Stripes - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Stripes
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As Islamic militants grow more savage, as they behead Americans and terrorize regions, America’s military under President Obama continues its descent into decadence. “Pentagon says it will allow transgender people to serve,” read one headline this week.

Political correctness, not military effectiveness, remains the organizing principle of Obama’s military. His Defense Secretary, Ashton B. Carter, declared the military’s resistance to transgender soldiers “outdated,” and made it clear that the military now exists not for the purpose of winning wars but for the purpose of making American society more “equal.”

His statement on the policy change could just as easily have been issued by the EEOC. “We must ensure that everyone who’s able and willing to serve has the full and equal opportunity to do so, and we must treat all our people with the dignity and respect they deserve,” he said.

Under these egalitarian imperatives, military society has become almost indistinguishable from domestic society. Obama’s goal was to turn the military into a lab for left-wing social experimentation and he has largely accomplished it. Historians of America’s decline will no doubt note that at a time of rising Islamic militancy America’s generals were preoccupied with such pressing priorities as placing women on the front lines of combat and integrating the transgendered into the military.

Generals once only had to worry about the enemy mutilating their soldiers. Now they have to feel enthusiasm at the prospect of their own soldiers mutilating themselves. A male soldier in their units who announces to them that he wants to become a woman will have to be accommodated and his sex change will have to be financed. What traitor Bradley Manning now enjoys in prison—hormone therapy paid for by the American taxpayer—will become commonplace.

Perhaps the military will bring back the slogan “Be All You Can Be” and give it a new liberationist meaning, since, after all, the goal isn’t to retain and recruit the strongest soldiers but to satisfy the dreams of every last American, no matter how mentally ill or physically weakened by self-mutilation they are. According to Carter, the military’s traditional fixation on winning wars has led to a lot of hurt feelings: “we have transgender soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines — real, patriotic Americans — who I know are being hurt by an outdated, confusing, inconsistent approach that’s contrary to our value of service and individual merit.”

Not that Obama’s military doesn’t have exacting standards. In order to serve in his military, one must never deviate from its egalitarian goals or politically correct sensitivities. The Military Times reported this week that even beneficiaries of those policies can’t be too careful: a female general has been ousted from her position for “toxic leadership,” which apparently revolved around her outdated expectation that female soldiers perform at the same level as male soldiers and that female soldiers could avoid sexual assault by not getting drunk so often.

The general, Kate Germano, stands accused of “victim-blaming” and “gender bias.” She apparently made the mistake of assuming that equality meant men and women would be judged by the same standards, instead of interpreting equality according to the understanding liberals give the term, which rests upon the insistence that the roles of men and women in the military be the same even if they can’t perform the same tasks at the same performance level.

The general, according to the paper, was “dismayed upon arrival to find that the all-female recruit battalion was kept separate from its male counterparts for events such as the Crucible hike, the famed concluding challenge of boot camp. The unit, she found, struggled to retain adequate enlisted and officer staff because of its all-female composition, resulting in shortened rest periods between boot camp series and overworked Marines. She also discovered that the standards for female recruit performance in objective skills such as shooting were historically lower than for male recruits.”

Noticing such facts is an obvious thought crime, which she made even worse by telling her female troops that “by drinking, you are putting yourself in a position to be sexually assaulted.” That is simply not correct thinking in Obama’s military. By criticizing, not praising, her underperforming female troops, by harboring antiquated notions about “preventable” sexual assault, she made herself unfit for leadership. The military has room for everybody, she failed to see, except those who focus on victory.

George Neumayr
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George Neumayr, a senior editor at The American Spectator, is author most recently of The Biden Deception: Moderate, Opportunist, or the Democrats' Crypto-Socialist?
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