Dear Congress: The Military is Our Fighting Force, Not Your Social Experiment

Dear Congress, 

   Our message here is simple: get back in your lane.  For as you meddle in the affairs of the Department of Defense pushing your parties’ social agendas du jour, you, at the same time, are unequivocally failing in your role to ensure that it can carry out its mission to “Deter war and ensure our nation’s security.”

There are no coincidences here: the more you micro-manage the Department of Defense in your attempt to mold it into your social Xanadus, the less Americans want to be a part of it.  Is it any wonder though?  American trust in your establishment continues to dwindle1, thus, the more you are associated with the military and the ‘management’ of it, the more it suffers from “guilt by association” with you.

In lieu of frittering your time away with peripheral non-mission-related issues within the Department, may we suggest you instead allow military leaders to lead while you focus on the following Congressional issues that actually can improve its capabilities:

1.  Think far more critically about defense expenditures.  You’re more than happy to write blank checks to our Military-Industrial Complex, while our service members and their families live in squalor2 and have their pay and benefits out-stripped by inflation and costs of living3;

2. Champion Constitutional rights for service members by defunding dysfunctional and corrupt so-called avenues of redress and justice (Inspector General, e.g.) that now provide neither for the individual service member, then, fund a mechanism that can;

3.  Help recoup the nation’s trust in the institution by holding the Department’s leadership accountable for the scores of rules, regulations, and laws they consistently violate4; 

4. Start learning.  You and two decades of your predecessors bled over $9 trillion5 in the name of the “Global War on Terror” and at the conclusion of it all, not even so much as held a meeting about it (and no, your mud-slinging campaign regarding the withdrawal6 doesn’t count).

Honorable Representative X,

  Over the course of the past month, you’ve demonstratively illustrated that you cannot keep your own House in order7 – perhaps you square that away first before dismantling another.

Sincerely,

The Walk the Talk Foundation

  1. https://news.gallup.com/poll/512651/americans-trust-local-government-congress-least.aspx ↩︎
  2. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/section/usa-military/ ↩︎
  3. https://walkthetalkfoundation.org/the-militarys-under-resourced-resource-its-most-valuable-resource/ ↩︎
  4. Title 5, Title 10, Title 50, FOIA, Privacy Act, HIPAA; to name just a few ↩︎
  5. https://www.nationalpriorities.org/cost-of/war/ ↩︎
  6. https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/press-release/subcommittee-hearing-announcement-a-failure-to-plan-examining-the-biden-administrations-preparation-for-the-afghanistan-withdrawal/ ↩︎
  7. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/patrick-mchenry-house-speaker-pro-tempore-threaten-quit-rcna121314 ↩︎