Florida Rep. Greg Steube is urging the Pentagon to get back to its main mission: fighting and winning wars and skipping the indoctrination into “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
On Friday, the Sarasota Republican introduced a resolution that also called on the Republican-led House of Representatives “to restore the Department of Defense’s superior warfighting principles of recruiting, assigning, training, promoting, and retaining personnel solely based on merit and ensuring such personnel maintain and display a warrior ethos.”
Steube highlighted the resolution in an email to constituents on Sunday.
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In a statement, he explained why the resolution was needed, and praised Florida lawmakers for actually raising the issue of how the Pentagon has gotten off track under President Joe Biden.
“The United States of America is known around the world to have superior warfighting principles, but under the Biden Administration, the Department of Defense has engaged in practices to erode those principles,” Steube said in the statement.
“The U.S. military should be focused on unit effectiveness and mission accomplishment, yet primary determinants of how the military forces should be comprised now include overemphasizing gender, gender identity, race, and sexual preference. These decisions, and others, have led U.S. military dominance to be called into serious question.”
“It’s time Congress recognizes that restoring a merit-based system in our military is the only way to ensure the safety and security of the American people,” the congressman added.
In May, the Legislature passed a resolution called a memorial that was proposed by Sen. Jay Collins, a Tampa Republican who is a former Green Beret and a Purple Heart recipient.
In the memorial, Collins wrote that the U.S. military’s “dominance in warfighting came about through reliance on the concept of meritocracy, in which personnel are recruited, assigned to specialties, assigned to positions within a unit, retained, and promoted based on their demonstrated aptitude and performance in the roles they are assigned to perform, regardless of their race, gender, sexual preference, or other person-centric identifiers.”
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But, “over the past several years, the United States Department of Defense and its military services have engaged in various practices eroding these warfighting principles to the point at which United States military dominance has been called into serious question.”
According to Collins, those practices include:
Overemphasizing and relying on DEI as a “primary determinant” in how military forces should be comprised;
Imposing mandatory and “nonsensical ‘unconscious bias’ training” for all military and civilian personnel;
Instituting mandatory COVID-19 vaccines without regard to individual medical concerns.
Requiring mandatory training at the Air Force Academy to incorporate “person-centered” and gender-neutral language when describing individuals and to request cadets to consider using the term “parent” or “caregiver” rather than mother or father;
Collins noted that such practices are having a “detrimental effect” on recruiting. The Army was 15,000 soldiers short of its 2022 recruiting goals, the worst recruiting year on record since the military implemented the all-volunteer force 50 years ago.
“The combination of an incapable and uninterested recruiting age group and non-merit-based practices calls into serious question whether the United States military currently has a sufficient number of members who hold a warrior ethos needed to effectively engage an enemy,” the memorial stated.
Meanwhile, “those with the necessary warrior ethos currently serving in the United States military are more likely to leave service, and those with the necessary warrior ethos before entering into service are more likely to refrain from enlisting.”
By adopting the memorial, the Legislature urges Congress to prohibit the use of “woke” social engineering and experimentation practices, which are “eroding military effectiveness,” and to mandate a return to a merit-based system.
The memorial passed overwhelmingly, although 29 Democrats in the Florida House and Senate opposed it.
Steube, in May, also introduced the ”Eliminate DEI in the Military Act,” which would prohibit federal funding from being used for any DEI program in the military, including the service academies.
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