Re-warriorizing America's Decaying Military Culture Goes Beyond Abolishing DEI

If my service in the United States Army taught me anything, it's that America needs the best defending her because America deserves the best. Back then, we focused on having the best military culture possible. No longer.

The sad fact is our nation's on track to lose the next war, a reality too many in Washington seem blithely unaware of. That we need to say this so loudly shows how far our military culture has decayed.

Yet thanks to the God-sent efforts of President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, millions of civilians are now aware of just one of the major problems facing our military: the corrosive Marxist policies Democrats have promoted since Obama. Thankfully, we rejected them in 2024.

Hegseth in particular has shone a light on the rot emanating from the senior leadership corps making many of our units and individual soldiers, sailors, and Marines unfit for combat duty. He's saved the military from Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). He's even engaged the nation in a serious and long overdue conversation about physical fitness standards throughout the services — which have been declining for years, and are nowhere near those of China and Russia.

We congratulate his success. Then we launched RestoretheMilitary.com to help him finish the job. This website showcases the worst offenders — and we're constantly adding more. These are senior officers like Admiral Derek Trinque, a far-left ideologue who praised the unconstitutional COVID mask and vaccine mandates, pushed false and partisan January 6 narratives on sailors, and pushed woke policies.

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.

Restoring Warrior Elitism

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 — any warrior crossing the Line of Departure (LD), the 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.

Warriors Only, No Exceptions

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. For those elite men who prove themselves worthy of LD status, the rewards should be high — including a 25% pay raise, funded by firing the many wasteful civilian jobs sapping Defense Department budgets.

Obtaining LD status would also entail special uniform designation — akin to green berets for Special Forces, Ranger tabs for Ranger School grads, Marine Force Recon badge. The LD designation would be worn on all uniforms: dress, utility, and physical training, creating the culture we want in the military.

Restoring the Merit Mentality at Our Academies

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.

Soldiering is a very physically demanding job for officers and enlisted alike. The answer is not mixed-gender combat units 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. A combat unit compromised by romantic entanglements between male and female soldiers is at serious risk of failing in its battlefield mission.

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.

China's Standards vs. Ours

While our military's become a petri dish for the Left's repulsive social experiments, China's training standards remain sky-high. 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.

All out commitment to winning wars at all costs will dramatically increase the number of qualified Americans enlisting in our Armed Services.

Foundation of All Future Victories

Our warrior elites cannot win wars without support from the engineers, machine operators, logisticians, and specialists working behind the lines. After World War II, America realized 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. The Pentagon blew through $200 million in munitions in just three weeks of fighting against Houthi militia. In a war with China over Taiwan, the U.S. could exhaust long-range precision missiles in less than a week.

Over 40% of the semiconductors that sustain U.S. weapons systems are sourced from China. The Gerald Ford-class supercarriers depend on over 6,500 Chinese semiconductors to operate. 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 — a decade longer than promised — and went $183 billion over budget.

The Path Forward

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.

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.

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.