Dividing the American Military against Itself

You would think that the American military exists to protect and defend the nation, and, by the way, to win wars. If so, you would be suffering from wrongthink.

You may recall that, in July 2017, three leading members of the Trump administration, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn summoned the president to a small bunker in the bowels of the Pentagon. They wanted to tell him that they were going to take over administration foreign policy, and that if he didn’t like it, tough.

Now, under normal circumstances theirs would have been an act of mutiny. Unfortunately, the Trump presidency was not a normal circumstance. Anyway, when President Trump heard the news, he reacted with outrage, declaring them to be a bunch of babies, who did not know how to win wars.

Obviously, everyone thought that Trump had lost his mind and was being rude, but perhaps he was on to something. In due time the three amigos who called the meeting were all replaced.

Now, the new American military, under the supposedly capable leadership of Lloyd Austin has declared war on-- white supremacy. You would imagine that Austin, the first black head of the Defense department, would have begun his tenure by doing what any serious defense secretary would have done-- that is, bringing the troops together, to foster cohesion, camaraderie and trust.

Instead, Austin declared war on white supremacy and other right wing extremist views. Obviously, extremist leftist views get a pass. In so doing he is fostering dissension, distrust and racism.

Thus, he has failed a basic lesson in leadership. A capable commander must ensure that his soldiers trust each other, that they form a cohesive unit and that they place patriotism over factional and sectarian interests. Instead the new policy will invite them to snitch on each other. 

As for the racism angle, it is fairly obvious that people of color will not be suspected of having white supremacist views. One understands that the furor over white supremacy absolves all people of color of all criminal intentions and actions.

If you ask yourself whether the military is dedicated to winning wars, at least we now know that its commanders have something else in mind. Surely, they know that a military that is divided against itself will not be able to win wars. Or, maybe they do not know it.

Obviously, Austin is drawing attention to his own race and is pitting himself against his troops. For those who might have imagined, surely unjustly, that he was another Biden diversity hire, his actions have lend credence to their views. 

The Legal Insurrection blog has the story, via The New Neo:

[Defense Secretary] Austin wants all military units to take an operational pause to discuss extremism as he works to grasp the full scope of the issue and better address the longstanding problem, John Kirby, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, told reporters Wednesday. The pauses are expected to occur within the next 60 days, but Austin has yet to determine how the stand downs are to be completed, Kirby said.

“The intent is to reinforce the [Pentagon’s] policies and values with respect to this sort of behavior and to have a dialogue with the men and women of the force and to get their views on what they are seeing at their level,” Kirby said. “He wants commands to take the necessary time to … speak with troops about the scope of this problem. It’s a two-way conversation.”

Austin spoke frankly with the acting service secretaries and uniformed service chiefs about his concerns about extremism in the military, including white supremacism, said Kirby, who attended the meeting. The new defense secretary, who is the first Black leader of the Defense Department, wants the service leaders to better grasp how pervasive the issue is within their formations and work with leaders to stamp it out, Kirby said.

Of course, they will try to sell it as sensitivity training. What the troops gain in the Biden administration is group therapy. 

For a cogent analysis of the effect of this policy, we turn to The New Neo:

Asking the men and women of the force “what they are seeing at their level” sounds like an invitation for members of the military to inform on each other about micro-aggressions or even about political affiliations. The offenders will either be booted or will be sent to the re-education camps. The entire operation puts the military rank and file on further notice that they should be suspicious of each other and cautious about anything they say.

So, we do not need to concern ourselves with the threat of Islamist terrorism. After all, Barack Obama never pronounced the phrase, and we must thereby conclude that it is not a problem. We just declared that the Houthi, Iran-backed rebels, are not a terrorist group and we are about to bend over again for the ayatollahs. 

And we do not, as a nation, want to organize ourselves to defeat the coronavirus or even to compete against China. Our real problem is white supremacy.

As for the riots conducted by Black Lives Matter and Antifa, they are of no account-- because the real enemy is white supremacy.

In addition, one wonders why a stand-down is considered necessary. Perhaps as propaganda to underscore in the public’s mind the supposed widespread, deeply serious, and threatening nature of the problem. A great many of these early moves by the Biden administration and the Democratic Party as well are to whip the public into a frenzy of fear and downright paranoia against the right in general – while simultaneously talking about healing. This is a page out of a very old totalitarian book.

Another goal is to stoke reactive anger and fear on the right and even to provoke further violence coming from the most extreme elements of the right, in order to justify further draconian crackdowns on the entire right.

QED