A Feature, Not a Bug

Via Stacy McCain: General: Military ‘Degraded’ by Obama

Barbara Hollingsworth at CNS News reports:

The military readiness of the United States is being “degraded by social experimentation,” Maj. Gen. Robert Dees (U.S. Army-Ret.) said Saturday at the Values Voter Summit in Washington.
Dees said that the Obama administration’s use of the military for “social engineering” on controversial gay and gender issues is detrimental to the nation’s ability to defend itself.
“Not only are we losing physical readiness to fight, we have to fix the problem of moral readiness,” he said on a panel chaired by Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin (US Army-Ret.).
“I think the moral readiness of our forces is even more important than the physical readiness, which is very low,” Dees later told CNSNews.com. “The moral readiness is degraded by social experimentation within our military.
“In fact, social experimentation is improperly named because it’s not an experiment at all. It’s a top-driven mandate for social agendas that occurs by this administration within the military, which is a captive audience.
“It is not enhancing our readiness; it declines our readiness. We’re spending more time on some of these social engineering projects than we are on developing and maintaining readiness in our force.”

Meanwhile, at People magazine, Susan Keating reports:

Way back in January, long before the first women attended the Army’s elite Ranger School – one of the most grueling military courses in the world — officials at the highest levels of the Army had already decided failure was not an option, sources tell PEOPLE.
“A woman will graduate Ranger School,” a general told shocked subordinates this year while preparing for the first females to attend a “gender integrated assessment” of the grueling combat leadership course starting April 20, sources tell PEOPLE. “At least one will get through.”
That directive set the tone for what was to follow, sources say.
“It had a ripple effect” at Fort Benning, where Ranger School is based, says a source with knowledge of events at the sprawling Georgia Army post. “Even though this was supposed to be just an assessment, everyone knew. The results were planned in advance.”
On Tuesday, PEOPLE revealed that Oklahoma Republican Rep. Steve Russell had asked the Department of Defense for documents about the women who attended Ranger School after becoming concerned that “the women got special treatment and played by different rules,” sources say.

Read the whole thing. It will make your blood boil. These women were the beneficiaries of a deliberate and systematic unfairness intended to achieve a politically approved outcome. The waste of resources involved in this dishonest endeavor — including extra training that required personnel to be specially assigned to prepare the women trainees — was conducted at taxpayer expense. The demoralization of male troops involved in this fraud was not least among the detrimental effects.

The left has always had a bone to pick with the military. Either it was consuming too much of the money they wanted to spend on entitlements (I've heard that a billion time from my coworkers sucking the government teat), or it's a misogynistic threat to the nation's morals.

If you can't cut their budget, make them waste it on "social justice" goals. If it hurt their morale, so much the better. They weren't supposed to have any. Obama is just giving the left what it has long desired.