My article from today’s FrontPage Magazine:
Purging and Transforming Our Military
By Matthew Vadum
President Obama hasn’t just been hollowing out the military since taking office, he’s been gutting it, purging it of ideologically hostile personnel, and fundamentally transforming it into something other than a war-fighting force, military experts say.
Although few with military ties are willing to say it openly, it seems the administration is leading an orchestrated effort to seriously undermine the readiness of the military. Some reports indicate that Obama has purged 197 senior military officers since moving into the White House and that many of the retired officers have been harassed at their new civilian jobs for criticizing the president’s policies. The effects of these purges will be felt long after Obama leaves office.
This is, of course, the same through-the-looking-glass administration that goes out of its way not to label actual Islamic terrorists as terrorists, that calls terrorist attacks “man-caused disasters,” and refers to the Global War on Terror as the “Overseas Contingency Operation.”
A retired senior military officer and combat veteran who remains involved in national security affairs, told FrontPage in an interview that President Obama is involved in social engineering of the United States military.
“Having women in combat is bad,” he said. “It is changing the social complexion of the infantry and we now have this epidemic of sexual assaults.”
Soldiers are told not to be mean to gays, he said. “Do you really think the individuals who are joining the all-volunteer force will be joining to pull triggers or to get sensitivity training?”
The former officer said that President Obama is getting rid of experienced war fighters for no apparent reason.
The “poster child” for such firings is James Mattis, a real soldier’s soldier and four-star general in the Marine Corps who retired unexpectedly this past May at age 63. As a brigadier general Mattis led a brigade into Kandahar in fall of 2001 and a Marines division into Iraq during the invasion in 2003.
“Mattis should have been the next chairman of the joint chiefs of staff but mysteriously he gets retired,” the officer said. Mattis had been asking questions about Obama’s policy toward, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran, that the powers that be didn’t want asked, he said.
In early 2009 Obama cashiered David McKiernan, the general in charge of the Afghanistan war. He was replaced by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, whom he also fired. Obama canned his intelligence chief, Gen. David Petraeus. Gen. John Allen, another key figure in the Afghanistan war, resigned unexpectedly, according to an analysis by the “Vernuccio/Allison Report,” a radio show carried by WVOX 1460 AM in New Rochelle, N.Y.
Gen. Carter Ham fell on his sword soon after the White House denied permission for a rescue mission to save officials trapped at the besieged U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya. Admiral David Gaurette, who oversaw an aircraft carrier group in the Middle East, also had retirement thrust upon him, as did Marine Gen. James Cartwright.
Vice Admiral Tim Giardina and Major Gen. Michael Carey, military commanders involved with the nation’s nuclear defenses, have also been shown the door by the president.
Retired Army Maj. Gen. Patrick Brady told WND that President Obama has forced out so many military leaders who have doubts about his policies that the nation’s armed forces no longer feel prepared to fight or to try to win armed conflicts.
“There is no doubt he is intent on emasculating the military and will fire anyone who disagrees with him” over such issues as “homosexuals, women in foxholes, the Obama sequester,” said Brady, a recipient of the military’s highest decoration, the Medal of Honor.
“They are purging everyone, and if you want to keep your job, just keep your mouth shut,” another top retired officer told WND.
“Not only are military service members being demoralized and the ranks’ overall readiness being reduced by the Obama administration’s purge of key leaders, colonels – those lined up in rank to replace outgoing generals – are quietly taking their careers in other directions,” the media outlet reports.
Retired Army Lt. Gen. William G. “Jerry” Boykin said four-star generals are being retired at an alarming rate under Obama. “Over the past three years, it is unprecedented for the number of four-star generals to be relieved of duty, and not necessarily relieved for cause.”
“I believe there is a purging of the military,” he said. “The problem is worse than we have ever seen.”
Retired Marine Corps Lt. Col. Oliver North weighed in on the issue on Mark Levin’s radio show last night.
Although “there’s a lot of dead wood wearing flags and stars … [who] wouldn’t know how to fight their way out of a paper bag,” a suspicious number of flag officers have been given walking papers by the Obama administration, he said. He continued:
There’s a group of people, and I don’t think it’s anything close to a hundred, but there’s probably several dozen who tried to do the right thing and they weren’t promoted by this administration because it was contrary to their policy whether it was the administration’s stated narrative that we’ve ended al-Qaeda, therefore we’re safe in the world, or whether it’s the stated narrative that we’re doing a pivot toward Asia which is total baloney because there’s no money to do it with, or it’s the people who want to defend America with a real serious ballistic missile defense and they were fired because they said, “hey gosh, we’re not doing what we need to do to protect the American people.”
Generals and admirals who “feel strongly that something has gone wrong and something isn’t being done right, you have a moral obligation to know, first of all, your career is probably over anyway, so have the courage to stand up at a podium, take off your stars, throw ‘em down [on] the podium, and tell the truth to the American people on your way out the door.”
This “has not happened yet and it should have happened a long time ago,” North said, adding:
The military is being turned into a laboratory for radical social engineering experiments. They’re wrecking the finest military force the world has ever known — brighter, better educated, trained, led, and now the most combat-experienced military force in the history of the world. And they’re not standing up and saying, “stop wrecking it.” This administration is intent on wrecking it.
The president has also taken some steps that seem aimed only at harming morale. Obama plans to force Marines of both sexes to don unisex headwear that critics mock as “girly hats.”
According to former Navy SEAL Carl Higbie, ranking SEAL commanders have banned their subordinates from wearing the Navy’s traditional “don’t tread on me” insignia. The patch depicting a coiled rattlesnake ready to strike is typically worn by SEALs and is a variation of the Gadsden flag, a Revolutionary era vexillological device that has been used by the U.S. Marines and Navy since 1775. In 2002 the secretary of the Navy ordered that a variation of the flag, the Navy Jack, be flown on all U.S. Navy ships for the duration of the Global War on Terror.
The Left abhors the Gadsden because it is carried at Tea Party rallies and has been used as a symbol of resistance to Obama’s authoritarianism.
Leftist influencer and all-purpose crackpot Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center describes the Gadsden flag as a symbol of hate that in “contemporary society [is] the flag of the militia movement.” The flag says “Don’t mess with us,” and implies, “Don’t mess with us at the point of a gun,” says Potok.
Since taking office in 2009, the Obama administration has been on a relentless drive to stigmatize and delegitimize opposing points of view. The administration has instructed Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials to treat conservatives and libertarians as potential terrorists. Obama’s IRS targets conservative and Tea Party groups for harassment and special investigations.
Americans ought to be alarmed that the administration is now using the same heavy-handed, un-American tactics to turn members of the nation’s armed forces against its domestic political adversaries.
We know, for example, that a January 2013 Department of Defense (DoD) diversity training center “student guide” entitled “Extremism” instructs soldiers that conservative organizations are “hate groups” and Tea Party supporters are potentially dangerous extremists.
The DoD materials not only take aim at modern conservative groups but label America’s Founding Fathers as extremists who would be unfit to serve in today’s military. The teaching guide advises that instead of “dressing in sheets,” radicals today “will talk of individual liberties, states’ rights, and how to make the world a better place.” American patriots who fought for Independence from the United Kingdom in the 1700s are identified as adhering to “extremist ideologies.”
“In U.S. history, there are many examples of extremist ideologies and movements,” the document states. “The colonists who sought to free themselves from British rule and the Confederate states who sought to secede from the Northern states are just two examples.”
The materials advise soldiers to rely on the Alabama-based neo-Marxist Southern Poverty Law Center as a resource in identifying hate groups. A 2006 report from the SPLC, essentially an anti-conservative attack machine funded by George Soros, claimed improbably that “large numbers of potentially violent neo-Nazis, skinheads, and other white supremacists are now learning the art of warfare in the [U.S.] armed forces.”
This is what happens when you make a radical left-wing community organizer Commander-in-Chief of America’s armed forces.