By Most people recognize that Democrats have not been a big fan of America’s military for many decades. While the party’s current nominee for vice president, Tim Walz, lied about serving in Iraq, Kamala Harris at least had the sense to pay lip service to our troops in her acceptance speech last week. That, however, didn’t sit well the sitting vice president’s family.
Newsweek noted that “in her speech at the Democratic National Convention, Harris touched on many issues, often being interrupted by clapping from the audience.
When she arrived at the topic of the military, Harris said: ‘As Vice President, I have confronted threats to our security, negotiated with foreign leaders, strengthened our alliances, and engaged with our brave troops overseas.
‘As Commander-in-Chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world. I will fulfill our sacred obligation to care for our troops and their families. And I will always honor, and never disparage, their service and their sacrifice.”
During that statement, the broadcast cameras cut to where Harris’ family were sitting. The line was received well by most of the audience, but some key members of her family appeared to keep their hands in the laps.
— Zara Rahim (@ZaraRahim) August 23, 2024
Now, it appears that after four years of a Democratic presidency, America’s military, particularly the Navy, may be the weakest it’s been in decades.
Fox News reports that The Navy will be sidling 17 vessels due to a manpower shortage.
There just aren’t enough Merchant Marines to keep all the ships going at once, according to Rear Admiral (Ret.) Mark Montgomery, senior director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation for the Foundation for Defense of Democracy, told Fox News Digital. Merchant Marines operate the many support vessels needed to keep the Navy running.
“The problem, of course, is the ships are at sea, away from home port 12 months of the year,” Montgomery said. “So you need two crews … we’re desperately short of the number of people.”
“There’s a lack of experienced merchant mariners to crew the ships, and this is really a clear danger to national security,” Montgomery added.
The ships include two replenishment ships, one fleet oiler, a dozen Spearhead-class Expeditionary Fast Transports and two forward-deployed Navy expeditionary sea bases – the USS Lewis Puller, based in Bahrain and the USS Herschel “Woody” Williams, based in Souda Bay, Greece.
The effort is known as the “great reset” and is awaiting approval from Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti. The change will reduce Navy demands for officers by 700 mariners.
In January, America’s Navy leaders warned Biden that he’d have to choose between the United States and Ukraine.
Now we know which side he chose.
During a period of global unrest Biden’s Pentagon has faced massive recruiting failures, likely stemming from vaccine mandates and a disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan that has seen both Harris and Biden pretend never happened.
Last year, according to reports, the Army missed its recruiting goal by 25 percent. It did the same in 2022. Republican Congressman Glenn Grothman identified the problem with Biden’s approach last spring after the Air Force missed its recruiting goals by 33 percent.
Liberal military leaders have an obsession with DEI.
“Our military is grappling with the Biden Administration’s social experiments of integrating principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion into their ranks to the detriment of our armed forces,” said Grothman. The military should not be focusing on divisive ideological initiatives, especially when they are failing to meet their recruitment goals by 41,000 people.
“It is troubling that the sitting Secretary of the Air Force sent a memo stating his goal was not to produce the best possible fighting force, but to achieve ‘a force more representative of our Nation’, and subsequently direct his recruiters to develop a plan that would cut the number of white males serving by 33%. This goal is just divisive and does not promote the hiring of someone based off skill, but rather on the color of their skin to check off a nonexistent box.”
“I have held two hearings on the impact of these divisive ideologies in the military, where we heard form servicemembers who were negatively impacted by extreme DEI policies, one servicemember going as far as saying he was dismissed for speaking truth to power on these policies.”
The Biden administration’s Pentagon requested $114.7 million for diversity and inclusion initiatives as part of the President’s Fiscal Year 2024 Budget request.
It’s not shocking that the Navy has seen a shortfall in mariners. In 2023, officials revealed that it had approached a “drag queen influencer” to help persuade new recruits to sign up.
“Yeoman 2nd Class Joshua Kelley, who goes by the stage name “Harpy Daniels,” announced back in November 2022 that he was the Navy’s “Digital Ambassador.” Kelley has over 1,300,000 likes on TikTok.
While Kelley’s Instagram bio shows that the performer’s opinions “are not endorsed by DoD or DoN,” the drag queen claims to have danced in drag for service officers on a number of different occasions, sharing one video from 2018.
The Digital Ambassador initiative that Kelley participated in ran from October 2022 to March 2023 and was ‘designed to explore the digital environment to reach a wide range of potential candidates,’ a Navy spokesperson told Fox News Digital. The reason, the spokesperson added, was that the Navy is navigating ‘the most challenging recruiting environment it has faced since the start of the all-volunteer force.’
‘Thank you to the Navy for giving me this opportunity! I don’t speak for the Navy but simply sharing my experience in the Navy! Hooyah, and let’s go Slay!’ the drag queen added.”
During a rally in North Carolina, former President Donald Trump said, “Kamala [Harris] and Crooked Joe purged 8,000 service members from our military for refusing their COVID vaccine mandate. They refused to do it.”
He added, “We didn’t want a mandate. The mandate — you just can’t do that.”
Trump then promised to “rehire every patriot that was fired with an apology and back pay. They will get their back pay and an apology from our government.”
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