Weak and Woke Won’t Deter America’s Adversaries

This week marked the 79th anniversary of D-Day when courageous American soldiers joined Allied forces to storm the beaches of Normandy and begin the liberation of Europe from Nazi Germany.  Their noble deeds eight decades ago serve as a reminder that preserving freedom often demands great sacrifice and commitment, crucial wisdom that we are in danger of forgetting today.  We are allowing our military investment to decrease and our readiness to decline.  This will severely hinder our ability to deter adversaries for years to come, while encouraging the kind of aggression and war on the part of our enemies that is detrimental to American interests.

The world is working to take advantage of perceived American weakness, greatly increasing the risk of conflict which would be catastrophic for the American people.  The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has doubled its defense budget since 2013.  That has resulted in the CCP fielding the world’s largest standing army, along with the largest aviation force in the Indo-Pacific theater.  The Chinese Navy currently commands 340 ships, 50 more ships than the American Navy.  Other malignant governments are also building their forces with an eye on outstripping American dominance.

Perceived American weakness is undermining the model of deterrence the Trump Administration strove to maintain.  China’s surge in military spending and force has, unsurprisingly, been accompanied by deliberately provocative actions meant to test the collective resolve of the United States and our allies.  Last weekend, a Chinese naval vessel came within 150 yards of a U.S. missile destroyer traversing the Taiwan Strait, which Beijing claims as China’s territorial waterway.  Just a week prior, a Chinese fighter jet came within 400 yards of a U.S. reconnaissance plane flying in international air space above the South China Sea.  Our lack of commitment to building real military readiness and establishing deterrence is making devastating conflict more likely.

The risk is not limited to China, though. The Iranian regime recently unveiled its first domestically manufactured hypersonic missile, which it claimed could “bypass the most advanced anti-ballistic missile systems of the United States" and "Israel’s Iron Dome."  Worse yet, it appears Russia helped them build it, with some reports suggesting it did so in exchange for Iranian military materiel, such as drones and short-range ballistic missiles.  The Iranian regime’s possession of such weaponry threatens to mire the Middle East in war and presents great risk to America’s ally, Israel – just a few short years after the signing of the Abraham Accords.

Threats to America are mounting while the Biden Administration’s policies toward our military are leaving America less ready to defend itself.  Instead of truly investing and building U.S. Armed Forces, the Biden Administration is obsessed with fighting the specters of racism and climate change.  This is both wrong and dangerous.  Our military is designed to fight America’s enemies and protect our freedoms, not advance a radical ideology.

Biden’s 2022 National Security Strategy claims the key to strengthening the effectiveness of our military is “promoting diversity and inclusion,” something the Navy recently must have taken to heart when it invited an active-duty drag queen to be the face of its recruitment drive.  In April, President Biden pledged he would make every vehicle in the U.S. military “climate-friendly,” while Vice President Harris remarked that “an accelerating climate crisis” is one of the “biggest challenges the military will face during their careers” in her address at West Point’s commencement.  None of these issues should be on our military’s list of priorities because they weaken our forces and hurt deterrence, but the Biden Administration does not seem to understand that a woke, weak military is incapable of deterring adversaries like China, Russia, and Iran.

The imposition of woke initiatives throughout the military has had a real effect on the strength of our military.  Last year, the Army missed its recruitment goals by 15,000 active-duty soldiers, which will likely result in the Army’s overall force shrinking by 7% in just two years.  Other service branches barely met their recruiting goals by accelerating their delayed-entry applicants, meaning it will be even more difficult to meet their goals in the coming years.  The reason for these recruitment woes is simple: Young men and women don’t want to sign up to defend the country they love, only to be lectured about supposed white privilege and their country’s systemic racism.  Why would they fight to defend a country they are taught to hate?

We must refocus our military’s priorities — not around Marxist, political ideologies, but around building our military to meet the threats facing our nation and ensuring our soldiers understand that America is worth defending.  If we fail to do so, we will lose the ability to deter our adversaries and risk the kind of catastrophic wars our ancestors fought so hard to keep from ever happening again. We owe it to them to get this right.

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