How Obama Sabotaged the American Military
BY Herschel Smith
2 years, 4 months ago
Seen at The Gun Feed, this analysis by Daniel Greenfield.
By the time Barack Obama left office, every branch of the military was smaller than it had been on September 11. But the change in size concealed the true impact of America’s most left-wing president in undermining our national security and weakening us in the face of our enemies.
“I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone,” Obama famously boasted. He used the pen to unleash a blizzard of executive orders and memorandums. Some led to outraged protests, but some of his most devastating penned assaults on our nation’s military flew under the radar.
One of those took place during the end of his last year in office. His memorandum, “Promoting Diversity and Inclusion in the National Security Workforce”, created the woke military of the Biden administration by putting identity politics, diversity quotas, and political indoctrination at the heart of the military’s mission.
Obama had always resented the military. Even former General McChrystal, an Obama loyalist fired for describing his boss a little too aptly in the presence of a Rolling Stone reporter, described him as “uncomfortable and intimidated” by generals. But Obama’s parting shot at the military cut the generals down to size by transforming them into community organizers.
His order redefined diversity as the military’s “greatest asset” and reinvented national security as a system for maximizing employment diversity by race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and every identity politics metric, but not the military metrics that truly mattered, readiness, competence, and a willingness to wage war in defense of the homeland.
Along with transforming the military into another quota-based federal employment agency in which skills and capability mattered much less than being a disabled transgender Eskimo, the order also demanded that national security agencies should make “implicit or unconscious bias” training mandatory for “senior leadership and management positions”. Divisions that didn’t earn sufficiently high IQ (Inclusion Quotient) scores would also be hit with bias training.
Implicit bias training is a form of political indoctrination which asserts that all white people are racist. Its sessions force participants into accepting its radical racial worldview or be treated as obstacles to the new organizational mission. Implicit bias training has succeeded in forcing out talented executives from corporations and officers from the military, replacing them with political activists and bootlickers cowardly enough to repeat Marxist dogma for the sake of their careers.
Obama’s memorandum led to the expansion of implicit bias within the military such as Army Secretary Eric Fanning’s infamous Directive 2017-06 ordering mandatory implicit bias training for “soldiers and employees in senior leadership and management positions” that was protested by chaplains for infringing on religious freedom. While the Trump administration later ordered a ban on such abusive training in the military, by then Obama’s order had long since been circulating in its cultural and organizational bloodstream, and was quickly restarted by Biden.
Biden’s first executive orders not only rescinded the ban, but doubled down on making the military more woke, more racist towards white Americans, and more incapable than ever. The new equity push went even further by attributing any failure to meet racial, gender, and other identity politics quotas to the grand hoax of “systemic racism” –a practice outlawed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Meeting these quotas became the foremost task of senior leadership.
[ … ]
By Obama’s second term, male Army ROTC cadets were being forced to march in women’s high heels. The humiliating woke rituals, whose purpose is not the stated one of inclusion, but of exclusion, of demeaning and destroying the morale of the traditional fighting man, continue to hollow out the military readiness of armed services waging a culture war against themselves.
Obama’s purge ousted 197 flag officers in five years. And there is also this. “Gen. Carter Ham [was] was relieved as head of U.S. Africa Command after only a year and a half because he disagreed with orders not to mount a rescue mission in response to the Sept. 11, 2012, attack in Benghazi.”
I always knew that, and I’m certain that General Ham was forced to sign an NDA in order to retain retirement benefits.
But here’s the problem with all of that. Who followed Obama in the Oval office and issued ridiculous Tweets into the wee hours of the morning rather than studying the CVs and resumes of the people around him, and the history of this purge and how to reverse its effects in the military?
Who wore his ego and feelings on his shoulders rather than hid his true intent (like Obama) while acting under cover to effect proper change back to a more effective and less woke military?
If you cannot recall the name of the president after Obama, perform a Google search. Why should he be given a second chance to screw up his four years as badly as he did the first go-around?
Obama had the guts to fire 197 flag officers to effect his vision. Trump issued some Tweets and disbanded the Integrity in Election Commission he formed himself. Who was more effective?
On December 12, 2021 at 10:33 pm, Georgiaboy61 said:
@ Herschel Smith
Re: “Obama had the guts to fire 197 flag officers to effect his vision. Trump issued some Tweets and disbanded the Integrity in Election Commission he formed himself. Who was more effective?”
The question has to be asked: For whom did Donald Trump work? For whom does he work now?
Phrased differently, was/is Donald Trump controlled opposition? I do not have a definitive answer to those questions, except to make the same observations you have. History also provides a clue or two.
During the climax of the Russian Revolution and in its aftermath, the Cheka – the forerunner to the NKVD and ultimately the KGB – ran a disinformation campaign designed to lull White Russian forces (those opposing the communists) into believing that their side was doing better than it actually was. To give false hope of victory to them, so they would relax and not redouble their efforts to defeat the Reds.
Turning to our time, remember all the fuss about QAnon? Trump was going to expose the plot to steal the election, you just wait and see! DJT the tactical genius was playing five-level chess. These were probably disinformatzia, disinformation campaigns along the same lines as those mounted in the early 1920s against the White Russian forces.
Of course, people eventually saw through the deception, some did at any rate – but by that time, the usurper was already in the White House.
Respected analyst Brandon Smith, who has a very good record as such things go, has written that he believes Trump to be controlled opposition. The flamboyant billionaire was hired by his fellow oligarchs as the staking horse, the bad guy, in their little drama to usher in the new world order.
Again, I have no definitive proof either way, other than my sense that something does not fit, something doesn’t hang right, in this whole tale. Call it intuition, and sometimes human intuition can mislead us, but other times, it knows things that the conscious mind does not.
Folks on our side of the fence said for four years that Trump was this brilliant politician, this “stable genius” who was playing the opposition like a fiddle. Ten steps ahead of those clowns on the other side. Trump ran a brilliant and unorthodox campaign, one which caught the deep-state off-guard, but once inside the Oval Office, he made one unforced error after another.
Including, as noted, sitting by idly and doing nothing to stop the destruction of the armed forces by the ‘Woke’ crowd, the cultural marxists. Allowing the deep-state to stage a success and more-or-less open coup against him.
Or were they “unforced errors” at all? Not if he was controlled opposition.
There are other explanations for Trump’s conduct. Other analysts have speculated that DJT and his family were threatened with violence to ensure their compliance. It could have been as a simple as a copy of the Zapruder film left where he could find it and a short anonymous note saying, “Hey nice family you’ve got there….” and so on.
Given that it is water over the dam now, this is all academic. But something did not and does not square. The pieces of that particular puzzle don’t fit together logically. Not yet anyway.
In parting, I will note however, that at least in the part of rural America where I reside, “Trump” campaign signs are still up all over the place. Which means that the con – if that is what it actually was intended to be – is still working, more than a year after the stolen election.
On December 12, 2021 at 11:37 pm, Third Term said:
Barry Hussein didn’t fail and the FUSA prize will be delivered to the Long March Global Soviet.
The COV-LARP will be the end of the republic once and for all.
On December 13, 2021 at 12:41 am, Dan said:
I agree with much of what you see regarding Obama vs Trump. There are some caveats however. First of all MOST of the bureacracy of the Fed Gov is and has been leftist/commie for a LONG time. Thus they were willing and eager to assist Obama in the continued assaults on our freedom and America. And the same deep state morass of evil actively and incessantly opposed Trump at every turn. It’s actually amazing Trump accomplished ANYTHING while in office. Yes….Trump could have and should have gone through and fired anyone and everyone he could that was serving the lefts agenda. But realistically the POTUS is NOT THAT POWERFUL unless he has either the active or the tacit consent of Congress. Both Obama and Pedo Joe have the support of Congress most of the time for most issues.
Trump NEVER had the support of Congress. And as an aside….everything that happened while the SCOAMF Obama was in office was concieved, planned and implemented as a result of UNELECTED POWER BROKERS like George Soros making the decisions. Obama was the quintessential puppet…..till Biden was installed.
On December 13, 2021 at 1:36 am, Jimmy the Saint said:
Enh, Emperor Obizzle I may have sabotaged the military, but the military itself – as an institution – participated rather eagerly.
On December 13, 2021 at 2:41 am, Georgiaboy61 said:
@ Dan
Re: “First of all MOST of the bureacracy of the Fed Gov is and has been leftist/commie for a LONG time. Thus they were willing and eager to assist Obama in the continued assaults on our freedom and America. And the same deep state morass of evil actively and incessantly opposed Trump at every turn. It’s actually amazing Trump accomplished ANYTHING while in office.”
That is certainly one of the possibilities any clear-thinking person must consider when trying to piece together what happened during Trump’s years in office.
And you are absolutely correct: The President of the United States is a powerful man, but not all-powerful. If the permanent federal bureaucracy wants to impede a chief executive’s agenda or plans, it has a multitude of ways in which to do it.
That said, what I find almost inexplicable is the degree to which Trump, who is supposed to be this great judge of people, character and talent – surrounded himself with so many people who were either incompetent, disloyal or both.
Being successful in the business world is a dog-eat-dog undertaking. As Andrew Grove, the electronics executive once said, only the paranoid survive. To have risen as far and as fast as Trump did in the private sector, but then to fail in such basic and avoidable ways in the public sector as POTUS, it really makes me scratch my head in bewilderment. Maybe I’m missing something, but as of right now, something doesn’t add up.
One possible explanation sounds implausible, but may factor into it: Is it possible that DJT was naive to how Washington, D.C. functions? How dirty and backstabbing it can be? You’d think that a street-smart character like Trump – from New York no less! – would have “been there, done that” as far seeing the best and worst in people…. but perhaps not.
Nevertheless, history is not going to treat Trump’s tenure kindly, primarily because he failed to discharge his duty as CIC/President when he knew the election was fraudulent, and also when he saw that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were committing what amounts to treason or at least dereliction of duty. And also for his role in rolling out the covid-19 vaccine program, i.e., “Operation Warp-Speed.” What’s up with that?? Yeah, I know the man isn’t a physician or scientist, but was his advice really that bad? And he’s also the person responsible for Fauci being where he is. Trump should have fired that guy and then told DOJ to charge him with everything in the book…. but he didn’t. Why not?
I realize there are people who will believe that I am being too-hard on the man, but I beg to differ. The job requires whoever holds it to do his duty, nothing more and nothing less, and the blunt fact is that Trump failed to do it.
Re: “Obama was the quintessential puppet…..till Biden was installed.”
I agree with your analysis vis-a-vis George Soros. He’s a big-time Democrat operative and he was involved in various schemes and plots with BHO and his people almost from the start. That putsch in the Ukraine in 2014 had his fingerprints all over it, i.e., those of his NGOs operating there and with the CIA.
But, IMO, you have backwards regarding who is the puppet and who isn’t. Obama was his own man, it is Biden who is the puppet. In fact, around these parts, we’re taken to referring to Biden either as Xi Jinping’s pet in the White House …. or Obama’s!.
On December 13, 2021 at 3:20 am, Georgiaboy61 said:
In history, the communists/left always move to seize control of the enforcement arms of the state when they gain power, namely the police and the armed forces.
For most of our history as a nation – as a constitutional republic – the armed forces have been one of the strongest bastions of traditional American values. For that reason, as an institution, the left has been unceasingly attacking the armed forces for a very long time.
Of course, the political left hasn’t always been so brazened in their aims. Back in the 1970s, changing the basic character of the military was phrased in terms of “equal rights,” and not as the ideological terra-forming of the armed forces underway today. There are many culprits responsible for the sad state of today’s ‘woke’ armed forces, and not only in the present.
Going back to the 1970s, and the formation of the AFV, both the senior civilian and military leadership failed to do their jobs – to discharge their duties – regarding the protection of the armed forces and their ability to perform the missions they are assigned by the nation. Specifically, the women’s rights movement was a big deal then, and after a great deal of political infighting, the much-ballyhooed “all-volunteer force” was inaugurated.
Not many years after that, around the time Jimmy Carter was in office, the first waves of large numbers of women entered the armed forces, including the service academies. And that’s when all the fun-and-games started, and all of the lying, cover-ups and the like by the Pentagon-DOD and the respective service chiefs.
Objectively-speaking, men and women are different. The science, as the left likes to say in other times and places, is “settled.” More to the point, they are not interchangeable. The problem with the AVF right from the start is that it was premised upon treating them as if they were interchangeable, when they are most-certainly not.
Feminists such as Rep. Pat Schroeder of Colorado and her allies worked very hard to liken the drive to get women “equally-represented” in the armed forces to that of the civil rights era for blacks, but that was/is a logical fallacy. But the left was successful in getting women into the armed forces in large numbers, because the notion was sold to official Washington that “anything a man can do, so can a woman.” The fix was in from that point onward.
Almost immediately, by the early-mid 1980s, the army discovered that female recruits could not perform basic soldierly tasks most men find to be easy, such as racking back the charging handle on a machine-gun or throwing a grenade far-enough to hurt the enemy.
A case in point was the army’s standard fragmentation grenade proficiency test at the time, which involved the soldier pulling the pin on a grenade, and then throwing it overhand at a designated target some safe distance away. Female personnel, however, it was discovered were almost all incapable of hefting the grenade far-enough or accurately-enough to pass the test. Worse, it was discovered that the women could not throw a live grenade far-enough to escape its blast cone (radius of lethality).
Now, in the face of such blatant failure, it would logical, would it not, to go back to the higher-ups and ask that personnel policies be changed to ban women from any MOS where they might be called upon to throw a live grenade? Or better yet, reconsider the whole rationale of the new force structure. But that’s not what happened: “Big Green” instead hid the problem and then quietly changed the grenade toss to making it easier for women to pass. The test was changed to having a recruit throw an armed grenade underhanded over a wall, an action which the women found much easier.
This was only one such incident among dozens and then hundreds, and ultimately thousands – across all of the branches of service – which were pencil-whipped out of existence, hidden from the public, or lied about in Pentagon PR/press releases.
The point is not that women did not bring positive attributes to the services; they may very well have done so. It is that they were never, from the very first, held to the same standards of performance as the men in uniform. And it is also that there was never an unbiased accounting of how women were doing in the new sexually-integrated coed military. The fix was in right from the start: Women were to be portrayed in the best possible light at all times.
Perhaps the worst falsehood or lie was the underhanded manner in which Big Green (the U.S. Army) and then the other services handled the vast disparity between male and female physical fitness attainment. Rather than admit that women and men are not alike, and cannot perform alike – as any honest and ethical person would – the Pentagon/DOD and the services instead created the “gender-norming” system. The army in particular boasted that it was a fair-and-just system, but that’s utter poppycock.
“Gender-norming” is nothing more than a handicapping system – not unlike that used by golfers to allow people of different skill levels to play. The women get easier physical fitness tests (PFTs), but are awarded the same number of points for completing them as the men, or more, depending on the precise situation. The grunts have to do a certain number of pull-ups, but the gals? They get to simply hang on the bar, stationary, against the stopwatch. A much easier task… but they get the same points for completing the test.
Long story short, once the Pentagon/DOD – meaning the highest-ranking civilians and flag-general officers – started lying about these things, then it became that much easier to lie about others, too.
The sad fact is that the armed forces have been lying to themselves, to their personnel and the American public – for decades now, going back at least thirty years, and really more like forty. First, they started lying about “small things,” but finally it ended up being about bigger things, too, like the debacle in Afghanistan.
And perhaps saddest and most-disappointing of all, very few senior officers have “fallen on their swords,” as the saying goes, and sacrificed themselves to lay these grave problems before the public. That was their duty, but most played the inside-the-beltway game instead to keep their pensions and those sweet retirement gigs on the boards of defense contractors. As the late Colonel David Hackworth termed them, they were “perfumed princes,” courtiers in uniform and not serious men doing a serious job.
On December 13, 2021 at 5:49 am, Joe Blow said:
Agree with GeorgiaBoy (what I read….)
Trump had his chance. He did many great things while in office.
He never once even looked for the drain for the swamp.
Hillary never got even a harsh question.
Ignorant of how ‘it all worked?’.. Ssshhyeah, got a bridge in Brooklyn for ya.
On December 13, 2021 at 7:39 am, Fred said:
“We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded,” Obama said in July 2, 2008.
That army is still being built, trained, and equipped. They’ll go neighborhood by neighborhood, door to door one day. Meanwhile the right piddles.
On December 13, 2021 at 7:41 am, ragman said:
I am more concerned with the upcoming presidency of hillary clinton. She will be crowned sometime in’22. Biden is removed early, cameltoe becomes president and appoints hildabeast vp. All she needs is a simple majority vote of affirmation in both the house and senate. Then cameltoe giggles herself out of a job and is removed. Hillary becomes president. Game over.
On December 13, 2021 at 9:31 am, George 1 said:
I must agree with Georgiaboy61. You cannot rule out that Trump was/is controlled opposition. You can look back over his presidency and it is clear that he got rid of people who were good Americans and kept/installed people who were anything but good Americans.
The most recent evidence is Trump’s stubborn adherence to the Covid narrative. If the man can’t look at data from around the world and conclude that something is very wrong with the not vax then there can be only two conclusions. He is either dumb as a rock. Or he is part of the problem.
On December 13, 2021 at 9:45 am, Ned said:
OT – but noteworthy – narcissist Trump also still pushes the vaxx. He’s a conspirator to mass murder. Why is he getting a pass?
On December 13, 2021 at 11:10 am, JoeFour said:
Word association … starting with … Trump … (but in no particular order afterwards)
… Trump
… bully (remember the Republican “debates”?)
… salesman (real estate, cars, or ham sandwiches … take your pick)
… narcissist (tweets and more tweets)
… can take a punch but can’t (or won’t) punch back (tweets and more tweets)
… sound instincts that he is easily talked out of implementing (has zero supporting convictions)
… no ability (or desire) to accurately judge a man’s character
… dumb as a rock (checkers not chess)
… does whatever the last person who talked to him wants him to do (especially if that last person is his son-in-law)
… all hat, no cattle (if he lived in Texas)
… overly impressed with authority figures (generals and admirals most of all)
…. expert at stringing together incomplete sentences (and repeating sentence fragments)
… hates homework (especially if it involves reading)
… a huge, bitter disappointment!
On December 13, 2021 at 12:54 pm, Frank Clarke said:
What could we have done differently in 2020? In 2016? In 2012? (I can keep doing this all day.)
The answer to all those questions is: “you could have voted third-party”. Someone will surely say “Oh, but that would have made things sooo much worse!”
Oh, yeah? How, exactly?
On December 13, 2021 at 5:56 pm, Glenn said:
I usually agree with posts here but not this one. Trumpster was an outsider from the beginning. He was met with a swamp deeper than he imagined. As for his tweets so what!!!!!!! 24/7 media opposition to him from the the first thru last day of his presidency. Nothing wrong with his tweets. Hillary was to finish the “fundamental transformation” but Trumpster got in the way. He had to be destroyed and it was finally accomplished on election night 2020.
On December 13, 2021 at 7:51 pm, Herschel Smith said:
How much time did he spend on his tweets? Every second of that time is time he should have spent trying to understand what Obama did to the military, reading the CVs of people he was putting around himself, and a thousand other things.
He willingly appointed Barr to be AG. Barr defended Lon Horiuchi. I know that, and if I know that, he can know that too.
He willingly left Comey in place, and then let McCabe run the show for a while. I knew Comey was corrupt, and I knew McCabe was corrupt way back when he was in Florida.
If I know that, he could know it too.
Almost all the damage inflicted on Trump was self-inflicted.
On December 13, 2021 at 9:52 pm, Mike S said:
Trump was imperfect in many ways but look at the economy he produced. Cutting regulations, record low unemployment, sanctions on China which forced their hand to sign a trade deal in December 2019 which rubbed China raw. I think this was his major focus, it was a world he understood, and he knew what would work. I think he thought it would be enough, he did get 76 million votes in 2020, more than any incumbent or candidate in history. Biden got 81 million, I think illegitimately, there were 5 million MORE ballots than registered voters. That is a fact. The election, via electoral votes in the battleground states, was settled by less than 50,000 votes.
I think Trump made some very bad choices in his cabinet. Gary Cohn, Mnuchin, Tillerson, Mattis were abysmal. Mattis for me was the most surprising disappointment. He had the potential to turn the military around, end the forever war in the Middle East, cashier the traitors, and get rid of the military’s transgender policy. For a guy who was supposedly all about “making the military more lethal” he failed miserably on that score, as I cannot fathom how having transgenders serving, much less paying for their transition, improves lethality, but I can certainly see it getting in the way of it.
Worst of all was his reliance on his daughter and his precious son in law for advice. They are both liberals, and I am sure, one day want to return to respectable society in New York and no doubt shaded their opinions to advance that goal. After all, Daddy isn’t going to live forever.
On December 13, 2021 at 10:11 pm, Herschel Smith said:
@Mike S,
I agree with all of that. Trump was trying to renegotiate all of the treaties and deals post-WWII. I wish he could have succeeded in that goal.
Alas, he surrounded himself with the enemy.
I too now loath Mattis and his predilections. He was a huge disappointment.
On December 14, 2021 at 12:35 am, Georgiaboy61 said:
@ Joe Blow
Re: “Hillary never got even a harsh question.”
This is one of the things which has troubled me about DJT from the start. His apparent closeness and friendship with the Clintons. I recognize that in the kinds of circles of ambitious and powerful people in which Trump was accustomed to running, sometimes necessitated dealing with unsavory and/or unscrupulous people. However, that being said, Trump seems to like the Clintons… or at least seems not to harbor them any ill will. And that’s a big problem.
On December 14, 2021 at 12:44 am, Georgiaboy61 said:
@ Herschel Smith
Re: “I too now loath Mattis and his predilections. He was a huge disappointment.”
As a military historian, naturally I had heard the various reports about Mattis from people in and out of the Marine Corps. Everything from reports proclaiming him to be the next incarnation of Chesty Puller to people claiming he was a fraud and a fake. But having been burned in the past by trusting second-hand appraisals from others, I kept my own council and waited for something that would signal his intentions and mindset clearly. I didn’t have long to wait: Mattis came out against the right to keep/bear arms and in favor of gun control. That’s a deal-breaker with me. Full-stop, do not pass go.
And sure enough, Mattis eventually outed himself as a deep-state stooge and perfumed prince in other ways.
The “real” Chesty Puller would have kicked his miserable butt up-and-down the parade ground…. chewing him out all the while.