Joe Biden Transforms the Pentagon From a Strong Horse to a Weak Woke Horse, Just When It Counts Most...

Back in 2003 a Muslim woman sued the Florida DMV because she wanted her driver’s license photo to be taken while she was wearing a niqab, or veil, which would have covered her entire face other than her eyes.  I remember thinking how absurd such a request was.  Not that the veil was absurd, but rather the idea of taking a picture specifically intended to identify someone with all of their identifying features covered. The request obviated the basic reason of why the picture was being taken in the first place. 

A year later, again out of Florida, the North Miami police department dropped its requirement that police officers know how to swim.  Apparently because they were having a hard time finding qualified black applicants who could swim, rather than teach otherwise qualified black applicants to swim, the police did away with the requirement.

The purpose of the DMV issuing drivers’ licenses is to make it possible to identify someone by looking at them and the purpose of a police force is to protect and defend the people within a particular jurisdiction, and in cities surrounded by water that might require swimming.  Anything that defeats the very purpose of an organization is probably a bad idea from the perspective of accomplishing that organization’s mission.   

Which brings us to Joe Biden’s Pentagon.  Building on Barack Obama’s turning NASA into a Muslim outreach program, Joe Biden has decided to turn the Pentagon into a monument to wokeness.  While the Pentagon has been moving in the woke direction for years (as demonstrated by a deadly political correctness, the repeal of DADT, women in combat and picking up the tab for sex change operations) Joe Biden has turned the military into a full fledged social program.

So how can Joe Biden beat Obama’s deadly despicable modifications to the Rules of Engagement?  How about pregnant women in military cockpits?  Yes, you read that right.  Joe Biden has the American military “Designing body armor that fits women properly, tailoring combat uniforms for women, creating maternity flight suits and updating requirements for their hairstyles… It will take an intensity of purpose and mission to really change the culture and habits that cause women to leave the military.” 

If the legion of stumbles Joe Biden has already made in his short time in office haven’t convinced you of such, that sentiment alone should demonstrate clearly that he is not a serious man.

The role of the military is to protect and defend the nation and its allies as well as enforce treaties the United States has entered into, whether that’s ensuring safe passage of shipping in domestic and international waters or making preemptive strikes against terrorists planning on striking American or allied targets.  All of those things and more involve training to kill, and possibly actually killing enemies.  Military is deadly business as large numbers of lives are at stake.  Not only are there hundreds of thousands of Americans under arms who actively or potentially put their lives in danger to protect the nation on a daily basis, but there are millions of people at home and abroad whose lives are impacted by the success or failure or American military operations.

And so, in this universe where the Chinese are willing to operate the open secret of concentration camps filled with their own citizens, are claiming sovereignty over virtually the entire South China Sea, are building outposts around the world, cornering the market on strategically critical rare earth minerals and turbo charging the world’s largest military, Joe Biden wants to make sure pregnant pilots have uniforms that fit.  In a world where nuclear weapons are in more, and more unstable hands than ever before, where bioweapons like the Coronavirus can kill millions and terrorism can strike anywhere anytime, one of Joe Biden’s first acts was to lift the ban on transgender enlistments.  Joe Biden is an unserious man who has no place as Commander in Chief and in any rational world he wouldn’t be allowed within a thousand miles of the nuclear football.  But there he is sitting in the White House – sadly as the result of Democrat fraud – and turning our military into a woke petri dish.

And there’s a reason he can do it…  Most people think of the military as jets in dogfights, solders storming a den of bad guys or ships bombing a coastline.  It is all of those things and more, but the reality is the military spends an overwhelming majority of its time preparing, planning and training rather than actually fighting… which is why leftists think they can turn it into a series of social experiments.  It’s easy to measure quotas and enforce the latest politically correct policies when no one is actually shooting at or trying to kill you. Importantly, that work is where troops learn the skills necessary to survive actual combat and lay the groundwork for success in actual war.  But to the left in America doesn’t care about that. They’re more interested in the optics of diversity and inclusiveness than they are in mission success and are willing to sacrifice the latter for the former. And to the degree the military focuses on those social issues, counts pigments or genders or tries to manipulate political allegiances, the less effective the training is and at the end of the day, the less capable the military is to accomplish its primary mission.  

Osama Bid Laden said:  "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse." Joe Biden is signaling to the world the American military is anything but a strong horse and he’s leaving no ambiguity about it.  The world sees this, our allies see this, and most importantly our enemies see this.  People around the world recognize that the United States has been the vanguard of freedom for a century and ushered in a period of economic prosperity unprecedented in human history.  But at the same time, most rational people recognize that nothing good lasts forever.  If the United States is literally telling the world that our military is focused on maternity flight suits and trans enlistments while the borg of China is expanding and strengthening its military and economic reach to unprecedented levels, we shouldn’t be surprised to see American influence deflate like a week old balloon animal as allies and friends turn their allegiances toward the strong horse.  When the left’s dream of diminished American influence comes to pass the irony will be that the tag on the boot standing on their necks will read “Made in woke America”. 

Barack Obama as Commander in Chief ... The Pentagon as a social experiment

I’ve probably cited this before, but it’s easily one of the best speeches ever uttered in the movies. In A Few Good Men Jack Nicholson’s Col. Jessep explains life to Tom Cruz’s Lt. Kaffee:

“… And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post.”

This speech came back to me a couple of weeks ago as I was reading about women being given special treatment so that they would pass the Army’s Ranger school. This is just the latest example of Barack Obama misunderstanding – or more likely, not caring about – the fundamental mission of the United States military.

From Berghdal to troops being kicked out of the military for beating up child molesters to gays in the military to women in combat roles, to the dangerous Rules Of Engagement troops must operate under, the Department of Defense has become a playground for political activism and social engineering rather than what it actually exists for, which is to defend the United States from external enemies.

One reason that liberals like Obama feel like they can manipulate the military is because they see it as simply another arm of the government, rather than the unique entity it is. Wherever on the political spectrum one sits, the general role of government is to protect the freedoms of citizens, prosecute those who violate the laws and support economic prosperity via the issuance of patents & trademarks and enforcing contracts, etc. That definition is pretty opaque, but whether we’re talking about the SEC, the FDA or the EPA, the primary goal is not (theoretically) to be prepared to kill hundreds or thousands or millions of people while putting the lives of thousands of Americans at risk.

That however, is exactly what DOD does. The role of the Department of Defense is to defend the nation from external threats, which often includes killing the enemy in large numbers, often violently. At the same time, by definition, it involves putting at risk the lives of American personnel. That fundamentally makes DOD different than HUD or the GPO or the Education Department.

Given the extraordinarily high risks and dangers associated with putting the military in the field, the primary driver of policy should be to further the mission, not social agendas. But the reality is, Barack Obama doesn’t agree with that. To him, putting women in combat or moving the goalposts so that women can “pass” Ranger school is more about combating the “War on Women” than it is about a military prepared to face real combat.

To Barack Obama, gays serving openly in the military make perfect sense as gays can work in law offices or coffee shops or big box retailers with no impact on operations. But the military is not Wal-Mart, Starbucks baristas don’t train to kill people and in most law offices men don’t spend hours and weeks and years training with one another in close quarters where emotions and tempers and jealousies and hormones come into play and put people’s lives at risk while doing so. It’s true, that on the field of battle when the bad guys are shooting at you it doesn’t really matter if the guy next to you is gay or straight or confused if he’s on your side. The reality however is that 99.9% of a military man’s job is not spent in the heat of battle, it’s spent in the classroom learning, in the field training, on back on base regrouping. It’s in those environments where soldiers and Marines spend most of their time that the problems associated with gays in the military are felt, not in the foxhole.

The perfect demonstration of Barack Obama’s view that all government programs are but tools for his social agenda can be found in something tangential to the Defense Department. In 2010 Obama’s NASA Administrator said the following: “When I became the NASA Administrator — before I became the NASA Administrator — He (President Obama) charged me with three things: One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.”

For Barack Obama the Pentagon is nothing more than a vehicle for achieving his progressive goals. That alone makes him an unfit Commander in Chief. Unfortunately the next Commander in Chief will pay the price for Obama’s folly. Not only will he inherit a military with morale at the lowest in years, he will inherit the smallest Navy in a century, a powerful and growing enemy in ISIS that is a direct result of Obama’s incompetence, and most dangerously he will inherit a world that increasingly lacks respect for American strength... which ironically, and unfortunately, increases the likelihood of actually having to use the military.

But on the upside he will have female rangers, gay couples and transgenders openly serving and a JAG Corps that has been cowed into towing the administration's line on Berghdal. No doubt that should make him feel better.