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Republicans to demand answers from military brass over pronoun ‘play acting’ training in hearing on Hill

March 22, 2023 | | Print Article

The U.S. military is currently experiencing an unprecedented recruiting crisis, and congressional Republicans want to know why.

And so to that end, the Senate Armed Services Committee is holding a hearing early Wednesday morning about this crisis.

Speaking with Fox News on Tuesday, committee members Sens. Joni Ernst and Rick Scott, both Republicans, drew a link between the current crisis and their own past experiences in the military.

“My family didn’t have much growing up, and the Navy gave me the opportunity for a better life and a better education – it can provide that for so many kids across our nation,” Scott said for his part.

“But unfortunately, this administration has made their focus more on pushing the failed agenda of the radical Left than building a lethal force and advertising the opportunities our military provides and how great our service can be for one’s life. When our military is more focused on achieving some diversity metric rather than defeating our enemies, our national defense and the American people lose,” he added.

Ernst concurred.

“The military’s purpose is to fight and win—not crusade for social causes. As a combat veteran, this is personal to me. The Department of Defense must act urgently to fix waning recruitment and retention—and ultimately to build a more lethal force. Our adversaries are watching,” she said.

Another member of the panel, Sen. Eric Schmitt, told Fox News that he’s looking forward to questioning Pentagon officials on their commitment to upholding national safety versus fighting “culture wars at home.”

“The goal of our military should be to meet global challenges facing America with decisive authority, not to wage culture wars at home,” he said.

“I look forward to questioning top military officials…to get more answers and ensure that our military is laser-focused on addressing the challenges that our adversaries pose to our country and our freedoms,” he added.

What he meant is that the U.S. military should be teaching soldiers how to survive abroad in the middle of war, not how to, as an example, use “gender pronouns.”

Likewise, the U.S. military should not be forcing West Point cadets to participate in role-playing exercises on “respecting the pronouns people prefer.” And yet, according to Republican Reps. Michael Waltz and Jim Banks, they have been.

“Cadets were forced to participate in preferred pronoun play-acting during training time allotted to prevent sexual assault in the military,” Banks confirmed to Fox News.

And so to that end, this week the two congressmen submitted a letter to West Point Superintendent Lt. Gen. Steve Gilland demanding answers:

“This exemplifies how divisive and radical left wing ideologies are creeping into our service academies at the expense of consensus and reasonable goals. Chairman Waltz and I will continue to hold accountable partisan officials who are poisoning our military with wokeness,” Banks added.

Waltz is the chair of the House Military Readiness Subcommittee.

“Over the last two years we’ve seen a disturbing trend taking place at our military academies that puts politics over service,” he said in his own statement to Fox News.

“We have an obligation to ensure military academies such as West Point are prioritizing the education and training of future military officers rather than implementing the political priorities of the Biden Administration. Every minute our soldiers spend in sensitivity training is a minute they could be at the rifle range. Chinese and Russian soldiers certainly won’t be focused on what pronoun a U.S. soldier uses,” he added.

Dovetailing back to the recruiting crisis, Sen. Tommy Tuberville said that last year the U.S. Army missed its recruitment goals by a whopping 15,000 recruits.

That’s “more than an entire division,” he said.

“While the Biden administration declares climate change a national security threat, our real enemies are growing in strength and numbers. … This year is shaping up to be even worse. This national security emergency ought to be a wake-up call for Pentagon leadership but they’ve refused to take responsibility. It’s time for them to get serious about keeping our country safe,” Tuberville added.

The problem, of course, is that all this “wokeness” is coming straight from the top, as Thomas Spoehr, the director of the Center for National Defense at The Heritage Foundation, explained in a piece written last year.

“The largest threat [American veterans] see by far to our current military is the weakening of its fabric by radical progressive (or ‘woke’) policies being imposed, not by a rising generation of slackers, but by the very leaders charged with ensuring their readiness,” he wrote.

“Wokeness in the military is being imposed by elected and appointed leaders in the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon who have little understanding of the purpose, character, traditions, and requirements of the institution they are trying to change,” he added.

Vivek Saxena
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