After much consideration, I’ve changed my mind – I’m going to start recommending that young people join our military again. I served for about 27 years, active and reserve, deployed a couple of times, and did some great things with some remarkable people. The United States Army changed who I was and made me who I am today – wait a minute, I’m not sure that’s quite a selling point, but bear with me. And thanks to President Trump, Pete Hegseth, and scores of others attempting to reform and repair our ruined military, I can once again wholeheartedly recommend enlistment.
Thank goodness.
This was never to say that our young people and our young troops were somehow not up to the task or incapable. Nor did I withhold support from those who chose to enlist anyway. I stopped recommending the military because the institution had turned into a failed, woke organization that could not perform even its most routine functions at a basic level of competence.
That never made me happy to say and it took me a while to get to that point. For decades, I unreservedly recommended that quality young people join our military and serve our country in uniform. But over the last few years, like so many other veterans, I had to stop recommending that young people sign up. I was not going to tell young people to risk their lives for leaders who don’t care about them, as the COVID-19 disaster demonstrated. I was not going to tell young people to risk their lives for leaders who squandered those lives – for a short time, I represented (as a lawyer) one of the families of a Marine killed in the grotesque Kabul rout, and that fiasco was worse than you can even imagine. I was not going to tell young people to risk their lives for leaders who had failed to unequivocally win a major war in three decades despite endless money and capabilities.
Nor was I going to tell young people to risk their lives for an organization that centered diversity and made DEI part of everything it did. The practical reality, besides dropping standards through the floor, was that the military actively discriminated against disfavored groups, primarily straight, white males. Who is going to join an organization that hates you?
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A woke organization cannot be a military organization. Instead, it's a camo-clad petri dish of social pathologies, and I was not going to suggest to anybody that they should submit themselves to it.
I wasn’t alone. Most other veterans felt the same way. How did I know that veterans were withholding their recommendations, besides the nearly unanimous consensus within military groups and vet networks that we could no longer recommend enlistment? Because the bottom fell out of the enlistment numbers. That's no surprise. If you tell the largest group within your organization that they are bad people and you hate them, they're not going to join.
Don’t listen to the hack generals and admirals who lied to you about how it’s all the fault of young people for not stepping up. It’s the fault of the admirals and generals for running a chicken scratch outfit. We veterans saw what was happening, and we spoke up. That’s what killed recruiting. The military has always relied on the endorsement of veteran family members, as well as veteran acquaintances and affinity groups, to get our volunteers. Sure, some duds sign up only because they want a few bucks for college, or because they have nothing better to do, but most recruits wish to serve even if they don't sound off about it in those terms. Most want to be something more than they were in civilian life. They want to be part of something special. And they want to see if they can measure up to their dad who was at 73 Easting in the Gulf War, their cousin who fought it out in Fallujah, and their grandpa who bombed the communists at Khe Sanh. Maybe their neighbor was in the armored cavalry, perhaps they grew up with pictures of their great-grandfather as a young man in his uniform having just come back from the European Theater of Operations wearing the Combat Infantryman Badge and Purple Heart he got at the Battle of the Bulge. The kind of guy we want in the military is the kind of guy who wants to earn the right to count himself among those heroes.
The real warriors, the ones who want to be there, are the ones we need to be there.
But they don’t need to be there so much that they’re going to sacrifice their dignity by having to call a male officer dressed as a woman “ma’am.” They don’t want to be on a ship that comes back into port covered with rust, looking like a garbage scow, or that collides with a freighter. They don’t want to trade hard, tough training for sitting in a classroom listening to endless harangues about the patriarchy.
The rot was real, and it even extended into the war colleges, where senior leaders are supposed to learn how to crush the enemy and instead learned how to cater to the feminine sensibilities of blue state swells. Here’s what another graduate sent me about what he found in a publication of our alma mater, the Army War College – don’t be impressed, it’s now the Chico State of War Colleges (edited for clarity and used with permission).
"I direct you to the Vol. 52, no. 1 Spring 2022 issue of Parameters, the War College magazine (kept my hard copy just for this day)
"The whole damn issue is problematic, but 'highlighting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion' by Danielle Holt, Susan Davis, Andrea M. Peters, Michael A. Washington, Lolita Burrell, and James Ness is a big start.
"Vol. 51, no. 3 Autumn 2021 has 'The Alt-Right Movement and US National Security' by Matthew Valasik and Shannon E. Reid that is essentially Milley’s talking points on white rage and Trump supporters being the enemy. The authors double down in a response to Charles Dunlap calling out their shoddy scholarship in the Spring 2022 issue.
"Vol. 50, no. 3 Autumn 2020 has 'Race and Inclusivity in the US Military' by Douglas W. Bristol Jr. and Danelle Gamble that is a critical race theory tour de force.
"Page 69 of above 'while quantitative diversity at every echelon and within every career field must become the norm...,' Captain Danelle R. Gamble (likely a COL now)"
That woke gobbledygook has no place in a military journal. Nothing that doesn't lead to stacks of dead enemies has a place in a military journal. "Parameters” is the War College’s journal. It’s supposed to be a serious publication. It’s supposed to preserve and promote the military arts, and the military arts are supposed to be concerned with killing the enemy. But the Biden-era military was not concerned with killing the enemy. It was concerned with frivolous faculty lounge bullSchiff.
Now that's over, and I’m optimistic. I’ve seen what Pete Hegseth and his team have done so far and understand what they will do. The SecDef just went to Europe and got out there in the cold and did PT with soldiers – hooah! That is huge. He has also been clearing out the DEI deadwood and refocusing our forces on fighting. Secretary Hegseth and his people are reaching out to those of us in the veteran community about how to purge the trash and get us back in line with 5,000 years of military tradition as opposed to a century of Frankfurt School Marxist subversion. Hegseth is a proven combat arms leader, exactly what we need at the head of the organization. As I’ve written here before, a combat arms leader knows how to take command of an organization and bend it to his iron will. That’s what’s happening now. He's broken the woke and he's taking out the trash. The results are already impressive. After the election, the Army had its highest recruiting month in years.
Our young people want to serve their country. I led them for almost three decades, and I never failed to be astonished by their courage and quality, a few knuckleheads notwithstanding. And now, because of the new leadership at the top, I’m confident enough to once again recommend that young Americans, if they can, seriously consider doing at least a tour. And I can’t tell you how happy I am to be able to say that again.
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