Barbara Kay: Trump, make the military manly again

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Withdrawal of approval by President-elect Donald Trump from his choice for Secretary of the Department of Defence (DoD), Pete Hegseth, is apparently becoming a real possibility, because of Hegseth’s failure, now a serious distraction, to disclose a 2017 claim of sexual misconduct to Trump’s transition team.   

On the one hand, Hegseth’s removal from contention would be no great loss, since he is widely regarded as lacking the necessary experience and political capital to oversee the mammoth Pentagon’s three million employees and $800 billion budget.  

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On the other hand, what earned Trump’s favour in the first place — Hegseth’s passion for reform of the military’s self-sabotaging culture of wokeism and zeal to restore the military’s wonted traits of honour and manly purpose — should remain highly-ranked objectives in any replacement search.  

One of former president Barack Obama’s many ambitious plans for “transforming” America was to entrench critical race and gender theories in the country’s institutions, including the military. His vision was realized. Aaron Reitz, a major in the Marine Corps Reserve and the Texas deputy attorney-general for legal strategy, observed that as early as 2009, his captain “told us we had to sign up a certain number of college-enrolled racial minorities and females. No need to be too strict on physical fitness or academics, he said. Just bring them in.” Later, the focus would change to LGBTQ recruitment. In 2016 Obama’s DoD was told to allow unrestricted service by transgender people. 

Afghanistan war veteran James Hasson’s 2019 book, “Stand Down: How Social Justice Warriors are Sabotaging America’s Military,” addresses the ramped-up effects of identity politics in the interim. Citing cringey woke examples, such as a PowerPoint presentation that instructed commanders about “male pregnancy,” Hasson poured scorn on the Obama administration, “packed with far-left ideologues who neither understood nor cared to understand the military. … In their eyes it was a blunt-force tool for driving broader change within society as a whole.”  

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Hasson offers evidence that serious training failures by female recruits in the army’s legendary Ranger School, weaknesses that would have disqualified males, were overlooked in order to ensure success for their first female candidates. The counter-factual theory that there is no appreciable difference between male and female strength or susceptibility to injury is as unfair to males in the army as it is unfair to females in sport. 

It was surely no coincidence that by 2023, the U.S. army had fallen short of its recruiting goals by 41,000 troops. A U.S. Army Recruiting Command officer told the Epoch Times, for a 2021 feature article on the recruitment crisis in the U.S. military, “the share of youth who have seriously considered military service is at a historic low of nine percent.”  

Amongst the Epoch Times’ multiple interviews with servicemen, three issues recur as sources of resentment:  vaccine mandates, the mortifying August, 2021 Afghan withdrawal that resulted in the deaths of 13 servicemen, and compelled race and gender indoctrination. The servicemen were peeved at being lectured to during “stand-down” days — i.e. entire days taken from actual combat training for internalizing DEI catechisms — about their white privilege, and resented the special entitlements afforded to trans recruits. (Other candidates who require daily medications, like asthmatics, are turned away, because the military cannot guarantee an ongoing supply of needed meds in war zones. Why, they reasonably wonder, should an exception be made for those dependent on daily doses of hormones?) 

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Trump encouraged skeptics to read Hegseth’s latest book, The War on Warriors. I have read it, and Hegseth makes a good case for a wholesale return to military first principles. The pith of the book is this: “(T)he radical left wing of America was — and always will be — in a permanent state of war, but only with their domestic opponents, not their foreign enemies. They believe the purpose of the military is to enact domestic policy and chalk up wins over their culture war opponents, not defend the nation and the Constitution.”  

For those who prefer objective reports over accounts fuelled by negative personal experiences (Hegseth was labelled an “extremist” by the National Guard for, according to him, his overt Christian faith and conservative views), you’ll find that most of Hegseth’s allegations, and a plethora of supportive cringey examples, are available in a 2022 Senate report, titled “Woke Warfighters: How political ideology is weakening America’s military.” 

In choosing this topic, I had in mind the palpable “air of despair” in the Canadian Armed Forces, where recruitment, as of Sept, 2024, is 7,600 short of authorized strength in the regular forces, and 7,000 short of reservists. In both nations, the explanation lies, substantially, with low rank-and-file morale, caused by widespread alienation from the divisive DEI policies that displaced the military’s unifying traditional values. It’s no wonder that in both nations the result has been a steady retreat by patriotic young males from a military more invested in social engineering than training for war. 

kaybarb@gmail.com 

X.com: @BarbaraRKay 

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