As Chris Bedford pointed out Friday, it’s no surprise U.S. military brass released a fake outrage squirrel with Tucker’s Carlson’s name on it the day after a war games leak suggesting the United States would lose a fight with China over Taiwan. Noncommissioned officers marshaling military resources to wage an information operation against an American journalist over his opinions doesn’t just happen by accident.
The operation also reveals that Carlson was right on the mark to target leftist identity politics as compromising U.S. military dominance over the globe. It also reveals that the U.S. military is more ideologically, and thus practically, compromised than many Americans will want to believe.
But nothing good comes of believing lies, even if the truth is scary. You can’t judge the right thing to do if you don’t base your judgment on an accurate understanding of reality.
If our military can’t understand its own culture well enough to succeed, how can anyone expect it to understand China well enough to beat it?
It doesn’t. Woke .mil knows that. That’s why it wants to stifle such discussions. But it’s too inept to do it effectively. 5/
— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) March 14, 2021
This way, we can set the stage for reform under a new President.
We can also make sure liberalism is properly assigned blame for the inevitable consequences of woke .mil leadership.
There will be a major defeat under Biden. America must understand why to repair the damage. 7/
— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) March 14, 2021
“The definitive answer if the U.S. military doesn’t change course is that we’re going to lose fast,” Air Force Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote told Yahoo! News in its article about the war games leak. “In that case, an American president would likely be presented with almost a fait accompli.”
“Whenever we war-gamed a Taiwan scenario over the years, our Blue Team [the U.S. military] routinely got its ass handed to it,” David Ochmanek, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense, told Yahoo. “…the U.S. military is still not keeping pace with Chinese advances. For that reason, I don’t think we’re much better off than a decade ago when we started taking this challenge more seriously.”
The article lays partial blame for this loss of U.S. hard power on our nation’s refusal to pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan, which also gave Chinese forces the opportunity to intensely study U.S. strategy. It also blamed the U.S. penchant for global policing instead of prioritizing national security interests, and senior U.S. military officers’ egos keeping them from considering “that another nation would dare to take them on.” The article also fingered Congress’s perennial use of the military as a pork-distribution vehicle to favored constituencies and donors, which keeps outdated equipment in operation instead of replacing it with next-generation war materiel.
The U.S. military’s response to this expose of its failures was to attack an American citizen and domestic opponent of the current president over his use of his constitutionally guaranteed free speech. Both their choice to engage in information warfare against an American citizen’s use of constitutionally guaranteed rights and the subject matter they picked the fight over reinforce the hugely important concern that the U.S. military is compromised by politics to the point it cannot achieve its primary mission.
That is reinforced by the U.S. military’s inability to win wars against two-bit tribal warlords in Third World countries that are not a U.S. security priority, despite deploying trillions of dollars across 20 years of warfare. It is reinforced further by high-ranking military and national security officials’ decision to repeatedly lie to the elected president to keep their expensive debacle ongoing. It is reinforced even further by the U.S. military being deployed against American civilians, both in boots on the ground in the U.S. capital and in information warfare like the Carlson incident.
Now, let’s be clear here. We have elected civilian control of the military in this country because the consent of the people is the only legitimate form of governance and is guaranteed to us by our highest laws, and because that is a safeguard against becoming a military dictatorship. When members of the military take actions to subvert civilian control of them, people should start freaking out about that, and the officials who do this should lose their jobs, if not face other sanctions such as prosecution and congressional inquiries.
One way to subvert civilian control of the U.S. military is to tightly control what information Americans receive, and to conduct psychological operations on the people whose rights the military is supposed to be preserving, to attempt to control what Americans think and do. This manipulates the electoral and democratic process, and is completely out of bounds. This is the bleeding edge of a militarized police state.
The identity politics of sending women to fight the United States’ wars even though data clearly and repeatedly shows that mixed-sex units are far less effective at their core mission is only a canary in a very deep coalmine. Inviting mentally ill people with gender dysphoria to have that illness indulged at a very high cost to taxpayers and a drag on the military’s warfighting mission is another such canary. Both of these are warning signs of a rot that goes much, much deeper. And decay has consequences, including maggots feeding on it.
Carlson did not even attack the idea of female soldiers, only the idea of pregnant women fighting U.S. wars. If top U.S. military officials can’t see that pregnant women should not be on the front lines, or communicate that military policy prevents such a ridiculous situation, how can any of their other decisions be trusted, either by Americans or the men and women they are supposed to be capable of leading into battle if, God forbid, it becomes necessary?
If top U.S. military officials cannot see that people who countenance the idea of cutting off perfectly healthy parts of their bodies are not mentally prepared to serve as soldiers, how can Americans trust them to form and lead the world’s best fighting force? It is crucial for our own and for global security for the United States to be the world’s Number 1. To do that, military leaders cannot make compromises on military standards for political reasons. But they are. And everyone knows it.
We have to trust these people to not let China take over the world, but they can’t make obvious judgments and distinctions about basic combat qualifications. When a random guy on the street can see more clearly than the nation’s top generals, we have big, big problems.
That is scary. What all this reveals about the terrible judgment and politicization of top levels of the U.S. military is truly an existential threat to the nation. It is not one that will be solved by Congress sending more money to an institution this badly intellectually and ideologically corrupted. It will only be solved by Congress demanding that the U.S. military be stripped of identity politics cant and corruption, and end the failed wars in the Middle East to regroup against China’s far bigger menace to the globe.
For Congress to do that, it will have to get its own affairs in order. They have to stop the infection of this effete ideology, because the lives of innocent civilians and our nation’s entire future are on the line. China is not going to wait for us to come to our senses.
