Wokeness Harming Military Recruitment (Finance Friday)
India crushes Joe Biden’s plans for pointless gabfest on trade in Asia
Amid failure to meet recruiting goals for the U.S. Army, top officers are blaming a raft of problems from obesity to a lack of understanding about the military. But they cannot bring themselves to finger two huge problems: wokeness and the lack of any plan to win wars.
Lt. General Xavier Brunson, the head the Army’s First Corps, recently observed that: “Only 23% of the people that are of age to serve are actually qualified” for the military. He explained, “Some of the challenges we have are obesity, we have pre-existing medical conditions, we have behavioral health problems, we have criminality, people with felonies, and we have drug use.”
However, these have long been impediments to recruiting when standards began to rise with a smaller, all-voluntary military beginning in the early 1970s when the U.S. involvement in Vietnam wound down. They do not explain a sudden shortfall of 20,000 soldiers out of 485,000 needed in this fiscal year.
What may explain the worsening shortfall is the expansion of wokeness in the military and the proliferation of endless obligations and few victories.
It starts at the top. Along with other winners like Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Chris Wray, then-President Donald Trump made General Mark Milley the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the military’s top job. [Related: Why DeSantis Would Be Better Than Trump] Like Fauci and Wray, Milley evolved right into Joe Biden’s Washington with ease. Last year, Milley remarked on the theory that America is inextricably racist: “On the issue of critical race theory, a lot of us have to get much smarter on whatever the theory is.”
Milley also said, “I want to understand white rage,” and did nothing to resist the fiction advanced by leftwing activists that the military contained a significant number of radical members who would put politics and ideology ahead of duty to country and the Constitution.
The Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Michael Gilday, jumped in with a recommendation to his sailors that they read, “How to Be an Antiracist,” a book espousing racism.
West Point is getting in on the new religion. As uncovered by Judicial Watch and Senator Rick Scott, the school has a critical race theory curriculum. A slide on whiteness teaches tomorrow’s military leaders: “In order to understand racial inequality and slavery, it is first necessary to address whiteness” and the “Take-for-grantedness of whiteness.” (Some of us miss our “take-for-grantedness” that professors at formerly elite institutions can write English.)
From there it was only natural that the Army produced an animated recruitment ad featuring a lesbian wedding. The couple’s daughter, an Army corporal narrated: “Although I had a fairly typical childhood, took ballet, played violin, I also marched for equality. I like to think I've been defending freedom from an early age.”
As a married gay man, I am ecstatic to live in a unique time in human history when society is increasingly at ease with homosexuality and recognizes equal rights for gays. But I would never mistake political advocacy over issues that remain divisive in our culture for the type of “defending freedom” that soldiers are called upon to do. One involves expressing a political point of view, which in this case doesn’t even involve risk to reputation or professional standing (although opposing it does). The other involves placing one’s life in the hands of others and risking everything.
More important than what I think, the type of mostly male recruits the Army needs to function and deter adversaries like China and Iran are unlikely to be inspired by a woke crusade. Asking someone to potentially cut short his life when he has hardly lived must rest on ancient notions of male chivalry that are antithetical to the woke sentiments of today’s leftwingers.
There is also the problem that our military cannot win wars. The loss of our position in Afghanistan ahead of the victorious Taliban just over one year ago was a debacle. If there was any silver lining to that failure, as some senior administration officials asserted at the time, it was the chance to shift attention from Middle East backwaters to Asia. In other words, we could cut back on playing cowboys and Indians some two decades after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America and instead focus on the serious danger from China.
But it was not to be. It might come as a surprise to most Americans that our soldiers are still at war in Iraq, Somalia, and Syria. Success there will probably remain elusive since no one bothers even to attempt to define success.
Furthermore, while Europe has an economy as large as ours and even more people, it is the United States that is overwhelmingly funding Ukraine in its war with Russia. Biden’s weakness invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to move on Ukraine and Biden’s de facto Europe-first foreign policy means the threat from China gets scant attention and our forces in the Pacific continue to atrophy compared to China’s growing capabilities.
Thankfully, young Americans will still answer the call to serve in the military and preserve freedom for the rest of us. Perhaps the biggest surprise isn’t the Army’s recruiting shortfall, but how many young patriots are still willing to serve.
We could help them more with a president who could actually explain their mission—not waste their service doing nation-building in Middle East backwaters and bailing out Europe’s decadent moochers—and celebrate masculinity and chivalry instead of woke hippie nonsense.
Biden’s Seinfeld Trade Deal Failing
Joe Biden’s trade policy is about the same as Joe Biden’s China policy: he doesn’t actually have one. But that won’t stop his trade officials and diplomats from wasting other governments’ time and engaging in a little diplo-tourism at taxpayer expense. Our allies have whined that the USA needs an economic engagement framework for Asia to counter China, and they aren’t wrong. But no senior officials, least of all Joe Biden, has advocated what is most essential: a mechanism to give governments the political cover they need to enact pro-capitalist free market reforms locally, as I argued in The Australian last December. That is the path to bigger economic gains than hoping to sucker the USA into pre-Trump trade deals that give away our manufacturing in exchange for cheap imports.
The Biden administration is also ignoring the will of Congress to use the U.S. Export-Import Bank to finance projects that give governments in Asia and around the world an alternative to Chinese money, which comes with military and political strings attached (e.g., in the Solomon Islands).
Instead, the Biden administration is touting an Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, that is one of the biggest nothing burgers in recent diplomatic history. The initiative ostensibly has four pillars: supply chain resiliency, clean energy and decarbonization, tax and anti-corruption, and trade. What that really means is that it will be a gabfest about business by diplomats who know nothing about business. And they will scheme new ways to raise energy costs and bring the shortages we see in Europe and California to Asian countries that can afford them even less.
Unfortunately for Joe Biden, India has seen through this charade and recently opted out of the phony trade component of the framework. Oops, there goes to the “Indo” part of Indo-Pacific. One well informed ambassador from the region pointed out to me that India remains in the other three (pointless) pillars, which is true enough. But the significance of India’s move should not be underestimated. As Mark Simon and I discuss below in the latest edition of Simon & Whiton, the days are over when large but developing countries simply could not afford to ignore Washington-globalist economic initiatives and extended sessions of bloviation and self-love.
Captain Undershirt Turns the Tide?
Ukraine has apparently halted and even reversed Russia’s gradual erosion of Ukrainian territory in the nation’s south and east. Hooray for our side, even though we have no vital national interests in Ukraine.
Kiev has done so by mounting a counteroffensive with U.S. arms and money—lots of it. Alas, the magnificent moochers of Europe have contributed much talk but very little in terms of money and materiel. Why bother paying for defense if all Democrats and all but of a handful of Republicans in Congress are willing to give Ukraine and its corrupt, repressive government a blank check (while neglecting the China threat and overlooking whether the Ukrainian government has become a state sponsor of terrorism, having accidentally killed a noncombatant woman in Russia while allegedly trying to assassinate her noncombatant father).
A question now is whether Ukraine’s offensive can be sustained. A secondary question is what happens in Europe this winter amid a full-blown energy crisis that is already putting intense pressure on household and government budgets, as well as manufacturers. Radical political change in Europe could begin this winter and run through early 2025 with the demise of the pointless Tories in England. Business will move south to an arc from the Middle East through Southeast Asia, and maybe the USA if we get our act together in the next two elections. But I digress.
What ought to happen in Ukraine is for both sides to recognize a potential stalemate and the sudden incentive for both sides to cut a deal. No one likes to give up part of his country, but Ukraine will be better off in the long run with fewer Russian speakers and having ceded Donbas, Crimea, and the land between to Russia.
But what ought to happen probably won’t happen. Instead, hawks in Washington and London, indifferent to the wishes of the their own voters to stop the neo-imperialism of foreign military adventures, will egg on Ukraine to try to take back all of the land occupied by Russia since 2014. That would bring what Russia sees as a proxy American army right up the Russian border and maybe beyond. Which creates a not insignificant chance of nuclear war.
Take solace that our public servants at least get to sound tough, but don’t wait too long to build your bomb shelter-ini.
The US military is in a bit of a mess of their own making. Even worse to see so many ejected because they refused to allow a medical experiment. Can't say what the future will bring but the top ranks may be beyond repair.
India ought to be a place for US investment given it's population. Not clear if the they are OK with that.
Japan and China both face a population bomb not at all helped by considerable xenophobia. Culturally both are incapable of growth, but for different reasons.
Ukraine now is likely to push Russia out of even Crimea. They are not likely to agree to any loss of territory. We have no idea what Russia might need to do if they elect to continue dumping their treasure there. They already are out of precision weapons after wasting them on apartment buildings. Going to N Korea for munitions shows how badly their supply lines have become.
OSCE Reports Reveal Ukraine Started Shelling The Donbas Nine Days Before Russia's 'Special Military Operation'
The Biden Administration, U.S. political officials, and the corporate media are lying the American public into World War III. https://kanekoa.substack.com/p/osce-reports-reveal-ukraine-started