Before I get to the shocking news of “revolutionary” indoctrination at our Department of Defense schools, we need to talk a little about what most militaries really do.
For many countries, having a military seems like an expensive extravagance they can ill afford.
“Extravagance?” I can almost hear you ask. “What would they do if someone invaded?”
Well, let’s see. I’m this month’s President-for-Life of Burkina Faso, and I’m worried that neighboring Mali might invade and steal all of our… [checks notes] …phosphates.
In almost every case, a war of aggression just isn’t worth it. An army is expensive to raise, expensive to equip, expensive to train, and extremely expensive to deploy in combat. And to what end? Even if your neighbor does have something worth fighting over, it’s worth a lot less once the fighting stops.
If the fighting ever stops. We spent 20 years trying to pacify Afghanistan and utterly failed. We weren’t even trying to take anything from them. We just wanted to give them the benefit of our civilization, even though they’d rather shoot us.
Vladimir Putin went into Ukraine with what was widely regarded as the second-best army in the world. Now he barely has the second-best army in Ukraine. And for what? A few industrial towns and some farmland populated by several million well-armed people who really don’t want to be ruled from Moscow.
Wars of aggression just aren’t worth all the effort and expense — even the very few winning efforts.
So if most countries don’t face genuine external threats and most wars of aggression don’t pay off, why does nearly every country in the world have an army?
In most of the world, the army doesn’t exist to protect the country. It exists to protect the interests and the tender hide of this month’s President-for-Life. An army doesn’t have to be particularly effective to put down a rebellion; it just has to be better-armed and a bit more organized than the people El Presidente might have to suppress.
The U.S. military has had its ups and downs, but since ending the draft half a century ago, it has been the most expertly trained and exquisitely armed force the world has ever seen. Even during the draft years immediately before World War II and the end of Vietnam, we paid for and usually got the best weapons and training the country could afford.
And unlike those militaries in all those shithole countries, our forces were generally apolitical. They didn’t serve a president or a party, but the country.
In the last few years, wokeness has come to infect our military just as it previously had our universities, news outlets, and the entertainment industry.
Also for our VIPs: Ron DeSantis and Hurricane Ian: a Category 4 Media Fail
The rot is so obvious that none of the services will meet this year’s recruiting goals.
The Army is the worst off, with a miss of 25%. The Biden Administration recently reduced the Army’s authorized strength to 473,000 from 485,000, but we won’t even get that many men and women in uniform.
One strong indicator of whether a young person will volunteer to serve is if he or she had a parent who served. We don’t have nobility in this country (thank goodness!) but we do have a tradition of military families (thank goodness!).
Claremont has a chilling report on what is being taught to the children of our servicemen and women, courtesy of Ryan Williams and Scott Yenor.
“With the 2018 ‘Blueprint,’ they write, the DOD K-12 education agency has “fully dedicated itself to the woke agenda.”
They call it a “dangerous and revolutionary educational system” that serves up an “anti-American, antifamily hatred in the name of perverse, dangerous, and false ideologies.”
My wife grew up on Air Force bases in Europe. She went to almost nothing but DOD schools. I don’t dare show her this story because you don’t break the heart of the woman you love.
It’s a chilling report, and I recommend you read the whole thing.
But there’s more.
The military — at the order of Commander-in-Chief Biden — has been particularly vicious and short-sighted regarding the COVID-19 vaccine mandates. Needless to say, those troops refusing the jab trend more conservative and more religious than average.
A military more concerned with being trans-friendly, using the proper imaginary pronouns, and cultivating a “safe and risk-free culture,” [per the “Blueprint”] is not going to be prepared for a hard slog against a peer or near-peer adversary. This isn’t the same kind of apolitical military we used to have, the one that kept the peace all those years.
The woke military’s dirty little secret is: that’s by design.
I’ve begun thinking of our postmodern military not as a useless Woke Force but as a Third World military: a woke military that isn’t any good at fighting wars but is perfectly suited for putting down domestic undesirables.
The wokesters don’t make us normals feel much desired in the modern culture, and now they’re getting a Third World-style military all their own.
“Keep your powder dry,” Robert Heinlein once advised. “And keep lots of powder.”
