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OPINION

The Good News About Our Failing Military – Trump Can Fix It

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.
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AP Photo/Evan Vucci

We need to elect President Trump if only to unscrew our screwed-up military – and he can. The situation is getting worse. The other day, Twitter came alive when a video dropped of a male Space Force colonel pretending to be a female lecturing at the Air Force Academy, and you look at this and realize that our military has become ridiculous under the current crop of generals and admirals. Not content with not having a single unequivocal major military victory in the last 30 years, they have presided over the descent of America’s once most respected institution into a laughingstock. No matter how hard they order troops to believe in the power of trans transformation, the troops will not believe. In the words of Austin Powers, a ridiculous fictional character who has won as many wars in the last 30 years as our generals and admirals have, it’s a man, baby. And our troops know it.

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You cannot lie to a soldier’s face and expect him to follow you. That used to be Officer 101. Now just saying it is probably a hate crime.

And the results of this transformation speak for themselves. Recruiting is at rock bottom. Veterans like me now refuse to recommend military service, which is heartbreaking but necessary. To tell young people that they should join the military and be subjected to the indignity of having to call someone with beard stubble “ma’am” is a bridge too far – a reference that most of our generals probably wouldn’t get, judging from their track record of failure. And another recent disgrace involves forcing female urinalysis drug test observers to watch men pretending to be women whip it out to fill their cups. Disgusting.

Who the hell wants to sign up for that? If you want to be exposed to indecent exposure you can avoid the inconvenience of military life and just walk through a Democrat city, though you’ll probably get shot at there too.

Now, some young people still join the military, and they deserve our respect. They are, as always, fantastic. They are the best of America. I’m always humbled by the fact that our country allowed me to lead them, and I’m outraged that our country allows the platoon of failures at the Pentagon to lead them.

Some people may scoff that a few men pretending to be women and women pretending to be men within the fighting force is no big deal, and that to object is a manifestation of some repressed hangup. But it is a big deal. It’s a symptom of a rot at the heart of our military that has rendered what was once the world’s most formidable fighting force, a force that achieved a victory three decades ago in Operation Desert Storm on the level of Hannibal and Julius Caesar – again, historical references our present military leadership probably won’t recognize. Today’s military is about promoting social pathologies, not winning wars. Today, we get pushed around by freaking Houthis, whatever they are. We don’t avenge our murdered troops in Jordan, instead flattening a few desert huts after giving the local terrorists several days’ warning to get clear. We got run out of Kabul, carrying 13 caskets, by a bunch of pedophile tribesmen. And now our airmen are subjected to the indignity of having to airdrop supplies on the same people who just murdered 30 Americans and are holding nearly a dozen more hostage.

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Oh yeah, give me those enlistment papers!

The American military is a lot of things, but it should never be a joke. Yet, when you have a grown man made up – badly – like a grown woman lecturing future officers, it is a joke. This frivolous nonsense would be a little more tolerable, barely, if the military were doing its job. But today, we have a Navy that sets fire to its own ships when it isn’t running them into other boats, an Army with officers dressed up as Doberman pinschers canoodling with subordinate officers, and now a Space Force that channels Bangkok after dark.

It’s an embarrassment. But more than that, it’s a total abdication of the military’s responsibility to be a lethal fighting force that deters our enemies and destroys them when deterrence fails. No, diversity is not our greatest strength. Strength is our greatest strength.

Beyond the fact that our political generals and admirals are conforming to the mores of the Wellesley faculty lounge is the fact that they learned a lot of bad lessons from the global war on terrorism. They are over-lawyered, over-bureaucratized, over-briefed, and under-effective. They’re not swashbuckling warriors. They’re craven bureaucrats who would fit in at the local university, having proven their willingness to submit to whatever bizarre cultural fads the local activists are demanding.

What’s the name of the general or admiral who publicly resigned in protest against this nonsense? For that matter, name one fired for incompetence. I’ll wait.

These perfumed princes, princesses, and non-binary royal scions (Hat Tip: Colonel David Hackworth) are certainly are not ready for war in 2024. Skirmishing with scruffy bands of guerillas in the desert and the mountains from inside relatively luxurious bases is not good training for the kind of high OPTEMPO killing that will happen in a contemporary peer-to-peer battlespace. What’s going on in Ukraine demonstrates that many things we used to think were true no longer are. Drones have changed the battlefield. Cyber has changed the battlefield. Electronic warfare has changed the battlefield. The tanks and airplanes that used to dominate are now highly vulnerable. But have our tactics changed? Who cares about tactics? Everybody, fall into the auditorium because we have another mandatory transgender awareness seminar!

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The military won’t fix itself. The current leadership is all in on this failure, and that’s by design. Right now, the purpose of the war colleges is not to teach strategy but to make senior military officers socially acceptable to the limousine leftists in our ruling class. True story from not too long ago – a bunch of colonels assembled for a pretty routine war college exercise where, on Day One, they identify America’s greatest strategic threat, and on Day Two, they brief on courses of action to address that threat. So far, so good. Except half of these colonels identified climate change as America’s greatest strategic threat. When you have a bunch of military officers who think that America’s biggest threat is the weather, you don’t have a real military. You have a woke joke.

No wonder so many young people won’t join. And that’s especially true of the kind of young people who traditionally formed the backbone of the American military, the cold-blooded killers who won our wars back when we won wars. A lot of them were country boys. A lot of them were farmers. Very few of them have weird pronouns. All of them are considered bad people by the uniformed MSNBC viewers wearing stars and their civilian overlords.

No, those young people wanted to fight and win for their country. That’s who you want in your military. But that’s not who the current leadership wants in their military. These young people won’t conform. These young people won’t comply. All they will do is kill the enemy, but that’s not important. What’s important is submission and obedience to the woke agenda, except the guys who are the best combat arms soldiers aren’t the kind of guys who are good at pretending men who are pretending to be women are actually women.

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Oh, and they also aren’t the kind of folks who would fulfill the current commander-in-chief’s sick fantasies about turning our soldiers on dissident Americans.

It’s a disaster, but it can be fixed. We just need a president committed to doing it. See, the military is a hierarchical organization. It takes on the tenor of its commander. We have a chance to get President Trump back in 2025. He’s been burned bad by our current crop of generals and admirals before, so this is personal. If he devotes the time, the effort, and the political capital to do it, he can change the current pseudo-military back into a real military very quickly. He can fire the failed generals and admirals, ban the wokeness, reject the transsexual insanity, and reconfigure the United States military into the deadly killing machine that it should be. But right now, our military leadership is more likely to get its own soldiers killed than to kill our enemies. And that’s a disgrace.

For those of you who don’t like Donald Trump and don’t want to vote for him, remember that your failure to support him means leaving our troops in the hands of these incompetent bureaucrats. Pull the lever for Trump for their sakes.

Follow Kurt on Twitter @KurtSchlichter. Get the newest volume in the Kelly Turnbull People’s Republic series of conservative action novels set in America after a notional national divorce, the bestselling Amazon #1 Military Thriller, Overlord! And get his new novel about terrorism in America, The Attack!

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