Free Republic

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is expected to recommend to President Trump that transgender people can serve in the U.S. military if they can deploy overseas, a U.S. official with knowledge of the secretary’s thinking on the issue told Fox News Thursday. The official said Mattis did not want to go against recent federal court orders which ruled Trump’s proposed ban on transgender people serving in the military is unlawful.

Secretary of Defense General James Mattis has done NOTHING to stop the PC insanity and lunatic social engineering polices that are destroying the combat power and fighting spirit of the US military. Physical standards are evaporating to accommodate women in the combat arms and Special Forces. Gay weddings at West Point, NCO's accused of committing 'microaggressions" when disciplining USAF cadets, communist army officers, social justice instructors at West Point, a male pregnancy SOP in the Army, transgender showers, Navy collisions on the high seas, a general fired for calling a woman, 'sweetheart,' no grenade and land nav requirements at army...

Defense Secretary James Mattis will provide President Trump with his recommendations on transgender troops sometime this week, the Pentagon confirmed Thursday. “The secretary will provide his recommendation to the president this week regarding transgender individuals and military service, and the president will announce his decision,” chief Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White told reporters at her semi-weekly briefing Thursday. In tweets over the summer, Trump announced his intentions to ban transgender people from serving in the military. He followed through with an August memo prohibiting the military from enlisting transgender people and from using funds to pay for gender transition-related surgery. The...

General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, was apparently the second coming of Patton, a real world walking, talking version of Frederick the Great’s maxim, “L’Audace, L’Audace, Toujours L’Audace”, a well-read grunt who spit napalm and ingested cut glass, a Marine who made Dan Daly and Chesty Puller look like campus snowflakes. During more than 30 years on active duty as a gyrene, the Mad Dog said many classic statements, but these were some of his favorites: ‘It’s quite fun to shoot them, you know. It’s a hell of a hoot. It’s fun to shoot some people.’ In 2005, he offered this...

QAMISHLI - US Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis on Saturday said that an attack by Turkey in Afrin, launched on 20 January, has no valid justifications in one of the strongest comments the US has made on Afrin up until date.  “While we understand their legitimate security concerns, as I've mentioned several times, that does not align with us concurring with attacks into areas that were not sources of violence before the attack into Afrin, for example,” he told reporters en route to Washington.    “We concur with Turkey on the need for locals taking control of the liberated areas, and...

Take a seat and watch Act II, in the Death of the US Army, a Shakesperaean tragedy powered by gutless generals, candyass Millennials and Barry Soetero, worshipping social justice warriors. It seems that every week there is a story detailing the newest clusterfu*k to hit the US military. Today, CNS News reported, “Army Basic Training to Drop Hand Grenade Competency as Graduation Requirement.” Hmm… Maybe, I’m just a cynical ex cav trooper, but maybe, just maybe, the US Army might need soldiers who are competent at throwing grenades in any future conflicts. But, then again, I’m assuming the Army is...

To put things into perspective, the situation in Syria is becoming alarmingly “hot”, and I am talking about a potential hot-war between Israel and Syria, which has a mutual defense pact with Iran. Let me explain: if you’re not Mr. Current Affairs, you should know that Israel attacked both Syrian and Iranian military targets on Syrian territory on Saturday, after claiming an Iranian made UAV (a drone basically) violated Israel’s airspace for one minute and half, before getting shot down by one of their attack helicopters. The drone was allegedly launched from a base in Syria; Israel’s response to the...

The U.S. has no evidence to confirm reports from aid groups and others that the Syrian government has used the deadly chemical sarin on its citizens, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Friday. “We have other reports from the battlefield from people who claim it’s been used,” Mattis told reporters at the Pentagon. “We do not have evidence of it.” He said he was not rebutting the reports. “We’re looking for evidence of it, since clearly we are dealing with the Assad regime that has used denial and deceit to hide their outlaw actions,” Mattis said. Syrian President Bashar Assad denies...

US military policies and operations are now being run on a fantasy, the fantasy of women successfully serving and fighting with the combat arms and special operations forces. The fantasy was legally authorized by former Secretary of Defense, Ash Carter, in December of 2015, and which is largely propagated by Pentagon lies, Pentagon cowardice, Generation Rationalization on active duty, Hollywood liberal morons and the feminist lobby, which consists of women who think that it’s really cool Kaylee wants to be in Delta, but who themselves will be 10,000 miles from the nearest round going down range when Kaylee is bisected...

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on Monday fired the top official overseeing the trials of five men being held at Guantánamo Bay who have been accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks.Harvey Rishikof is an attorney with experience in national security law, but with no military experience. According to the Miami Herald, there is no known reason for Mattis’ decision to fire the man he named convening authority for military commission last April. Two Pentagon lawyers have replaced Rishikof and Gary Brown, a legal adviser for military commissions who was fired by acting general counsel William S. Castle.Tom Crosson, a spokesman for...

In a post-war first, the United States is poised to send an aircraft carrier to Vietnam in March, officials of both sides said on Thursday, dramatic evidence of deepening military ties between them, more than four decades after the Vietnam War. The announcement came during a two-day visit to Hanoi by U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis that had been expected to focus on shared concerns about China. The proposed visit is set for March at the central port of Danang, Vietnam’s defence ministry said in a statement. Such a visit by a U.S. aircraft carrier could bring the most U.S....

A Russia-led initiative involving China and Pakistan that seeks a political settlement to Afghanistan’s civil war has the makings of a diplomatic alliance that could supplant the United States as the leading power in Central Asia. The grouping was unveiled after a third meeting in Moscow late last month and may be expanded to include regional powers Iran and Turkey, which formed a separate tripartite grouping on Syria with Russia in talks preceding the parleys on Afghanistan. The Afghan government reacted angrily to the Moscow meeting, to which it had not been invited, because the meeting proposed the relaxation of...

The warrior culture in the US Army is dying every day, in a hideously slow death by a thousand lacerations of social engineering, diversity and political correctness lunacy, abated by senior army leaders who are too gutless to raise even a finger in protest. From Green Beret training standards lower than ROTC camp in the 80’s to Mommy Rangers, lactation memos, pregnancy simulators during physical training and a parade of cadets in red high heels, it’s more than apparent that this ain’t your father’s army anymore. Heck, it ain’t even your older brother’s army anymore. The army, like the rest...

Born in 1912, Kim Il Sung went to the Soviet Far East in the 1930s to train with Stalin's military during the war against Japan, which had occupied the Korean peninsula since 1910. The North makes much of Kim, the heroic soldier. But whether he actually fought against the Japanese is a matter of debate. What's clear is that Stalin believed Kim was trustworthy, and after the Soviet invasion of the peninsula in 1945, installed him as the Communist leader in the North. A virtual unknown in his country, he seized power with considerable help from the Soviet Union and...

Beijing and Moscow have criticised the US military’s move to put countering China and Russia at the centre of its latest national defence strategy, with China again hitting back at America’s “cold war and zero-sum game mindset”. Presenting the new strategy – which will set priorities for the Pentagon for years to come – Defence Secretary Jim Mattis on Friday called China and Russia “revisionist powers” that “seek to create a world consistent with their authoritarian models”. It marks a shift in US defence priorities after its focus for more than a decade-and-a-half on the fight against Islamist militants. The...

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Friday morning that a government shutdown would have a “terrible impact” on military operations. “Our maintenance activities will probably pretty much shut down. We will not be able to induct any more of our gear that need maintenance,” he said Friday morning at the Johns Hopkins University, where he was unveiling the National Defense Strategy. The government is barreling towards a shutdown at 11:59 p.m. Friday night, with the Senate unable to pass a 2018 spending bill or a stop-gap measure to keep the government running. At issue is immigration reform. Democrats have refused to...

Moscow will work to preserve the Iran nuclear deal despite Donald Trump's recent pledge to change it, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said at his annual news conference. "Unfortunately, our American colleagues still want to operate only on the basis of dictating policy, issuing ultimatums, they do not want to hear the perspectives of other centers of world politics," Lavrov said on Monday. The US is refusing to "acknowledge the reality of the emerging multi-polar world," he added. The Russian foreign minister said that statements coming from the US also "seriously aggravated" tensions in other parts of the world, including...

The Pentagon’s new defense strategy calls for aggressive steps to counter Russia and China, directing the military to retrain its attention on great-power competition after nearly two decades of focusing primarily on Islamist militants and "rogue" nations. The Obama-era Quadrennial Defense Review called for “preserving strategic stability” with Moscow and Beijing and took a rosier view of the prospects for further nuclear arms reductions in partnership with Russia. Now, the new document asserts in blunt language, both Russia and China must be the U.S. armed forces’ "principal priorities." “The erosion of our military advantage is the problem that the strategy...

Despite the “rise and fall of the unipolar concert,” China and Russia’s balancing strategies have backfired: they are not leading to multipolarity, but are actually reinforcing unipolarity. The reason is that China and Russia’s balancing strategies have focused on regional “revisionism,” which has provoked powerful responses in East Asia and Europe to contain them. Russia’s balancing strategy has to a large extent proven to be counter-productive. Instead of preventing the expansion of NATO through a “divide and conquer” strategy, or driving a diplomatic wedge between the United States and Europe, Russian revisionism has united NATO...Perhaps most illustrative of all, a...

General Mattis, this is US Defense Watch; radio check, over… Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh… General Mattis is starting to look like Hermann Goering promising the besieged Sixth Army at Stalingrad that everything is A-OK – the airdrops will be coming with ammunition and food and medical supplies for everyone. Just hang on boys… Don’t worry about those Russians surrounding you. You’ve got the Romanians on your flank! The US military is starting to resemble the doomed Sixth Army – surrounded by Marxists and under constant attack with limited options, knowing the inevitable is coming; the inevitable defined as the Hour of the Total...