U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville and Republican Study Committee (RSC) Chairman U.S. Representative Kevin Hern authored the following op-ed in Newsweek reflecting on the need to reject woke politics in the upcoming annual defense bill.
As Congress considers the annual defense bill, it’s a good time to reflect on the legislative branch’s constitutional duty to provide for the common defense.
Throughout our history, this duty has required countering threats presented by adversarial nations overseas.
But today our military is also threatened by a serious problem at home: Joe Biden’s woke social and climate agenda.
What a difference two years makes.
Under President Donald Trump, America began the process of rebuilding our military into the most lethal fighting machine on the planet. Our adversaries were on their heels. China was facing accountability for the first time in decades. Peace was flourishing in the Middle East through the Abraham Accords. ISIS was defeated, and Iran was severely weakened.
But since Joe Biden took office, the world has become more unstable and more dangerous.
Russia has invaded Ukraine, causing the largest war in Europe since World War Two. The Taliban controls more of Afghanistan than it did on 9/11. Iran is closer to building a nuclear weapon than ever before.
Perhaps most ominous of all, China is building up its military on an unprecedented scale and acting in the belief that it can bully the United States. Just a few months ago, two dozen Chinese military planes and ships were detected near Taiwan as the U.S. military conducted drills in the South China Sea. Around the same time, a Chinese spy balloon traversed the entire continental United States.
Dangerous times like these call for a stronger and more lethal military. But Joe Biden is taking us in the opposite direction by turning the Department of Defense into yet another testing ground for his woke social and climate agenda.
Joe Biden was so insistent on imposing his vaccine mandate that he was willing to discharge more than 8,000 patriots from the ranks of our armed forces to do so.
Secretary Lloyd Austin’s first act as secretary of defense was to spend 4 million man hours forcing every servicemember to take “anti-extremism” training. The Pentagon’s own report on extremism later found fewer than 100 extremists in a 2 million-person military. In other words, 99.9 percent of our servicemembers are NOT extremists.
President Biden’s national security strategy labels climate change an “existential” threat and uses the word “climate” more times than it mentions China. In April 2021, Secretary Austin warned, “we face all kinds of threats in our line of work, but few of them truly deserve to be called existential. The climate crisis does.”
But worst of all, the Biden administration has even made radical abortion policies a priority within the military’s budget. President Biden is forcing taxpayers to fund travel and up to three weeks extra paid time off for servicemembers and their dependents to get elective abortions. The Biden administration has made the Veterans Affairs system start performing abortions for the first time in its history, and the State Department has declared abortion a “human right.”
The Pentagon has taken its eye off the ball, and it is already having an effect on our military’s effectiveness.
Last year was the worst recruiting year for the U.S. Army since the military became an all-volunteer force in 1973. Nearly every branch of our Armed Forces is on track to miss recruiting goals this year, which would be another unprecedented failure. At the same time, experts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies are sounding the alarm about the depletion of our weapons reserves.
We’re seeing the military version of “go woke, go broke.”
When the Biden administration focuses the greatest warriors in the world on social justice instead of lethality, our deterrence is weakened, and the entire rules-based international order is threatened.
If the Biden administration continues to weaken our armed forces, then Congress must act. Congress will soon consider its annual defense bill and will have not only the opportunity but the duty to put an end to the politics at the Pentagon.
As conservative leaders in Congress, we are committed to ensuring that the Congress exercises its authority to check Biden’s woke agenda and put forth a new vision for American strength and security in 2023.
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