By Rod DREHER
The reader who sent in this story says “there’s no question the U.S. military is now the armed wing of the Democratic Party.” Read on:
President Joe Biden’s nominee for the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told the Senate “gender advisers” for combat troops are critical to the United States’ success, a position some veterans say is nothing more than a left-wing initiative that distracts from the military’s core duties.
The revelation came during a Dec. 8 exchange with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D., N.H.), who asked how Adm. Christopher Grady intends to implement “women, peace, and security” legislation within the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“The role of a gender adviser is a way to attack a very significant issue, and if confirmed, I look forward to leveraging those advisers who can make me think better and smarter about the issues that you raise,” Grady said. “So I look forward to, if confirmed, understanding that ecosystem and helping advance that cause going forward again.”
More:
The Women, Peace, and Security Act of 2017 required the Department of Defense to require training in “security initiatives that specifically addresses the importance of meaningful participation by women” and to develop “effective strategies and best practices for ensuring meaningful participation by women.”
Grady’s answer drew outrage from veterans such as Jason Church, who earned a Purple Heart when serving in Afghanistan. Church told the Washington Free Beacon that “gender advisers” are nothing more than “liberal pet projects” to score points with Democratic lawmakers.
“When someone nominated to be the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says something like this, it tells me top brass is aligned with radical political elements in the country,” he said. “You have people’s lives on the line. These positions aren’t about how to communicate with Afghan women, we have a diplomatic corps for that.”
Here’s an academic paper from 2016 examining what gender advisers do in NATO armies, and suggesting that the US military add them to its ranks. The paper cites several examples of overseas deployments in which gender advisers were useful in helping soldiers understand complex gender standards, and how respecting them helped the mission. That said, are you confident that in the current highly politicized environment in the US, that gender advisers will be of practical help, versus being de facto political commissars? I’m not — but I could be wrong.
Ms. magazine recently cited a Georgetown report about the need to further feminize the US military. Excerpts:
Changing military culture to improve women’s integration and equality, and increase compliance with international law obligations, the report argues, will require fundamental strategic and operational alterations to the military status quo, including measures to eliminate the “entrenched culture of militarized masculinities” throughout the armed forces.
To ensure women’s meaningful participation, the report suggests that women must be promoted to leadership positions and their input must be valued. To do so, the military must adopt better and more complete childcare and parental leave policies and decouple physical fitness standards from advancement. Only by incorporating women into senior ranks—thereby giving them influence throughout the chain of command—will the culture shift.
To address gender participation gaps, the report suggests that the Department of Defense should also conduct a comprehensive review of physical fitness requirements and occupational standards. De-emphasizing physical fitness would help address the “culture of toxic masculinity rooted in beliefs of physical superiority.”
This is infuriating. The military has to offer childcare, and disregard physical fitness standards — for soldiers, sailors, and airmen?! Are we still about fighting wars, or are we instead about fighting culture wars? There is no question that on average, men are physically superior to women. Now we have to pretend that that isn’t true, for the sake of equity?
More:
As part of the report launch, women with military experience offered comments on how best to ensure meaningful participation of women. Kyleanne Hunter, a U.S. Marine combat veteran, highlighted the need for new metrics for leadership success, such as social acumen and empathy. By not forcing women to adhere to traditional notions of masculinity, women will advance more quickly and their new perspectives will increase the U.S.’s overall security.
How, exactly, will America’s war-fighting capabilities be improved by having commanders who are more empathetic? How in the world do empathetic officers “increase the US’s overall security”? It’s mind-boggling.
You will not be surprised to learn that the article ends with a call for more gender advisers to feminize the US military.
Also in today’s mailbag, from another reader:
I might be the only person to ever think you’re insufficiently alarmist, but your recent article about conservatives leaving the Army should have made everyone’s eyes widen. A military that’s been politicized, especially along racial/ethnic lines, in a politically polarized country is a disaster. For much of the country to have voluntarily (if understandably) contributed to this polarization is a bad, bad development.To see why, here’s a link to the BBC Documentary “The Death of Yugoslavia.” It starts at 9:25 of episode 4. A crony of Slobodan Milosevic boasts about how, in anticipation of Bosnia declaring independence from Serb-dominated Yugoslavia, he and Milosevic re-jiggered the Yugoslavian army within the borders of Bosnia to only contain Bosnian Serbs. That way, when Bosnia declared independence, the Bosnian Army would have already essentially chosen sides in the resulting ethnic war between Serbs, Muslims, and Croats.
The Army’s corruption apparently caught Bosnian Muslims off-guard. Their president, as the following article makes clear, had expected the Army to be a neutral force protecting civilians from Milosevic’s paramilitary chetnik units that had already been tearing up Croatia. He found out the very hard way that the Army had different ideas.
I’m not sure I buy that the military right now is a serious threat to American conservatives.
For those of us who have served in recent years, nothing in this post is especially surprising. American elites genuinely cannot conceive of personal violence. It’s totally beyond their comprehension, so they’ve turned the military into a massive organization dedicated to social work, grifting, and rent seeking. Assigning gender advisers to the military and changing its culture to make it more female-friendly are aspects of the elite’s broader strategy of parceling out American society into tiny groups, then paying off 51% of these groups to stay in power. It doesn’t make for competence, but it’s been fairly effective so far as it goes.
Meanwhile, the American general officer class has no real values outside of promotion and getting a job at Raytheon after retirement, so they parrot anything in the zeitgeist that will guarantee them continued funding. Back in the Reagan-Clinton-Bush years, it was aping evangelical Christianity. I vividly remember the evangelical Christianity in the water in the late 1990s and early 2000s at the army bases where I grew up. Nowadays, it’s blabbering nonsense about gender ideology at senatorial confirmation hearings. Admiral Grady doesn’t believe in any of this dreck. Just look at his face. He’s saying what he gets paid to say. Every general officer briefing I ever sat through in my decade in the service went exactly the same way. I never once got the impression that any of them were really dedicated to defending our country or to aggressively killing our enemies. They’re totally bought and sold, hence the catastrophe that took place a few months ago in Kabul and the horrendous outcome of our other campaigns in the War on Terror.
What should terrify your readers isn’t the fact that Admiral Grady is explicitly committed to doing all of these crazy things. It should terrify you that America’s military leaders really are that galactically stupid. They really are dumbshit f**king retards, to use the French expression. They know absolutely nothing about war, economics, policy, or anything else. And, as we speak, we have made a series of absolute military commitments to Taiwan and Ukraine that we cannot possibly fulfill. When Putin and Xi do call our bluff and come to collect, these people will be in charge of our nation’s response.
I feel strongly, in my bones, that defeat in a major war is in the offing for our people. Things do not look good. Nothing feels right at the top. Our elite believes its own propaganda, especially the blood libels they sowed about Russia in the 2016 presidential election. They really are framing our rivalries with Russia and China in messianic, apocalyptic terms. Things are ripe for a miscalculation. Perhaps that will be the culmination of God’s judgment on our nation, begun on 9/11 and gathering momentum with every humiliation our country has endured in this century.
UPDATE.2: A reader e-mails:
I wanted to address the concern the reader had about parallels between the U.S. situation and that of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. I fully understand the concern and there’s no shortage of lessons for us all to learn. However, I find the comparison ultimately lacking and is more a “doomer” fantasy than anything substantive.
First, the Balkans, for centuries, had been divided along ethnic lines in a way that the U.S. has no parallel. Yes, race/ethnic relations were once very bad in the U.S. But we’ve actually lived among each other more than we’ve lived apart in the sense we didn’t have distinct nations for every ethnic group like the Balkans did. Yugoslavia was really the first attempt at getting all these distinct nations to live together, whereas the United States was always the United States for the most part – we were formed from colonies, but not distinct English, German, Spanish, or Black nations that were ultimately forced to live together.
Second, imagine a civil war broke out today: how would the dividing lines break down? One of the things that facilitates a hot civil war like that of the Balkans is geography. The region’s various ethnicities occupied more or less distinct areas of territory and you can clearly see it on the maps all through the years. The U.S. has no real parallel to this. Voting patterns are distinct by region, yes, but there’s always plenty of people on the other side of the political divide living in the same area. Segregation tends to occur at the local level, with White-majority neighborhoods, Latino-majority neighborhoods, and Black-majority neighborhoods, but this also tracks with class and culture. If a race/ethnic war erupts in the U.S., it’ll probably take place between communities and ‘hoods (in line with American historical experience), but these aren’t the same things as nations.
Following on the last question, let’s say someone in the U.S. military decided to do something similar to what Slobodan Milosevic’s crony did with the Yugoslav military in Bosnia – how would that work, anyway? Would they make it so the military would only have women and people of color? Bearing in mind the often-repeated point about how the sharp end of the military is male and White, not only would they have to start training women and people of color to close and engage with the enemy like they’ve never done before, but they’d probably have to face a resisting force comprised of an led by those very same males and Whites they kicked out from the military (assuming they didn’t exterminate them ahead of time).
This is just me talking, but a female and PoC-majority military, one that’d spend more time on political indoctrination and staying on a Woke message would be a wholly ineffective fighting force to begin with. A military like that would probably just crumble in confusion.
To avoid getting long-winded, I’ll just say the lines don’t break down as neatly here in the U.S. Regardless of what the Left says, America isn’t anywhere near as race-conscious a country as they think (probably why raising race consciousness is in such high demand, at least for the Left). Likewise, regardless of what the Right thinks, our divisions are often blurrier than they seem. In some ways, the uniqueness of race and ethnicity in the U.S. makes a hot civil war unlikely here, meaning this failing experiment was, in one respect, quite successful in avoiding a horrific outcome.
That’s not to say racial/ethnic violence couldn’t occur in the U.S. As times get rough, people will use those divisions as an excuse for exacting violence on others and we’re seeing the early stages of that now. But a Yugoslav War in America? As Jussie Smollett and his supporters at CNN and MSNBC found out the hard way last week, America just might be made of tougher stuff than that.
