Being pro-military was the hallmark of a Reagan conservative that informed the minds of the past two generations of conservative policy. However, conserving and even growing a military that is now irrevocably woke – a military in which you must carry a vaccine card and mask on base but can’t carry a weapon; a military where Christianity is scorned and transgenderism is embraced – is not conservative at all. Rather than Republicans throwing more money at a woke and broken Pentagon and military-industrial complex, the time has come to make systemic reforms to the purpose of the military. Then we can discuss the dollars and cents.
Our military today resembles nothing from its Gulf War-era culture. It is unhospitable to Christians and conservatives and imbued with racism, transgendersim, and coed social engineering, and nearly every official above the rank of lieutenant colonel is to the left of a Hollywood actress. Moreover, for an entire generation, the mission of our military has been muddled and primarily focused on social change, refereeing sectarian civil wars, and nation-building.
More recently, there are growing concerns that the NSA is spying on Americans, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is engaged in unbridled biomedical security experimentation and hyper-obsession with vaccines, and the medical-industrial complex is inextricably tied into the transhumanist endeavors promoted by Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum. We have all taken pride in our military for most of our lifetimes, but what happens when the most powerful and expensive apparatus of your government is captured by the left? Well, now, sadly, it has become the greatest menace to our liberties. Thus, absent systemic reforms, any desire to throw endless, unaccountable spending increases at the Pentagon brass will create a bigger threat to what the Biden administration calls “domestic terrorists,” aka we the people, than to our true foreign enemies like China.
Anyone who considers himself both a conservative and a defense hawk should not be offended by this grim assessment of the military. In fact, a true defense hawk who cares about the troops should be leading the charge with intrepid fortitude to reform our military rather than empowering a woke, broken, and dangerously ideological military brass.
Yet the defense “hawks” who are truly doves, led by incoming House Armed Services Committee Chair Mike Rogers, believe that anyone who will stop the gravy train and ask questions about the military is somehow an enemy of the state. This is why he was angrier about the speaker coup than even the other moderate Republicans and appeared to lunge at Rep. Matt Gaetz on the House floor last Friday night. The establishment “hawks” are now concerned that a desire to focus on a balanced budget will spill over to their fiefdom.
Defense spending was already boosted by 10% last year, now topping $858 billion, again funding foreign escapades, biomedical tyranny, surveillance of Americans, and woke policies. The same way those who oppose a blank check without policy concessions are tagged as opposing the troops, I can suggest those who support the status quo hate the troops and hate Americans because they are empowering the current military brass, whom we should all agree are a threat to our liberties and certainly don’t scare our enemies.
What ultimately needs to happen is that before we debate spending levels in appropriations bills, we must finally have a real debate on the National Defense Authorization Act. The NDAA was designed to first lay out the priorities and vision of national defense, the role the military must play in that vision, and the scope of procurements we will need in the near term. Where do we need bases, and where are they outdated? Where do we need a military presence? Where do we need to fund allies, and are they indeed allies who serve our interests?
Then, based on those priorities, we would write an appropriations bill to fund the military. But in recent years, the NDAA has been primarily about spending levels without regard for formulating a strategic vision. This year, the NDAA must audit every theater in which our military is engaged and determine whether there is a vital national security interest there. In general, our entire defense deterrent needs to be reoriented away from the theaters we’ve been in over the past generation or two and focused like a laser beam on China.
So yes, we might need spending increases in some areas of the military hardware we all support, but there are undoubtedly foreign entanglement expenditures we can and must cut. We must also reassess the structure of the military as well. For example, as Rep. Jim Jordan recently observed, “Focus our military spending on the soldiers and not having so many generals — the ratio of general officers to enlisted individuals now is so out of whack.”
But most importantly, we must clean up the military culture itself. Here are some policies that the Armed Services Committee should focus on beginning this week rather than simply debating top-line spending levels:
- Ban the Pentagon from ever instituting a mask mandate.
- Force reinstatement and back pay for those terminated under the vaccine mandate.
- Expand parameters of religious and medical exemptions for other vaccines and permanently ban mRNA shots in the military.
- End the weaponization of the military medical system forcing behavioral evaluations on service members as forms of retaliation for whistleblowing, per the Seth Ritter story at Fort Benning. The entire Defense Health Agency needs to be overhauled to focus on military readiness rather than the biomedical Karen agenda.
- Allow our own soldiers to carry weapons on U.S. bases.
- End the Saudi training programs on U.S. military bases. After one such trainee killed three Americans in a terror attack at Naval Air Station Pensacola in 2019, the Trump administration failed to terminate the program.
- Prohibit all transgender or critical race theory training and programs.
- Cancel all green energy mandates on military hardware and vitiate any military mission “combatting” the climate. For example, the Biden administration is requiring that 60,000 vehicles be retrofitted with $50,000 battery packs (likely made in China).
- Terminate all NSA programs spying on Americans.
- A full audit of the mission and activities of DARPA and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, particularly as it relates to their work on gain-of-function pathogens and vaccines in biolabs across the world.
- Terminate all social engineering programs lowering standards to place women in combat.
- Craft a religious liberty bill of rights ensuring that no soldier is forced to violate his religious conscience through his tour of duty in the military.
Just how broken is our military? Despite Congress halting the COVID jab mandate on the military, the Pentagon is still enforcing it on the National Guard. It demonstrates a level of malfeasance and unaccountability that stems from the GOP’s categorical affinity for all things Department of Defense. We must not forget that it is perhaps the department whose left-wing takeover is probably more consequential to our life and liberty than any other department. Commensurate with how important we regard its role is how alarmed we should be by its subversion.
Why are the so-called defense hawks not concerned about the aforementioned issues within the military?
Is this really about being a hawk for our soldiers, our national security, and the values the military is there to defense — or about being a hawk for Lockheed Martin?