Re-warriorizing America’s decaying military culture goes beyond abolishing DEI.

It’s going to take more than one presidential term to re-internalize lethality and morality into every part of the Armed Forces’ culture, from senior officers down to new enlistees in basic training.

That’s our goal: A total reenvisioning of America’s fighting culture from top to bottom. Let’s draw upon our storied history while planning for the next American century, but let’s not let our history dictate our future. It’s time to think big, and correctly. Success is defined as fully re-warriorizing the culture of our Armed Forces. We want nothing less than a class of true killers ready to go down-range at a moment’s notice and an excellent support class helping those combat warriors get the job done.  

Forget incremental fixes—we need a moonshot that inspires and challenges every service to think big… because the threats we face abroad are that serious.

Here’s why.

The military has one clear purpose: Fight wars—and win. Our forefathers were clear and honest about it until they renamed the War Department the “Defense Department” in 1947. It’s time to change it back.

Fundamentally, soldiers, sailors, Marines, guardians, and airmen are supposed to be there to do what civilians need them to do but can’t do themselves. That’s the dividing line between professional warfighters and everyone else.

Yet there’s another crucial cultural dividing line inside the military between the warrior class and warrior support, one that’s almost completely eroded. Restoring it is the only way we forge the kind of military our country deserves to compete abroad and earn its keep from taxpayers.

We need to establish a new, highly elevated physical fitness standard for down-range warriors. By down-range, specifically I mean any warrior crossing the Line of Departure, or LD, which is a geographical line on a battle plan past which enemy contact is inevitable. The LD Fitness Standard should be attaining the top quartile of the Marine Corps Physical Fitness Test and Combat Fitness Test in your age group. Getting to that level of physical fitness and maintaining it makes you the real deal.  

This must be the model for the warrior class that crosses the LD for every service. Anyone else need not apply.

The true warrior’s test is whether he can overcome the most rigorous physical readiness requirements. Compromise here is fatal, so let’s be blunt: Only heterosexual males who surpass LD Fitness Standards—scored monthly—should be allowed to cross that line. Fail it, and you lose LD status for a year and are reassigned to a warrior support role.  

For those elite men who prove themselves worthy of LD status, the rewards should be high. And for the toughest among them—the men who score in the top 25% quartile of the Marine Corps Physical Fitness Test and Combat Fitness Test —a bigger prize still: A 25% pay raise, funded by firing the many wasteful civilian jobs sapping Defense Department budgets. This would be akin to codifying the hazard pay concept into a permanent, service-wide commitment to elevating warriors over everyone else. As a nation, we should be willing to compensate them for their willingness to bear the immense burden of combat. 

Obtaining LD status would also entail special uniform designation. Think of green berets for Special Forces, Ranger tabs for Ranger School grads, Marine Force Recon badge, etc. which act to distinguish one special group from the rest. The LD designation would be worn on all uniforms: dress, utility, and physical training. Having these designations creates the culture we want in the military. They become a physical reflection of the discipline, courage, and devotion to duty these LD warriors possess. The warrior supporters will know what it took for them to get that designation and will increase their willingness to offer impeccable support for these warriors. 

I am a proud West Point graduate. As West Point goes, so goes the U.S. military, the country, and the world. So it’s deeply concerning to see mandatory “Diversity & Inclusion Studies” and “Race, Gender, & Sexuality” courses infiltrate the school Thomas Jefferson founded in 1802 to produce the finest military officers in the world. Academic rigor remains high; but education alone can’t win wars.

Soldiering is a very physically demanding job for officers and enlisted alike. The answer is not mixed-gender combat units—or mixed-up transgender soldiers—compromised by fragility in the field. In combat, lives depend on trusting the men around you. A unit bolstered by brotherly love and esprit de corps is an effective fighting force on the battlefield. A combat unit compromised by romantic entanglements between male and female soldiers, or gay and trans soldiers, is at serious risk of failing in its battlefield mission and possible complete annihilation.

Besides rewarding merit over skin color and sex, this is crucial for combatant commanders to determine how many LD troops they need for combat engagements in their respective theatres.  Those numbers will drive the recruiting goals and specialty classifications needed.

We spend more money than any nation on defense. But bad leadership has systematically weakened physical fitness standards over the past three decades to accommodate political priorities. A 2015 Marine Corps study found that 0% of women could complete its basic infantry course, while 71% of males could.

Marines tested sex-integrated units as early as 1998. Predictably, it was a total disaster. Female Marines could not physically tolerate the unsanitary combat conditions after just 12 days in the field. Females were as much as 6 times more likely to get injured in the field.

The Clinton administration buried the results.

Secretary Hegseth’s order restoring sex-neutral standards is a great start, but by itself won’t cut it if standards across the board are too low. The Army Combat Fitness test gives candidates 2 minutes to perform just 10 push-ups, and 22 minutes to run 2 miles—practically a walking pace. The Navy is so desperate for recruits it began admitting enlistees who score 50% on the ASVAB entry test, even without a high school diploma or GED. Biden even floated allowing calculators to do basic math on the test.

Standards are lower still for female troops—including males who call themselves women. Under Biden, the military permitted servicemen who “medically transition” into women to meet female fitness standards (and use female bathing and berthing facilities).

Despite dropping training standards, the services still routinely miss recruitment targets. The solution is not drafting women to fight wars, as radical feminists have suggested. It’s immoral and ineffective. God made males to fight battles. Period. The best generals throughout history, from Joshua to Eisenhower, knew that righteousness wins wars. The United States is, and will always be, a Christian nation; now let’s start acting like it before we can expect God to grant us the victory. All out commitment to winning wars at all costs will dramatically increase the number of qualified Americans enlisting in our Armed Services.

Our warrior elites cannot win wars without support from the engineers, machine operators, logisticians, and specialists working behind the lines to keep them mission-ready. Our mistake was blurring the dividing line that separates them.

After World War II, America realized that we must be prepared to fight two major wars at the same time. Today we’re unprepared to fight even one.

Commitments in Ukraine and Yemen have drained us of valuable weapons stockpiles that can’t be quickly replaced in a long war against a foreign power such as Communist China. The Pentagon blew through $200 million in munitions in just three weeks of fighting against Houthi militia—and tied up two aircraft carriers, Patriot and THAAD anti-air defenses, and numerous B-2 bombers and fighter aircraft to do it.

In a war with China over Taiwan, the U.S. could exhaust long-range precision missiles—crucial to preventing enemy marines from landing on Taiwanese soil—in less than a week. In a grinding war of attrition against a near-peer rival, that means defeat.

Aiding Kiev has emptied our arsenal of Stinger surface-to-air and Javelin anti-tank missiles—some of which even ended up in the hands of Mexican drug cartels. We don’t have the 1940s manufacturing base to replenish those losses like we once did.

The Army was already cutting production of critical 155mm howitzer artillery shells months before the Russians invaded Ukraine in 2021. For more than a year, in 2014–2015, we produced zero new shells. Then engineers halved production again in 2021 after discovering many were faulty. A plan to replace the Virginia plant that produces them is over a decade behind schedule—and many of the chemicals are made in China and India.

Germany supplies the specialty glass tubes used in night-vision systems. Japan and Europe source all the proprietary carbon fibers used in missiles and satellites, setting up a weak point for hostile submarines and aircraft to cut off our resupply. That’s to say nothing of our reliance on our top rival: China.

Over 40% of the semiconductors that sustain U.S. weapons systems are sourced from China. The Gerald Ford-class supercarriers, for instance, depend on over 6,500 Chinese semiconductors to operate, as do many of our other ships. Between 2005 and 2020, the number of Chinese suppliers to our defense-industrial supply chain quadrupled.

Then there’s the red tape. In 1968, it took just two years from design to production to build the first F-14 Tomcats. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter took 23 years to bring to production—a decade longer than promised—and went $183 billion over budget. Each F-35 costs roughly $100 million to manufacture.

The Navy estimates it needs 35,000 more sailors to support President Trump’s planned 355-ship fleet. But America has too few shipbuilding facilities and workers to even build them. From 2005–2020, the U.S. Navy added just 5 warships while China added 144.

Solving this massive problem will require a laser focus on military readiness. Our goal should be a Strategic Ammunition and Equipment Reserve, mirroring the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve, brimming with enough ammunition and equipment to fight two wars simultaneously for one year. It must only be tapped in times of war.

We cannot depend on foreign countries to defend us. All military equipment, including every component of every weapons system in use, must be manufactured in the United States by law. No potential enemy can be involved in producing U.S. military equipment and arms whatsoever. That is non-negotiable.

Preparing the equipment our warriors will need to win a protracted war is the number one job of the support class. Nothing else comes close in importance. In a major power war, the United States must be able to arm, fuel, and supply its armies and navies without relying on anyone else—particularly potential enemies such as China.

Time is running out. We live in a much more dangerous world than when I served in the Army years ago. Today, we’re closer than ever to the next world war. America’s military needs to get back to basics—and that means total, radical, visionary transformation from top to bottom. With RestoretheMilitary.com, we mean to see it through… starting with the officers dragging our military down.

Failure is unacceptable.