The great Rush Limbaugh said a lot of things that are timeless in their truthfulness. When it came to the military, he said two things. Number one, the primary purpose of the military is to kill people and break things. Number two, the left despises the military; they view it as nothing more than a social experiment. But President Joe Biden has accomplished one more thing. According to a recent Gallup poll, Americans’ confidence in the U.S. military is the lowest it has been in two decades. The poll was conducted from June 1 through June 22, and those polled said they are less likely to express “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in America’s fighting men and women. This poll is the latest that has shown a decline in Americans’ confidence in the military.
Since the Vietnam era, it has been a bumpy ride for the American military. From the late 1970s to the early 1980s, amid the Iran hostage crisis and the cold war with the former Soviet Union, military confidence ran between 50-58 percent. That confidence rose in general under Commander-in-Chief Ronald Reagan. There was a jump in confidence after success in the Gulf War to a record 85 percent in 1991. The last time confidence in the military was lower than the present was in 1997 at 60 percent, and immediately post-Reagan when it measured 58 percent. The period following the 9/11 terrorist attacks saw another surge and has held steady since then at around 70 percent. That number went down slightly in 2021 to 69 percent and dropped still more after Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Confidence in the military is about where it would be expected when broken down by party affiliation. Republicans are the most consistent cheerleaders for the American military for roughly the past fifty years, but even that has been on the decline, falling from 91 to 68 percent, according to Gallup. Among Independents, confidence has gone from 68 to 55 percent. Among Democrats, confidence in the military rose slightly after Joe Biden became President, but in the past year, even those numbers among Democrats have fallen off.
The Biden administration’s efforts to transform the military into a woke social experiment may have a lot to do with Americans’ lack of confidence in it, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has been on board the woke train since day one. From drag queen shows on military bases, to Critical Race Theory (CRT) being pushed on America’s service men and women, to the celebration of “Pride Month” in June, in which the Air Force posted a graphic on social media that depicted the silhouette of an Airman in front of a pride flag. But the most dangerous (and that is what this is) image to come from the “New Coke” style new woke military came in 2021, as RedState’s own Streiff reported on Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), both military veterans, who set up a hot-line of sorts for members of the military to report instances of wokeness occurring around them. One of those reports was a disturbing tweet of a picture of male soldiers being forced to wear high heels, presumably to identify with women who must wear them.
The American military is comprised of volunteers – men and women who feel called to serve and protect and defend their nation. Overall, the majority of military members have tended to be conservative and, therefore, have grown up or been exposed to and agree with more traditional American values. They join the military to defend the nation, not to be told that they are oppressed or are an oppressor based on skin color, or to celebrate Pride Month. The same people who join the military to defend the nation also know that we face grave threats from places like China and that this kind of unreadying of the military for any sort of conflict is extraordinarily dangerous. Combine all of this with an incompetent and inept Commander-in-Chief like Joe Biden, who recently told CNN while discussing the war in Ukraine, “This is a war relating to munitions. And they’re running out of that ammunition, and we’re low on it,” and you have all the makings of a military that is far short of the numbers they need, and alarmingly unprepared should they be called to engage in any sort of conflict.
Help may be on the way as House and Senate Republicans try to get a defense policy bill passed that would strip funding for any woke agenda in the U.S. military.