A former fighter pilot who wouldn’t want to serve today
Howard Sutherland writes:
I have been reading your posts and the comments on the “repeal of Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell” (which as you note is in fact no such thing), with interest. There are many aspects of the problem, and you and correspondents have been bringing them out ably, so I won’t echo what I agree with. I will say, as one who loved being a commissioned officer and fighter pilot in the U.S. armed forces, that I cannot imagine serving in the armed forces as they are today. The combination of self-destructive overseas missions that advance no true American national interest (hardly a new problem, that) and the destruction from within of the armed forces through force-feeding into the ranks every social pathology beloved of the left makes the U.S. military today look a profoundly hostile environment for someone who thinks like me. And when I was commissioned in 1980, I hardly stood out as a reactionary!
There are obvious reasons for the Democrats’ drive to make the armed forces a happy haven for homosexuals. One that sticks out is the need to appease a wealthy, noisy, and demanding constituency whose dollars Democratic candidates crave. The other is leftist hostility to anything that smacks of traditional society and its defense. A corollary to the latter is that American liberals do not want the U.S. armed forces to be an efficient and successful fighting force. Such a thing is abhorrent to them; since the Vietnam War at least, liberals have been actively undermining military cohesion, discipline and effectiveness. There is also a hatred of manhood at work, I think. Traditional manhood is now under attack from every liberal-captured institution in society. Most people may not realize it, but the military—despite being perceived as the last bastion of high-testosterone manhood—is completely under the thumb of liberals, and—again—has been at least since Robert McNamara’s unfortunate tenure as Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson.
The first, essential step to making the military less manly was to make it more feminine. The way to do that was to introduce more and more women into the service, pretend that everything was better for their presence, start to claim that the service could not perform its missions without them and—since it’s the military we’re talking about—ruthlessly suppress dissent while promoting the toadies who are willing to push the new party line even though it is self-evidently nonsense. Prime examples today are Adm. “Mike” Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and diversity-obsessed Gen. George Casey, Army Chief of Staff. But the program hasn’t completely worked yet. Combat units remain largely male and pretty manly. Openly making women into infantrymen is something most Americans, despite all the propaganda about American Amazons, still oppose. So what better way to unman combat units than to force them to accept unmanly men, who would not be subject to the combat restrictions on women (which, of course, will be fully swept away just as soon as liberals think they can get away with it)?
So, at the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I think the push to endorse homosexuality in the armed forces is less about the “equal rights” of homosexuals than it is about ruining an institution liberals detest.
One other thing occurs to me about the “DADT repeal,” and this I admit is going out on a limb a bit. One predictable consequence of making the military more homosexual is that normal American men will be less interested in joining up. There is a solution to that problem, albeit one worse than the problem itself. One major military trend of the last decade or so has been the growing numbers of non-U.S. citizen Latin Americans, often of dubious legal status, in the ranks. Bill Clinton relaxed the requirements for non-citizen GIs to be naturalized. Mexico’s man in the White House, GW Bush, relaxed them further, making citizenship almost a sure thing for aliens who enlist. No doubt we will soon be hearing about how badly our military needs to recruit foreigners to keep the ranks full. To anyone who knows anything about the history of the Roman Empire, that’s a familiar tale and one we shouldn’t want to repeat. It strikes me, then, that one consequence of homosexualizing the military will be an accelerated drive to recruit even more Mestizo mercenaries, expanding further yet another pipeline for mass Latin American immigration into America, as for many normal American men military service becomes a job those “Americans don’t want to do.” If this occurs to me, it has probably also occurred to several of the leftists behind the DADT repeal.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 23, 2010 08:34 AM | Send