Kindle Notes & Highlights
If elite universities are where underprivileged kids learn how to hobnob with the elites, then the military should be where potential Antifa members learn what it really means to use force for just and honorable reasons. The American military is one of the great deradicalization machines for aimless young men—but only if it’s working correctly.
is so closely tied to my previous book, Battle for the American Mind—because if we don’t stay free, then we’re just another country with a flag. I won’t fight for just any flag, and I hope my kids would not either.
One warrant officer in the U.S. Army Special Forces, Brad Paul—who has thirteen combat deployments under his belt—told me this: “The current state of the military is careerism. It no longer centers on our core task: to win wars. Indeed, the ethos is: Where’s my next command? How am I going to advance myself? That pushes our leaders toward protecting careers and we never filter out the turds.”
We can’t think about winning the next big war if we aren’t honest about the failures of the past.
We need to clean house of woke generals. Currently the Department of Defense has forty-four four-star generals with a total force of 1.2 million serving. In World War II, there were only seven four-star generals and over 21 million were serving. It’s upside down, and ripe for firings—without replacements.
twenty-six of the thirty-two four-star officers who retired after June 2018 were employed by defense contractors.
Want to change this reality—and empower generals to be real leaders with the latitude to stand up for the Constitution? No general in the United States military should be allowed to work in the defense industry for ten years after they retire. That will help break the cycle.
A man who has a feeling toward a female and acts differently in combat—gets people killed. A woman who can’t do the same job as a man in combat—gets people killed. A “trans” soldier who doesn’t have his/her meds is combat ineffective—and gets people killed. A competent, experienced white soldier who leaves the Army because he’s been told he’s the problem—gets people killed. Likewise, a black or female soldier who gets promoted, primarily
because of the color of their skin or the genitalia between their legs—gets people killed.
That study found that post-surgery-transitioned soldiers would be nondeployable for 238 days or 34 weeks. When this report was brought to then–incoming president Donald Trump’s attention, he promptly banned transgender soldiers from serving.
This change to the standards meant that men and women could join the military for the express purpose of transitioning, be nondeployable for a year, and take life-altering hormone therapy that would mean they would be nondeployable unless the military could guarantee the supply of medication (you know, in some shithole country).
“When George Floyd was killed, we had a series of seminars where only black cadets were allowed to talk,” Gordon told me.
“Thursdays are leader time—I wanted to do training on radios. And skill-level stuff for our jobs. My boss called and said we needed to cancel training . . . for a transgender pronoun session. I mean, this happens all the time now.”
Gordon’s chain of command cannot question if someone in the unit wants to change their gender. He has soldiers in his unit enlisting under one sex, and then the DoD pays for them to immediately change to another gender. By the time they transition, their three-year enlistment is up and, because they are on “medical” and not available for training the entire time, they hardly served a day in the field artillery.
young people don’t want to be a part of an organization that doesn’t share their values. Even more, an organization they no longer trust. Or worst of all, an organization that doesn’t trust, or want, you.
Joining the military is not a jobs program. It is a commitment, a passion, an act of sacrificial love. There is no draft. No one is forced to join. Those who join do so because they believe in the nation that they will be serving.
A study was compiled, and one thousand pages showed us what any sane person who spent two days in a field exercise or doing PT since forever would state: the all-male units blew away the gender-integrated unit. (Remember, this was not a fifty-fifty comparison—even the male-female unit was overwhelmingly male. Otherwise, results would have been more dramatic.)
The gender-integrated did lead the all-male Marines in one important category: injuries. Yes, the female Marines were injured at twice the rate of the men:
So, the discipline was better while serving with female Marines, but there were seven allegations of sexual assault. Wait, what? And according to these sources at ABC News, “nothing to see here.” That is what normally happens when units train for war? After only four months of range time? Did this training occur at Tailhook or Twenty-Nine Palms?
The percentage of total service members who served versus alleged sexual assaults is 0.45 percent. Those are male and female sexual assaults combined. In that exercise in Twenty-Nine Palms it was alleged that 2.33 percent of the female Marines were sexually assaulted.
Alleged assaults aside, the women struggled. And in war, struggling at physical competence leads to people getting hurt. People getting hurt means less rounds downrange. Depleted morale. And death. Defeat and carnage.
Her unit did not fire a round at the enemy and their convoy got lost and drove into the awaiting enemy. Think Custer’s Last Stand if Custer asked Sitting Bull for directions at Little Bighorn.
So, since women cannot physically meet the same standards as men, the military has two options—both bad. They can lower the standards for everyone to ensure more women meet with infantry or combat standards. Or they can return to gender-based standards, and allow women to enter the infantry with lower standards than men. They have tried both. And, always, in the background are generals and commanders asking leading questions like: “Why don’t we have more women in combat roles? Why are so many women failing?” While posited as a question, subordinates hear exactly what it is: a directive.
The daily five-mile run, long a staple, has disappeared. It was never a formal “standard,” but instead a tough aspect of the course that weeded out weaker candidates. Too many women were washing out, so the run went away. They also used to foot-march to the hangar before jumps—now students are bused. Are either of these traditions tied to jumping out of airplanes? Maybe not, but they reinforced the challenge of graduating Airborne School.
It doesn’t help that 77 percent of military-age Americans do not qualify for military service due to weight issues, medical problems, drug use, or a criminal background. This is true, and DoD recruiting makes this excuse every single day. But it’s only part of the military recruitment story.
Also, while I was writing this book, the Air Force dropped the requirement for high school or GED diplomas for new recruits. No more high school degrees needed.
But women also get a vote, and they are voting with their feet. Retention for women in the military is declining. Turns out, as my former first sergeant pointed out, the majority of women want nothing to do with the prospect of being in combat—let alone actual combat. So how does the Biden administration’s Defense Department deal with that issue? Abortion.
According to the new policy, the real purpose of these abortions is retention, continuing female military careers by helping them end unwanted pregnancies.
The DoD was silent when Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) asked what the actual number was of women getting abortions covered by taxpayers while serving in the military. According to sources under oath, this seems to be something that we can never possibly calculate. It is a great unknown to the Department of Defense. Like the origin of life. The existence of aliens. Or the source of cocaine at the White House. We will never know.
nearly 18 percent have sought at least one abortion.
For the past three years, the Pentagon—across all branches—has embraced the social justice messages of gender equity, racial diversity, climate stupidity, vaccine worship, and the LGBTQA+ alphabet soup in their recruiting pushes. Only one problem: there just aren’t enough trannies from Brooklyn or lesbians from San Francisco who want to join the 82nd Airborne.
The Left today—weaponized inside the DoD—is not just ideologically slanted. This is dogma. This is religious fundamentalism. This is a religion to these woke zealots. And they have been tasked with purging the ranks of those who do not bow to their government god.
One of the most important books written in the last ten years dealing with this very topic is John McWhorter’s Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.
We must stop being afraid of these people, and once we do there is something we need to steel ourselves against and get used to. . . . They WILL call you a racist. No matter what you do or say beyond what they stipulate as proper.
The only solution is a rock-solid sense of self. Forget compliance; the only response to an unfair standard is noncompliance, grounded in integrity. McWhorter
The coping strategy therefore must be not to try to avoid letting them call you a racist but to get used to their doing so and walk on despite it.
Young people—but especially young men—always need an outlet for pursuing heroic action.
He drafted a resignation letter that—unsurprisingly—he never had the courage to deliver.
We went from giving the enemy no comfort and no quarter to having designated hugging stations to embrace each graduate at the Air Force Academy.
you don’t feel good about yourself, and don’t want to join the military, you are free to do something else. But you do not have the right to exploit the decency of our warriors and use them as a petri dish for your social engineering experiments.
For some people, it is. But for most men—especially the military type—it is much more important to be purposeful than to be safe or included.
It is a world where most men live increasingly automated lives, unable and then unwilling to use their hands. . . . The emerging American man possesses nothing, creates nothing, for nobody in particular.”
Men don’t want to be included; they want to be purposeful. They want to be needed. That is what I felt on a remote base in Iraq and while training troops in Afghanistan. It forged me.
Or young men who don’t come from military families, but love the country. In some ways, I fall into this category. I wanted to “be all that I can be.” I also think of two other high school friends. Neither played sports; neither was particularly tough or “cool.” But they came from good, patriotic, Christian families and went to basic training after high school. Call it duty, or a challenge—but they stepped up. One of those men just retired after twenty years as one of the Air Force’s top jump-masters. The other is still a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force. They went from weak and timid to
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One day while training stateside another lieutenant from Charlie Company took me aside and said, “They are going to come at you. They will come at you and figure out who you are. Just let your competence speak for itself, or at least show that you are listening to your NCOs. You will make people believe you are ready when we go downrange.”
On our platoon’s first salvo outside the wire, we harvested real bad guys. Wanted, hunted, known bad guys. We discovered and removed a weapons cache. That feeling was greater than any game-winning bucket I had ever shot in my lifetime.
We adapted. We overcame obstacles. We trusted each other to make decisions that would push the objectives to accomplish our mission. We had our mission success and we put the leader of the terrorist cell and a cache of deadly rockets on ice. We were not individuals: we were a team.
The only thing that truly keeps me up at night is wondering whether those jihadists went on to kill more Americans. Because modern warfighters fight lawyers as much as we fight bad guys. Our enemies should get bullets, not attorneys.
In this context, the Europeans are the worst. Outdated, outgunned, invaded, and impotent. Why should America, the European “emergency contact number” for the past century, listen to self-righteous and impotent nations asking us to honor outdated and one-sided defense arrangements they no longer live up to? Maybe if NATO countries actually ponied up for their own defense—but they don’t. They just yell about the rules while gutting their militaries and yelling at America for help.
And one more thing . . . the next president should also change the name of the Department of Defense back to the War Department. Sure, our military defends us. And in a perfect world it exists to deter threats and preserve peace. But ultimately its job is to conduct war. We either win or lose wars. And we have warriors, not “defenders.” Bringing back the War Department may remind a few people in Washington, DC, what the military is supposed to do, and do well.
