren’t coming from out of the blue. They’re pushed by Democratic politicians and liberal activists who despise the military as it is and want to transform it, just as they’ve transformed so many elite institutions into hollow shells of their former selves.
The root of liberals’ hostility to the defense budget and key weapons is distrust of the military as an institution. The military embodies American power at its hardest and most lethal edge. The Democratic Party is sometimes called "the mommy party" because of its focus on softer, caring, and nurturing priorities. Few characters in American culture are more distant from "mommy" than the military’s iconic drill sergeant. Tensions are bound to arise.
These tensions undermine our military’s ability to fight and win wars. Too often, liberals suspect the military of racism, sexism, and extremism lurking just below a highly polished and creased veneer. They distract from training and readiness to rectify these supposed sins, engaging in social engineering that both threatens our security and puts our troops at risk. Liberals seem more comfortable training social-justice warriors than actual warriors trained to kill.
This is all dangerous folly. The military is a fighting force, not a liberal-arts college or Fortune 500 company. Phyllis Schlafly, the famed conservative activist who defeated the Democrats’ first attempt to draft women into the military, put it well when she said, "The purpose of the armed forces of the United States is to defend our country. The purpose is not to engage in social experimentation or to give jobs to needy people or to run day-care facilities for people who have babies. The purpose is to defend us." The military operates in a different way and reveres different things than do civilian institutions precisely because the stakes are higher. If the military is mismanaged, protesters don’t occupy a campus building and shareholders don’t take a loss. Americans die. […]
Unsurprisingly, many Democrats also see racism, sexism, and extremism lurking around every corner of the barracks. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York has long crusaded to upend the entire military-justice system, on the grounds that it’s biased against women and minorities. As she put it, "if you are a black or brown servicemember, I’m sorry to say, there may well be biases against you." During a hearing on supposed extremism in the military after the Capitol riot, Senator Dick Blumenthal of Connecticut asserted with zero evidence that up to 10 percent of the force might be white supremacists.
Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois in 2005 compared American troops to "Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime—Pol Pot or others—that had no concern for human beings" because he thought Guantánamo Bay was too harsh for terrorists. After days of hemming and hawing over the controversy, he issued a typical politician’s apology "if anything," he offered, "cast a negative light on our fine men and women in the military." I wonder what kind of light he intended to cast. I remember the episode vividly because I was on a weekend pass from Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia. After being largely cut off from the outside world for five months, I checked into a hotel in downtown Columbus, flipped on the TV, and learned of Durbin’s comment, which dominated the news all weekend. And it dominated our conversation when we reported back to OCS on Sunday night. Suffice it to say, none of us soon forgot Durbin’s slander.
In reality, the Democrats’ prejudices about the military are all wrong. Far from being laggards, our troops have higher levels of academic achievement and fewer blemishes on their character than the military-age population as a whole. And far from being "stuck" in Iraq, virtually every soldier I knew wanted to go fight for our country.
Moreover, America’s military also has a proud record of racial equality. Truman integrated the military in 1948, just one year after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball and six years before Brown v. Board of Education. Today, African Americans serve at a higher rate in our military than their share of the population—hardly evidence of a racist institution. Contrary to Dick Durbin, America’s military swiftly and severely demands accountability for wrongdoing, unlike brutal regimes that employ terror and torture as official state policy. As we’ve seen, though, you can always count on Democrats to blame America first.
But these mistaken views still lead to badly misguided policies and priorities that impugn the military’s culture and alienate our troops. Biden’s secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, for example, spoke at his confirmation hearing about the need to "rid our ranks of racists" and asserted that we can’t defend America against our enemies "if some of those enemies lie within our own ranks"—all before he spoke of any foreign enemies, like China.
Hearing his testimony that morning left me disappointed. I felt he must’ve known better. His own distinguished career as an African American four-star general who has held several of the Army’s highest commands refuted such accusations against our military, as had Colin Powell’s career thirty years earlier. I knew as well as he did that the military has a strict zero-tolerance policy against all forms of discrimination and harassment. Every unit in which I served had periodic training sessions on all sorts of standards, including equal-opportunity policies and expectations.
More to the point, the soldiers with whom I served always lived up to these high standards. I had African American and Latino instructors, commanders, peers, and subordinates. Not once did I witness racial discrimination or harassment. I suspect Powell and Austin unfortunately did, coming from an earlier generation, but that merely highlights the progress the military has made. What mattered most wasn’t our skin color, but the red, white, and blue we had all volunteered to wear on our right shoulder. We were comrades in arms. That was a deeper bond than skin color.
Nevertheless, once confirmed, Austin ordered an extraordinary military-wide, daylong "stand-down" for training on "extremism." By contrast, the most aggressive all-Army training stand-down I can recall came in 2007 for brain injuries and post-traumatic stress. It was needed and useful, given how many soldiers suffered these injuries—and it lasted thirty minutes. Predictably, a lot of these full-day training sessions went off the rails. An Army truism is that if the commanding general wants a division formation at 0600, young privates will have to report at 0400 because each subordinate leader below the commanding general takes it a step further, directing his troops to arrive "five minutes prior" to his own boss’s hit time. The same thing happened with this directive from the secretary of defense. Instead of reinforcing the military’s zero-tolerance policy and demanding equal opportunity for all, I received hundreds of complaints about training sessions that accused the military of "systemic racism" and "white supremacy," segregated servicemembers by race, presumed that they held "implicit bias," mandated "confessions" of "privilege" and bias, conducted "privilege walks," and other left-wing fads. Some complaints came from minority soldiers, who found the sessions condescending and belittling.
The same is true for the Biden administration’s witch hunt for "extremists" in the military. Launched with great fanfare after the Capitol riot, a "Countering Extremist Activity Working Group" bombed embarrassingly for the administration. After a six-month search, it identified fewer than one hundred "extremists" in the ranks—out of a force of more than two million. And many of those cases were criminal street gangs. Again, this shouldn’t have surprised Austin or anyone else with military experience. The military rigorously screens its recruits for extremist ties, conducting criminal background checks and even doing full body scans during physical exams for extremist tattoos. Like most veterans, I remember shuffling around in my underwear on exam day, getting poked and prodded for various maladies, and checked out for disqualifying tattoos.
Such distractions and misplaced priorities aren’t limited to race, or to the Biden administration. Ray Mabus, Obama’s highly political secretary of the Navy, waged an eight-year culture war against the traditions of the Navy and Marine Corps. In his final year, he directed both services to change "gendered" job titles such as "infantryman" to gender-neutral names. I suppose Mabus thought the Obama administration had done so well against ISIS and countering China’s naval buildup that it could focus on such matters. His directive was especially disruptive to the Navy, which has a tradition predating America’s founding of using job-rating titles such as "yeoman" or "corpsman" instead of ranks such as "petty officer." Besides, even changing the Navy’s job titles wouldn’t have solved the supposed "problem," since the first three enlisted ranks in the service are "seaman." After months of open rebellion from the enlisted ranks and veterans, and with Mabus on the way out, Navy leadership ditched the insulting plan.
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In the summer of 2021, I saw up close another instance of the Democrats’ misguided views and resulting bad policies during the Armed Services Committee’s debate over the annual defense bill. Normally, we consider many amendments about how we recruit, train, and equip our troops or which weapons, aircraft, and ships to purchase. But not this time, with Democrats back in charge. Over more than twelve hours, we didn’t vote on a single amendment about something that would kill a bad guy. What did we vote on? Registering women for the draft. Creating a new bureaucracy to "counter extremism" in the military. Dismantling the military-justice system to combat its supposed racism and sexism. Taking privately owned guns away from troops. The longest debate was on Senator Elizabeth Warren’s amendment to rescind Medals of Honor granted at the Battle of Wounded Knee more than a century ago. Afterward, as I marveled with fellow Republicans about the unseriousness of the session, a senator walked over from the Democratic side. With a bemused smile, he asked, "Isn’t it something we spent the whole time on these social and cultural questions and not on military ones?" I answered icily, "Yeah, it’s really something, isn’t it."
In an ironic turn of fate, we killed most of these bad provisions during negotiations with the House. Because we had also added $25 billion to Biden’s anemic defense budget, the Democrats lost votes for the bill from their far left. They had to drop the "social and cultural" amendments from the language to secure enough Republican votes for passage. Democrats were hoisted with their own petard.
But the scene repeated itself in 2022, the second time as farce. What I call the "Draft Our Daughters" amendment stands out in particular. In 2021, I was one of just five senators on the committee to oppose this measure to require women to register for the draft. Some called us out of touch, when in reality the Democrats were out of touch: according to one poll, two-thirds of women opposed it. After the amendment got dropped from the final bill, the Democrats gave it another run in 2022. In a telling glimpse into their mindset, several Democratic senators this time gushed about how registering for the draft would improve their daughters’ self-esteem. I was the only senator to speak against the amendment and I said simply: "The purpose of the military isn’t to help your kids’ self-esteem; it’s to kill our enemies."
The Democrats still hadn’t gotten the message, but I suppose it’s hard to overcome decades of unease with the military. But they should, because Democratic misgivings usually end up sowing division in the ranks, undermining morale, and distracting troops from their core mission.
If this woke crusade continues, the military’s recruitment and readiness problems will worsen. Our troops will remain the bravest in the world. But they’ll be underequipped and underprepared for the conflicts America may face in the years ahead, all because politicians and activists put ideology ahead of discipline and lethality—which are the decisive factors on any battlefield.
