“US military asks the public for help finding its missing F-35 fighter jet after its pilot had to eject while training over South Carolina.”
While the above Insider headline may sound like a comedic piece straight from the pages of The Babylon Bee, it’s not. The U.S. military actually publicly claimed it had lost a multi-million-dollar fighter jet.
The loss occurred Sunday following an alleged “mishap” that required the aircraft’s pilot to eject. The F-35 purportedly kept on flying. It wasn’t until Monday evening — a day after Joint Base Charleston requested the public’s assistance in finding the missing jet — that military officials announced they had discovered a debris field “about two hours northeast” of the base.
The debacle has since prompted the Marine Corps’ acting commandant, Eric Smith, to issue a “two-day stand-down” order for all military aviation units “both inside and outside of the United States.”
A Sign of Decline
This episode raises so many questions. For one, how does the U.S. military — the supposed best and most advanced fighting force on the planet — lose a highly-valued asset, especially over U.S. soil?
Why are military bases such as Joint Base Charleston acting as landing pads for commercial planes transporting members of the People’s Republic of China — the very government trying to topple the United States as the world’s hegemon?
While it’s improbable any of these questions will actually be answered to the public’s satisfaction, the likely answers probably wouldn’t reverse Americans’ waning confidence in the ability of U.S. military leadership to defend the American homeland. Nor should they.
This week’s fighter jet fiasco is just one example of many showcasing a U.S. military in severe institutional decline. Instead of focusing on how to win wars — which should be the sole purpose of any military — top Pentagon brass have since at least the Clinton administration treated the service as one giant, left-wing social experiment.
Through its adoption and outright promotion of neo-Marxist ideologies including DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), the military has sacrificed efficiency, ruthlessness, and strength for LGBT celebrations, racial politics, and climate alarmism. A look into the backgrounds of President Biden’s many military nominees shows the primary focus of the Pentagon’s leading figures isn’t defeating communist China or protecting Americans from other international threats, it’s crafting a “diverse” and “inclusive” social club where leftist lunacy is treated as gospel and conservative “wrongthink” as extreme.
Look no further than the Pentagon’s abortion policy, which violates U.S. law in using taxpayer money to pay for female military members’ travel expenses to kill their unborn child. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Democrats have baselessly claimed for months that Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s slow-walking of Biden’s military nominees in protest of the policy harms “military readiness.”
If that’s true, then why hasn’t the Pentagon dropped its policy? If “readiness” is such a major concern, why did the military fire thousands of service members who chose not to get an experimental shot? And why isn’t Democrat Chuck Schumer using his power as Senate majority leader to approve Biden’s supposedly important nominees?
The reason, as tacitly admitted by the heads of the Army, Air Force, and Navy, is that taxpayer-funded abortions are a sacrament of the leftist religion so must be preserved at all costs. Coupled with decades of failed military adventurism and nation-building like that conducted in Afghanistan, it’s no wonder the U.S. military is facing the worst recruiting crisis since shifting to an all-volunteer force in 1973.
A High Price To Pay
The Marxist hijacking of America’s military isn’t an accident; it’s an intentional act contributing to the left’s greater plan to re-invent society. For the left, the military is just another piece on the American chessboard to coopt. It’s why the military so vigorously promotes Marxism and penalizes conservative beliefs: to dissuade the God and America-loving patriots who have largely staffed it for generations from joining or remaining in service.
As witnessed many times before, however, the leftist takeover of institutions has its costs. Only America’s “rainbow” military could cost our country its security and well-being.
For decades, the U.S. military has prevented widespread global conflict, deterring aggression from hostile actors and maintaining peace through strength. If the world’s leading aggressors no longer view America as the dominant military power, where does that leave us? If the U.S. gets dragged into a war with a rival power, can we be confident our “rainbow” fighting force can get the job done? The withdrawal from Afghanistan and growing quagmire in Ukraine atop the failed war in Iraq and our military’s distraction into identity politics don’t bode well.
Much like the missing F-35, our nation’s military is lost with no sense of direction or purpose, and those faithfully committed to the American cause are forced to bail out. Let us hope and pray for new military leadership before it’s too late.