National Security Council spokesman John Kirby’s asinine claim deserves all the scorn we can muster.
Rich has already taken to task National Security Council spokesman John Kirby for his claim that the National Defense Authorization Act passed by House Republicans puts “our troops at greater risk” and may put “our readiness at risk.” But an asinine comment such as this deserves all the scorn we can muster, so allow me to pile on.
Kirby’s claim rests on the notion that America’s capacity to deploy combat-ready forces is imperiled by an NDAA that eliminates some recent DEI commitments imposed on the Pentagon and prohibits the armed forces from paying or reimbursing service members for abortion services, hormone treatments, or sex-change surgeries. Since nearly 85 percent of the services are composed of males — presumably, mostly males who identify as such — this claim should trigger far more instinctual skepticism than it has yet received in the mainstream press. But since the services are struggling to meet their recruitment targets, we can safely deduce that the politicization of the Pentagon is a bigger threat to America’s readiness than is paring back Democratic efforts to transform the military into one big social experiment.
Like most complex phenomena, America’s recruitment challenges are multicausal. Between eligibility requirements, the lack of candidates who can meet the physical standards, and the low rate of unemployment, the national environment is not presently conducive to attracting large numbers of new service personnel. But among America’s most reliable recruitment drivers are families in which at least one member is a veteran. Indeed, nearly 80 percent of all recruits have at least one family member who has served. The politicization and polarization of the armed forces is severing those familial ties to the services.
According to a survey commissioned by the Heritage Foundation in October 2022 and conducted by the National Independent Panel on Military Service and Readiness, current and past service personnel are acutely aware that the military is hostage to aspiring social engineers, and they don’t like it. Sixty-eight percent of service members say they have witnessed the military’s politicization to one extent or another, and another 65 percent express some level of dismay over it. Among the service members polled, 68 percent said the politicization of the military influences their inclination to encourage their children to serve their country in uniform — presumably in a negative direction.
You can already hear progressives gearing up to rain condescension down on the hidebound troglodytes who serve in America’s armed forces, all of whom are arrayed detestably against progress. That is self-serving nonsense. What has lowered the trust and confidence in the armed forces is the perception that it increasingly privileges faddish political trends over — indeed, at the expense of — the efficacy of the forces and the safety of service personnel.
Sixty-nine percent of respondents to the NIPMSR poll said they lost trust in the armed forces when they were urged by the brass to read critical race theory–flavored texts, such as one from Ibram X. Kendi that alleges that interracial adoption is “extremist,” that capitalism is “essentially racist,” and that the nation they serve in uniform owes its existence and prosperity to chattel slavery. Our soldiers take an oath to defend the Constitution and are subsequently bombarded with literature designed to inculcate in them the idea that their oath is founded on a lie. Anyone would find that a little dispiriting.
But the concerns expressed by service personnel are not strictly motivational. The soldiers surveyed also said that they had lost trust in the military because of its lowered physical standards for recruits and its allowing transgender personnel to serve without restrictions on the capacity in which they can serve. These concerns dovetail with respondents’ hostility toward President Biden’s Federal Sustainability Plan, which mandates that all “light-duty” military vehicles be emissions-free by 2027. These soldiers can be forgiven for concluding that civilian reformers, amid a pursuit of highly ideological objectives, are jeopardizing their lives and the military’s core mission.
If John Kirby or anyone else is genuinely concerned about readiness, safeguarding the services from the designs of left-wing technocrats and the faddish orthodoxies to which they are susceptible should be priority No. 1. It is not, however, which suggests that the officials for whom Kirby speaks are more protective of those orthodoxies than the soldiers subjected to them.