Free Republic

There is no greater danger to the country than this effort to politicize the military by ensuring that all officers hew to the political party line of this administration.resident Joe Biden and his administration are continuing to purge and politicize the American military. Consistent with the totalitarian left’s effort to control curricula down to the grade-school level, their latest effort targets the education of America’s future military leaders at the service academies: The U. S. Military Academy at West Point, the Naval Academy at Annapolis, and the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. This is not happening by accident. And...

Joe Biden’s emergency Afghanistan press conference Monday accomplished exactly the opposite of instilling confidence in the American regime, by neither promising accountability for this catastrophic failure nor releasing a plan to stabilize the situation, reassure our allies, and recapture at least some deterrence against our watching enemies. This is a disaster with evil consequences that will reverberate long and far.The lack of accountability worsens the debacle by teaching Americans, our friends, and our foes that things this grossly incompetent will happen again. As Ben Domenech pointed out Monday, “Whoever Biden doesn’t fire, their performance Biden believes is acceptable. If this...

Corporate media’s irresponsible and dishonest ‘reporting’ during the Trump administration had an adverse impact on officials’ decisions—and to tragic effect.When President Trump’s acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller testified before Congress on May 12, he provided important context about why he made the decisions about troop deployments, which at the time, seemed to many Americans obviously too little, too late. First, it is important to note Miller has been a straight shooter from the beginning. Referring to the speech Trump gave on Jan. 6, 2021, Miller told Vice News in March, “Would anybody have marched on the Capitol, and tried...

The federal government just used its publicly employed career professionals to target a working journalist for professional destruction.After a cable news host irresponsibly attacked the U.S. military for aiding in the “death of the republic” by taking to the streets of the U.S. capital for use against the American people, the coordinated response from the Department of Defense through its public affairs channels was swift and unforgiving.The headline in the Defense.gov news article said it all: “Press Spokesman Destroys Host for Despicable Suggestion about US Military Use.” This was a response to an MSNBC cable show host using her show...

Three years gone, thousands of lives lost, tens of billions in debt-funded spending, and we’re right back where we started, with a permanent entanglement in the longest war in U.S. history. President Trump plans to pull about 4,000 U.S. troops from Afghanistan early in 2020, officials in his administration reported in mid-December, a partial withdrawal that would put American force levels in our longest war exactly where they were when Trump entered office. Three years gone, thousands of American and Afghan lives lost, tens of billions in debt-funded spending, and we’re right back where we started, with an apparently permanent...

FOREWORD The Department of Defense has a long-standing policy of intolerance for organizations, practices, or activities that are discriminatory in nature. DOD Directive 1325.6, “Guidelines for Handling Dissent and Protest Activities Among Members of the Armed Forces,” was issued in 1969 as one of many measures taken to renew, clarify, and emphasize that policy. Despite the specific language of this directive, reports in 1986 of Army and Marine Corps members participating in Ku Klux Klan (KKK) activities forced Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger to reaffirm the Defense Department’s position via the priority message cited above. Yet new cases of service...

Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy by Frederick W. Kagan, 2006. Encounter Books. Recommendation: read This book is an excellent accounting of the theories that have gripped and influenced American military thinking and planning since the Vietnam war. Theories? If all your information on the military has come from Hollywood (and there is a new series about Iraq out on HBO, surely this time written by writers who actually served and are thus knowledgeable), then it might come as a surprise that when planning a war you actually have to decide what to hit, what resources are...

There's certainly nothing wrong with debating the wisdom of war before making war. But too often, those current and former public officials who seek to influence the course of our foreign and military policy are not held to account for their public positions. Indeed, many of the Democrats who oppose using military force against Iraq voted for a nuclear freeze at the very time Ronald Reagan was modernizing America's nuclear arsenal in Europe, opposed the Reagan military buildup (which was used to win the Cold War), voted against the 1991 Gulf War resolution, voted to slash the defense budget and...