Some time back on the David Webb Show,** Webb had as one of his guests, retired Marine Corps Lt. Col. Dakota Wood. Wood is Senior Research Fellow, Defense Programs, Center for National Defense, Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy. It was a wide-ranging conversation about National Security. In effect being music to my ears, Lt. Col Wood addressed something that few (including me) have addressed: How do all the “woke” policy decisions and actions now running rampant, enhance our military’s ability to do its job?
Our military is sworn to obey the legal orders of the duly constituted civilian chain-of-command. That policy stems from the constitutional charge given to the President, who is specifically named, Commander in Chief of the armed forces. That’s a good thing. However, when the civilian chain of command is running down the wrong road and doing so to the point of being a detriment to military readiness, then senior leaders need to step up. Our military leaders have failed to do so. Moreover, they seem to be all in on this self-destructive philosophy.
On many an occasion, when confronted with the latest attempt to use my beloved Army (and the rest of the Armed Forces) as some sort of social experiment or worse, merely to advance the leftist agenda, I try and take a page from the great Thomas Sowell who famously asked,
“three questions that I think would destroy most of the arguments on the left:
The first is, ‘Compared to what?’
The second is, ‘At what cost?’
And the third is, ‘What hard evidence do you have?’”
My version of Sowell’s challenge to the left goes something like this; The mission of the military forces of these United States, is to kill people and break things (or credibly threaten to do so) in support of the lawful orders of the National Command Authority, as determined by Congressional mandate (war declaration). In my discussions with those senior officers regarding these policies, I ask two questions:
How will this policy or decision:
1. Increase Lethality, Cost Effectiveness, Survivability, Combat Effectiveness, Logistical Sustainability, Readiness, Deterrence or any other metric by which we assess our military ability to execute missions/tasks as determined by the President and SECDEF, and if so;
2. At what cost?
To date, not one senior officer or DOD civilian, or even a NEOCON, NRO pundit, has been able to answer any of those questions about any of the left’s social degradation of the Armed Forces, including the study of the non-existent, “systemic racism” in the military or “white rage” in general society. The closest was a 4 Star General, who told me that it was important to keep women in Special Operations Units so we could retain (my words here) the ability to grope Arab females in the combat zone. Interestingly, we somehow, we managed to triumph without that capability in desert combat theaters in both World War I & II. In short, no measurable benefit.
Now on to the costs. Heretofore, I’ve mentioned some of the logistics and monetary costs of some of those decisions. On Webb’s show, Lt. Col. Wood brought up the extremely high cost to morale caused by such leftist garbage now being forced on young officers in training and those already in the field. Wood is correct.
Military units are teams. They are teams that are often engaged in inherently dangerous, high-risk activities. This is especially true of units that engage in close combat
Close combat units, Infantry squads, platoons, companies, and battalions are the elements that seize and hold ground. The majority of the work, the up close and personal stuff, is done by squads and platoons. These men have to trust each other. They have to not only trust the abilities of their teammates, but also their leaders. They have to know…not believe mind you, but know, that their leaders are in charge because they have been put in that position based on ability, not melanin content, bathroom requirements or mating preferences.
These great young Americans also have to believe in their leaders’ motives. They have to trust that their leaders actually give a damn about them. As Lt. Col Wood mentioned, how can the troops and the leaders trust each other when they are being actively encouraged not to by their senior leadership.
The senior military leadership, both uniformed and civilian, are actively sowing seeds of mistrust that will take decades to root out. Each and every new pronouncement seems to tell minority Soldiers that the real enemy is their White teammates. That’s interesting. I wonder what our real enemies…China, Russia and North Korea think about that particular, self-inflicted, gut shot to morale.
**David Webb can be found on Sirius XM 125, M-F, 9:00-Noon EST
© Mike Ford Analytics 2020
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Give this administration a little more time, and the right person in his administration to put it in the form of a command and we will be seeing Milley and Austin replaced by trannies. They will get higher budgets, but for transitioning, and instead of the dogs of war, we will then have a chihuahua with glitter on its nails for a military example.
You know all this stuff is being done intentionally, Mike. Obama said it during one of his terms. He wanted to bring it down a notch or two. How about a completely emasculated military?
I guarantee Obama is laughing.
Shirley you can’t be serious. Let’s be frank. (Don’t call me Shirley and who needs Frank?) Wars are trained for and fought by many men doing dangerous and manly things with other manly men in spite of the danger. It is that comraderee that promotes teamwork and self sacrifice toward the goal of team survival and winning (not necessarily in that order). Rising above because it is the manly thing to do and in so doing allows one to feel they have risen above the crowd to a higher level of purpose and achievement. If everyone can do it and the standards are lowered to achieve that then the sacrifice is not worth it. Hence warfighting capability is lower, morale is worse and you cannot fill the slots. The Leftists’ goal isn’t victory it is equality of outcome which is anathema to winning. Patton could not survive in this culture and neither could I and many other warriors.
Well said, only the weak minded and weak- kneed could disagree.
Mike,
No wonder military recruitment is down. The incentive for joining is just not there. All that’s left are SJWs.
Your neighbor in Anniston.
What you describe is a terrible development for the military but, given the fighting capital we’ve built up in the decades before all of this started, I’m not sure it’ll be the end of the military’s awesome effectiveness. We’ve gone through this before and, God willing, the country will get back to this point of strength and social revival and decay that we might see it again.
I think though that what we’re seeing in Ukraine points to a deeper truth about the military power we have, that is that we needed the reforms and improvements down at the fighting unit level to get to where we could improve our strategic, tactical, and operational tools but… it didn’t stop there. We needed the improvements in the strategic, tactical, and operational tools to see that we needed to improve the weapons of war. One level builds on the next and, in fact, requires the previous level to see what is needed and, although the left can destroy the military at the unit level we still have the artifacts of improved weapons of war that came from those lower-level improvements.
Looking at Ukraine and what even the imperfect use of those weapons can do, it seems clear that the left can do a lot of damage… spend or degrade a lot of the war fighting wealth built up over the last 30 years… to make ingratiate themselves to their base, both in this country and the world. They’ll do a poor job of it and our capabilities will eventually degrade but such is the nature of the taker class.
Good analysis, as usual!
You left out the part about the destruction of our military being part of The Left’s grand strategy to “take America down a notch” and make us just another nation “in the global community.”