My 1980 high school yearbook was a sign of the times. Inside was a picture of a massive billboard opposite the home of the 82nd Airborne Division on Fort Bragg Boulevard. Its message encapsulated the legacy of the Jimmy Carter presidency: “Iran, Let Our People Go.”
That is what we had become: a mendicant begging Tehran’s theocratic fanatics to release American diplomats and soldiers.
In the 1970s, the world assumed the United States was on an inevitable decline riven by problems at home and indecisiveness abroad. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and Cuban proxies were rampaging through southern Africa. The defense budget tanked. There was no fuel for vehicles and no money for training, and the carriers were stuck in port.
The Army imploded in on itself—my father armed himself to enter barracks at Fort Bragg and there was not enough fuel to get his artillery tubes from his motor pools to the Green Ramp at Pope Air Force Base.
The Carter years have returned with a vengeance. It did not take the Biden administration long to signal American weakness. With China continuing its massive military modernization program and increasingly threatening its neighbors, the administration opted to open the government spending spigot, while defense and homeland security were set to receive a few extra droplets. In case any world leader failed to notice that clue, the administration followed with the debacle in Afghanistan.
In underfunding the Pentagon, Biden has stolen a page not just from President Jimmy Carter but from the Obama playbook, too. During the Obama administration, ships and crews were worn out, several Air Force fighter squadrons were grounded due to lack of funding, and bureaucratic initiatives arrested the development of a generation of promising sailors and pilots. Future systems were also put on hold.
With the return of Carter-era inflation, President Biden’s defense budget is the smallest since 1948. The Pentagon was already projecting an inflation rate of 2.2 percent before inflation kicked into gear, with an annual rate hovering around 5% for 2023. The Biden Administration requested a 1.6 percent increase to the defense budget—with inflation that is a 3.5% cut in the budget.
The difference today is that communist China is a more formidable threat than the sclerotic Soviet empire was at its height. And China has junior partners in crime in Moscow, Tehran, and Pyongyang.
The American military now faces a ferocious great power competition without the resources to match the threat. The claxons are sounding. The Heritage Foundation’s “2022 Index of U.S. Military Strength” has laid open the looming threat: “In the aggregate, the United States’ military posture continues to be rated ‘marginal.’ “
The 2022 index concludes that our current force can meet the demands of a single, major regional conflict while also attending minor engagements elsewhere. But our military would be ill-equipped to manage two major regional conflicts at once — especially considering the weak condition of key military allies in Europe and the Pacific.
The U.S. military is getting older faster than it is getting modern. As currently postured, the index concludes that “the U.S. military continues to be only marginally able to meet the demands of defending America’s vital national interests.”
The crisis is most evident in the Pacific, and the annual defense report on China from 2020 makes clear the U.S. is losing on shipbuilding. China has over 110 large shipyards; we have twenty with only four actively building warships. China can now put 350 combat ships at sea; we cannot get near three hundred. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the maintenance required on our submarine fleet alone would occupy the resources of all our shipyards for the next 30 years.
The United States Air Force is looking at facing China’s arriving fifth-generation fighters with small numbers of F-35s, but mostly aged F-15s and F-16s that will not survive in a high-end conflict.
When laser focus is required to deter China and Russia, billions of dollars are siphoned off the Pentagon top line “to mitigate the impacts of climate change.” The Secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force have each testified that climate change is each service’s number one priority.
When the Secretary of the Army visited Fort Bragg in April, one would have expected her to comment on the readiness of the 82nd Airborne or the power of the Special Forces or that FORSCOM is up and at ‘em. No. Instead we got a flurry of messages proclaiming that Fort Bragg “leads the world in fighting climate change.”
No doubt that’s pleasing to General of the Army Greta Thunberg, but it won’t impress Chinese President Xi Jinping, especially after the disaster in Afghanistan.
What will impress is deterrence. We know it works. China is not invincible; it has structural, ideological, and geographic vulnerabilities that can be exploited by a vigorous America.
As Michael Hirsch former chief diplomatic correspondent for Newsweek notes, “…now is the time for a radical shift in defense thinking. First, this would mean de-emphasizing traditional platforms like expensive, and newly vulnerable, aircraft carriers and moving to exploit the best of U.S. high tech advantages, including the most recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence that American industry dominates, and which could power new generations of drone aircraft and ships.”
Among major U.S. allies such as Japan and Korea, it has also led to discussions about whether they should develop nuclear arsenals because they do not trust the Biden Administration to meet its conventional responsibilities in the Indo-Pacific.
But time is running out. We must act now: Invest in new weapons, divest legacy systems as the new ones come online, and harden our space and cyber assets. We must also unleash Silicon Valley to condense the kill chain by turning artificial intelligence on the Chinese to overwhelm their systems.
Let me now move to the greater problem facing America’s national security and I begin with a warning from a 29 year old young Abraham Lincoln addressing the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield.
At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? — Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!–All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
The Department of Veterans Affairs was born of war—it was born of Lincoln. I was privileged to lead it for three years.
In the most biblically righteous inaugural address ever delivered by an American President, an exhausted Abraham Lincoln called upon his countrymen to care all of those who had taken up arms— risking all in battles that raged from Pennsylvania farm fields and the desert brush of the New Mexico Territory to the Caribbean and the English Channel.
In this, his Second Inaugural Address, delivered just weeks before his death, Lincoln closed his remarks with these words:
“With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”
President Eisenhower decreed that Lincoln’s charge be emblazoned on VA’s headquarters building and all hospital walls. And in 2020 in response to progressive attacks on Lincoln’s “non-inclusive character”, I ordered bronze plaques with his Second Inaugural placed in VA cemeteries across the country to remind Americans of the speech Fredrick Douglass called, “the sacred effort.” Biden is in the process of removing those plaques.
Lincoln’s message was simple. America is a creedal nation founded on the universal ideals of human freedom and individual dignity. That creed has been defended by forty-one million Americans who have worn the uniform since the first shots were fired on Lexington Green in April 1775. One million have paid the ultimate price.
Sadly, after fighting three years to keep Pelosi’s House from ripping Lincoln’s words from our hospitals and cemeteries the new VA Secretary immediately moved to rip them down. In the Secretary’s eyes, the Great Emancipator had the temerity not to mention 21st century progressive pressure groups in a speech he delivered in March of 1865.
Those who today loudly argue that Lincoln’s words are sexist, and offensive are the same who said nothing as the Obama-Biden administration left VA in tatters.
If Honest Abe is on the chopping block, then the very idea of America is under siege. The late British philosopher Roger Scruton described this as the “culture of repudiation.” The prevailing liberal clerisy is beset by the fanatical loathing of everything that is America—the deconstruction of all aspects of our political, spiritual, and cultural inheritance.
The culture of repudiation has given us, as Daniel Mahoney, a professor emeritus at Assumption College, calls it “coercive and moralistic political correctness that rejects objectivity, truth and tradition.” Hence Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt are tossed aside as irredeemable oppressors, not men of good conscious confronting the exigencies of their times–men who created an imperfect but spiritually and morally sublime Republic. Failure to recognize and celebrate their achievements is to acquiesce in the suicide of America and the West.
The United States is the last station on a western continuum running from ancient Jerusalem through Athens and Rome to London. This is the continuum that gave the world its understanding of liberty and human dignity. America is the expression of 3,000 years of historical and religious memory. The emphasis is on memory, what G.K. Chesterton described as the “democracy of the dead” that “refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”
Today, the military is on the frontline in those culture wars ripping America apart. Progressive politics have been injected at every level of service from the academies to basic training to the Joint Chiefs. It is a long way from George Marshall saying he served only the Republic to General Mark Milley opining from Black Lives Matter talking points about white rage.
The military is divided into competing racial ethnic and sexual groups and the witch hunt for non-existent extremists continues unabated. The Secretary of the Air Force said that race will now be considered in all promotions and assignments.
The U.S. Naval Academy produced a Diversity and Inclusion Strategic Plan that requires “bias literacy training” and has developed a “diversity and inclusion checklist and schedule to inventory and assess all academic classes and training events.” New cadets at the Air Force Academy are required to watch a video that promotes Black Lives Matter.
These are not the actions of rogue university administrators, but rather reflect a deliberate shift by all service branches towards a dominating focus on “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Annapolis requires that midshipmen pledge the following: “I will invest the time, attention and empathy required to analyze and evaluate Navy-wide issues related to racism, sexism, ableism and other structural and interpersonal biases.”
These plans – the vision behind them and their implementation – represent a rejection of the American military ethos and turns the force into a social justice animal warring against the very society it is sworn to defend. Practically, why would anyone volunteer to defend such an irredeemably racist country.
Our current military leadership is deliberately blind to the very qualities that make the American Republic and its military unique. Military service is the great leveler in American society—if you perform you are accepted. This is the ultimate riposte to the culture warriors because there is no institution that looks more like America than the Armed Forces.
The 63rd Superintendent of the Naval Academy VADM Sean S. Buck explained in the fall of 2020, the need to “mark an important new beginning as we look to acknowledge prejudice within our own institution and eradicate it from our service for good.” The Admiral seems to believe that 2023 America is the Alabama of George Wallace, and not the most “equitable” society in history.
West Point cadets pursuing a minor in “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Studies” may substitute a courses on American and military history with courses on sex and civilizations, or race and ethnicity.
Physical fitness standards are also caught in the crosshairs of the new religion. The Marine Corps conducted a “statistical study of all Marine Corps Fitness Reports written on active duty Marines from 1999 through 2020” – two million reports – “to ascertain any differences…with respect to demographic differences in race, ethnicity, and gender to identify areas where groups may be adversely impacted by examining the relative value of high and low scoring reports and the proportion of adverse reports.” The results “will be used to identify if any bias exists in physical fitness standards.” Ladies and gentlemen, you can either carry the ruck sack or you cannot—it is that simple.
The Army no longer permits physical fitness failures to be placed in the efficiency reports of officers and senior enlisted sending an “aw shucks” message to the force. This is the negation of leadership and a recipe for disaster. Equity will get our people killed.
Simply put, Civilian standards of fairness do not apply to the armed forces unless the political and military leadership is determined to give the enemy a fair fight.
The Chinese would love facing a military that is measured to the lowest common equity denominator. To say to the Army, train Back to the Bayonet is not a call to discriminate. It is a demand for survival.
How did it come to this? Former Army Captain Dave McCormick put it this way: “Americans have been fed a narrative of victimhood. Our society treats veterans as victims or, worse, charity cases, not as warrior-citizens taught leadership, discipline and camaraderie. On campus, in the media and across popular culture, grievance is the new coin of the realm. Children are taught to doubt, not love, America, and leaders on both sides of the aisle question its goodness.”
James Cunningham author of A Superpower in Peril notes, America’s cultural cancer manifests itself in many ways, but no symptom is more telling than our low military recruitment. Last year the Army hit only 75% of its recruiting target, while other services had to scramble to meet theirs. This year looks to be worse. The all-volunteer force, formed 50 years ago, is in peril and threatens our ability to defend ourselves in a dangerous world. He concludes:
“We need new leaders to cultivate the American spirit and restore institutional integrity: in the Pentagon, to put war fighting and deterrence first; in schools, to teach civics and America’s exceptional story; in business, to reaffirm the principles of merit and capitalism; and across society, to create a new national commitment to citizenship.”
McCormick also notes that “William F. Buckley Jr. defined citizenship as the union of privilege (because to be an American is to be blessed with liberty and opportunity) and responsibility (because as Americans we have a duty to preserve the republic and serve the nation). Today, we have the balance wrong, emphasizing privilege and too often forgetting responsibility.”
To view the state of the military as solely a crisis of uniformed leadership is to miss the broader dangers facing America. That the Superintendent of the Naval Academy speaks with such shame and guilt to midshipmen is an effect, not a cause, of rot within the American polity. With China rampant, America cannot afford any fair fights. We had better act fast or we will fall victim to the most lamentable words in the English language per Winston Churchill— “too late.”