Free Republic

Hate to say “I told you so” but President Obama’s disinterest in enhancing our combat capability in favor of social egalitarianism and a warped sense of social justice is indeed having an impact on war readiness. According to the Washington Times, “A Navy F-18 fighter pilot and former Top Gun instructor is publicly warning admirals that retention is beginning to suffer from the military’s relentless social conditioning programs. Cmdr. Guy Snodgrass said sailors are becoming fed-up with the constant emphasis on social issues — an apparent reference to gays in the military, women in combat and ending sexual harassment.”

In After America (available here, he pleads, and the profits of which go to support my free-speech pushback against Michael E Mann), I write inter alia about Fort Hood, and in particular the disgraceful statement by General Casey, and the Pentagon's absurd decision to classify what happened as "workplace violence": In the days after the slaughter, the news coverage read like a satirical novel that the author's not quite deft enough to pull off, with bizarre new Catch-22s multiplying like the windmills of your mind: If you muse openly on pouring boiling oil down the throats of infidels, then the...

Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Robert Papp said that in 2010 Obama told U.S. military leaders to accept his push for gays in the military, and that if they didn't, they could take the "opportunity to resign [their] commissions." Papp said these things in a video BuzzFeed obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. The video shows a speech Papp delivered to Coast Guard Academy cadets during which he was asked how he would deal with enforcing an order with which he didn't agree. He used the story of his 2010 meeting with Obama as an example of how service...

The proposed move will take the Pentagon from the banks of the Potomac River to northwest Kansas. WASHINGTON (April 1, 2010) -- Top Army officials unveiled plans early today to relocate the massive Pentagon building to the western part of Kansas sometime this summer. "This move will be a huge undertaking, but we determined it was a necessary step as we realign our force structure," said one of the Army's top generals. "Once we started investigating the possibility of the move, we determined that it was not only critical to our efforts, but that it would be good for our...

A Navy F-18 fighter pilot and former Top Gun instructor is publicly warning admirals that retention is beginning to suffer from the military’s relentless social conditioning programs. Cmdr. Guy Snodgrass, until recently a Pentagon speech writer for the chief of naval operations, Adm. Jonathan Greenert, said sailors are becoming fed-up with the constant emphasis on social issues — an apparent reference to gays in the military, women in combat and ending sexual harassment. “Sailors continue to cite the over-focus on social issues by senior leadership, above and beyond discussions on war fighting — a fact that demoralizes junior and mid-grade...

Earlier in March, Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus revised how to count the size of the U.S.’s battle force inventory. The battle force inventory is important because it measures the size of the U.S. combat fleet. The new definition will make the U.S. combat fleet look larger than it really is. This provides a political shield against legitimate concerns that the Navy is shrinking. Ships included in the battle force inventory had been “warships capable of contributing to combat operations” or ships that contribute “directly to Navy warfighting or support missions.” Aircraft carriers, destroyers, amphibious ships, and submarines are...

Robert Farley, a political science professor at the University of Kentucky, wants to ground the U.S. Air Force, for good. In his book, Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the US Air Force, Farley argues the United States does not need an independent Air Force in order to effectively wield military air power. Farley, an assistant professor at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce, came to his conclusion after studying the conflict between the Army and the Air Force over which military branch was primarily responsible for winning the first Gulf War. “I slowly became more aware that these...

Christians in the U.S. military are being told they must forfeit their First Amendment rights. Bible verses are being erased from cadets’ personal dorm-room white boards, and military lawyers claim that legal protections for religion only pertain to matters such as clothing and growing beards but do not extend to any religious expression such as talking about one's faith or posting a Bible verse. Last year Breitbart News broke the story of a campaign by anti-Christian extremists to suppress traditional Christian expression within the U.S. military. There were conflicting stories regarding the possible court martial of service members who share...

The Marine Corps will open new combat jobs to women, allow women to volunteer for combat specialty training previously closed to them and create a co-ed experimental task force to evaluate how female Marines perform as part of a ground combat unit, Marine officials said. The task force will be made up of about 460 Marines, and about one quarter will be women, said Capt. Maureen Krebs, a Marine spokeswoman. The task force will look like a small battalion landing team with attachments such as artillery, tanks and amphibious assault vehicles — similar to the ground combat portion of a...

For more than a decade new military recruits at Maxwell Air Force Base – Gunter Annex in Alabama have received a Bible from Gideons International volunteers. But that tradition has come to an end after volunteers said they were told by the military that they would no longer be allowed to personally distribute the pocket-sized Bibles to recruits. “They kicked us out,” Gideon’s volunteer Michael Fredenburg told me in a telephone interview from his home in Montgomery, Ala. “They told us, ‘get your Bibles out.’” Gaylan Johnson, is a public affairs officer for the Military Entrance Processing Command. He told...

Since Barack Obama has been in the White House, high ranking military officers have been removed from their positions at a rate that is absolutely unprecedented. Things have gotten so bad that a number of retired generals are publicly speaking out about the “purge” of the U.S. military that they believe is taking place. As you will see below, dozens of highly decorated military leaders have been dismissed from their positions over the past few years. So why is this happening? When I was growing up, my father was an officer in the U.S. Navy. And what is going on...

KADENA AIR BASE, Okinawa — Since the repeal of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, U.S. military bases have hosted gay marriage ceremonies and potluck gatherings. But on Saturday, servicemembers here may have been the first to take to the stage and perform as drag queens on a military installation in support of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender troops. Drag queens and drag kings, to be precise.

The Air Force Academy removed a Bible verse posted on a cadet's whiteboard after it determined the posting had offended other cadets, a spokesman for the academy said. The cadet wrote the passage on the whiteboard posted outside his room. "I have been crucified with Christ therefore I no longer live, but Christ lives in me," the verse from Galatians read. Mikey Weinstein, director of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, told me 29 cadets and four faculty and staff members contacted his organization to complain about the Christian passage. "Had it been in his room - not a problem," Weinstein...

The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) is proudly announcing that the U.S. military is again using their chaplains.

Troops based at the Kadena Air Base in Japan know how to party. On Saturday, six gay and straight service members applied some of their finest makeup and lip synced to "I Wanna Dance with Somebody" in what is believed to be first drag queen and king show on an American military base. The show was thrown in support for the base's recently formed OutServe-SLDN chapter, a nonprofit advocacy group for the army's LGBT community.

A sordid account involving illicit sex in uniform will be aired this week in an austere courtroom at Fort Bragg, N.C., and the results could tip the scales in a high-stakes debate in Congress over the future of the military justice system. The defendant, Brig. Gen. Jeffrey A. Sinclair, is accused of carrying on a long affair with a junior officer and sexually assaulting her on two occasions, among other crimes. He is only the third Army general to face court-martial in more than a half-century. But after two years of investigation and preparation, the prosecution is in disarray. The...

Troops based at the Kadena Air Base in Japan know how to party. On Saturday, six gay and straight service members applied some of their finest makeup and lip synced to "I Wanna Dance with Somebody" in what is believed to be first drag queen and king show on an American military base. The show was thrown in support for the base's recently formed OutServe-SLDN chapter, a nonprofit advocacy group for the army's LGBT community.

No surprise that the intel guys, like their political bosses, reassured themselves that Russia wouldn’t invade. Even though they made the same mistake just a few years ago when the morsel was Georgia. Indeed, that kind of error, revolving around the phrase “rational actor,” is the trademark of Western confusion about the world. They refuse to see that our enemies are waging war against us, thus refuse to think about winning that war, thus lose many battles, and happily retreat. After all, if our enemies are rational actors, what could go wrong? We could even slash and burn our own...

Republican governors are accusing President Barack Obama of making politically motivated cuts to their states’ National Guard funding. Speaking to reporters after a meeting between the President and the National Governors Association, the GOP governors said they were deeply troubled by Obama’s tone when asked about planned cuts to the National Guard. South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley said Obama became ”aggressive” and that his tone “chilled the room quite a bit.” “He basically said, ‘Many people in this room have asked for cuts, and now you getting ’em,’” Haley said at a news conference across from the White House at...

In remarks today, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said U.S. global military dominance can “no longer be taken for granted.” He said this even as he was in the process of announcing that the Obama administration plans to shrink the United States Army to its smallest force since before the World War II buildup. (For context, the Army will go from a post-September 11 peak of 570,000 to between 440,000 and 450,000, the smallest Army since 1940.) Max Boot does an excellent job laying out the problems with this proposal here and here. I’d simply add that the fact that...