Secretary of the Army Guarantees a Lot of Young Soldiers Will Die but Has the Right Thoughts and Feelings

streiff reporting for RedState 

The US Army is a barking shambles. In Fiscal Year, the Army missed its recruiting goal by 15,000 soldiers or 25% of its goal (Military Recruiting Numbers Lowest Since the Vietnam War). At the end of the fiscal year, the Army was supposed to have 485,000 soldiers, but it only had 466,000. That shortfall of 19,000 soldiers is the equivalent of disbanding five of the Army’s 31 brigade combat teams. While we can quantify the number of soldiers not enlisted, what is much more difficult is to put a number on those who have voted with their feet because of Army leadership that has become highly politicized and the men — fathers, teachers, coaches, and family members — who will actively discourage young men from enlisting because the Army no longer represents American values (Army Backs off Enlisting High School Drop Outs but the Woke Cancer Killing Enlistments Remains Stronger Than Ever).

A Reagan National Defense Survey late last year found a decreased confidence in the military among respondents, with 62 percent believing military leadership has become overly politicized, and 50 percent believing “so-called ‘woke’ practices” were undermining military effectiveness.

Things will be better next year because the Army has asked to reduce its end strength to 473,000, so they’ll come closer to making their recruiting goal. In addition to cutting end strength, the Army plans to focus on recruiting more women and immigrants to compensate for the loss of the evil, retrograde, and disfavored pale, penis people hailing from rural America. The people who have historically been the backbone of the Army but who are now told they are no longer welcome. The biggest enemy the Army has to combat right now is sexual harassment, a self-inflicted wound brought on by the Army’s own policies.

Army leadership is much more devoted to diversity, inclusion, and equity programs and ensuring enough genders are represented (Army Starts Sham Investigation Into Bondage Fetish Colonel and His Friends Because They Think You’re Stupid) than to combat training. According to an official Army publication, two decades of nation-building has eliminated the 40 years of experience and doctrinal development after Vietnam and calls into question whether the Army has the ability to fight and win battles.

Before 2001, when the National Training Center (NTC) was the keystone event in every brigade training cycle, battalion and brigade commanders brought with them a sacred institutional knowledge gained through experience. Hard lessons-learned created leaders who bore the knowledge of
past battles, engagements and experiences through fighting a lethal and thinking enemy. As the bridge between operational art and tactics, these lessons were the most valuable tool a battalion commander could distribute across the force.

These documented experiences, augmented with decades of experience from senior noncommissioned officers (NCOs), especially master gunners (MGs), enabled our junior leaders to develop the tactics and leadership skills that made America’s armored formations the most formidable and lethal in the world.

However, the shift to the counterinsurgency (COIN) environment rendered these lessons-learned about how to approach decisive-action engagements at NTC obsolete. With the return to great-power competition, today’s Armor force faces the loss of institutional knowledge across the force when it comes to decisive-action engagements.

But Biden’s Secretary of the Army, Christine Wormuth, a career Democrat political apparatchik, has it under control.

This is insane. But we’ve seen this movie before and know how it ends.

In the rainy predawn darkness of July 5, 1950, two US Army rifles companies reinforced by six howitzers—about four hundred men in all—dug in on a saddle-shaped hill straddling a highway just north of Osan, South Korea.

…

Around 0730 local time, a column of thirty-three North Korean tanks moving south became visible on the highway. They were Soviet-made T-34s, the same tanks used to defeat Nazi Germany in World War II. When the lead enemy tanks were four thousand yards away, the American howitzers opened fire. To their surprise, most of their artillery shells ricocheted off the tanks’ angular steel armor. A heroic second lieutenant, Ollie Connor, was even more shocked when he fired twenty-two rockets with a bazooka at the lightly armored back of a T-34 that was only fifteen yards away, and they bounced off. By 1000, the harassed North Korean tank column had rumbled down the highway that bisected Smith’s defensive position and disappeared to the south. The artillerymen had destroyed two tanks and disabled two more, but in the process the forward howitzer’s crew had expended all six of the task force’s precious antitank rounds, their only weapon that could penetrate the armor of a T-34. Task Force Smith had seen tanks and not run, but it had also learned it was impotent against armor. The tanks had cut the communications wire connecting the infantry and artillery, overrun the artillery positions, and inflicted an unknown number of casualties, leaving the task force battered.

At about 1115, another North Korean column appeared. It stretched six miles to the horizon and included tanks and thousands of infantry. Task Force Smith opened fire again, but within half an hour, they were surrounded, and North Korean tanks were raking their positions with machine-gun and cannon fire. Any of the arrogance that MacArthur had hoped for and that the soldiers still had evaporated, and many began to “bug out,” a polite term for desertion. Outnumbered and outgunned, Smith ordered a retreat, abandoning the dead, the wounded who couldn’t walk, and the howitzers. By the end of the day, 150 American soldiers were dead, wounded, or missing, and the North Koreans’ advance continued for weeks more.

This is the story of the first meeting of US troops with the North Korean Army. The unit was 1st Battalion, 21st Infantry, also known as Task Force Smith for its commander, Lieutenant Colonel Charles B. Smith.

The unit was soft from garrison life in Japan, it was essentially untrained as occupation duties had a higher priority, and it was equipped with s***, but it was the best s*** the US Army had in the Far East. It was sent after the North Korean invasion because it had the highest level of readiness in MacArthur’s Army in Japan.

In 1989, Army Chief of Staff Gordon Sullivan made the slogan “No More Task Force Smiths” the watchword for the post-Cold War drawdown and the Peace Dividend that gutted the US military. For years, Army leadership was able to make the slogan stick, but no more.

The Army is coming off losing two consecutive wars in twenty years. It has been through the cultural equivalent of a prison shower. It is commanded by people focused on national politics and not on warfighting. There is a great deal of reason to wonder if warfighting remains a priority. While climate change may or may not be real, a “floating solar array” at Fort Bragg, or whatever the hell the woke-ists plan on calling it this week, is not going to affect anything. The Army can’t even fill its own ranks, how does it expect to fight the scourge of global warming. Wormuth should be backing away from this bullsh**. The “resilience” she should be worrying about is the resilience of US troops clashing with the Chinese Army.

Focusing on solar panels is not only not going to save the planet, it is going to kill American soldiers. Assuming anyone working for Joe Biden cares.