4-2-25

Late Monday afternoon the news broke that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth

issued a new directive…..you may recall that Hegseth was an Infantry Officer as

recently as 2017…..he got out as a Major because he was irritated at the level of

politicalization he was experiencing…..Hegseth, a two-time combat zone veteran,

had a tattoo that was deemed scary and extremist…..it was just a Jerusalem Cross,

but hey, in woke world everything can be scary……but Hegseth volunteered for

support of the Capital in DC when leftists threatened to riot because of Trump’s

first election…..he was denied the opportunity to serve because of his

tattoo…..make that make sense…..oh that’s right, you can’t!.....So Hegseth is fresh

out of his own time in service and jaded by the fact that he watched political

wokisms invade the province of the supposedly apolitical US military……you can

imagine that he has a few notions about how to fix things…..he has immediately

set about revising standards, returning to an era of personal and corporate

discipline……he has rooted our DEI and woke policies…..Generals and Admirals

have been asked to retire if they were a part of the era of woke and fecklessness

that marred the military over the past four years……and Monday he issued a

directive that was designed to move some pieces on the chess board that liberals

aren’t going to like…..he ordered that for the combat arms branches of the military

there will be one single fitness standard for both men and women and you will

meet that standard or you will not be a frontline warfighter……one standard….an

equal standard….not an equivalent standard…..and the liberals don’t know what to

do with this…..the same woke policymakers and pundits who swear that a woman

can actually change into a man will now try to claim that it is unfair for a woman

to be required to meet the same standards as a man…..you watch….it’s

coming…..they demand equality, until they can’t reach equality, then they settle

for equivalent…..

For those who don’t know the military is divided into various branches within each

of the services…..in the Army you will have Combat Service Support, Combat

Support, and Combat Arms…..everyone can be a warfighter when the time

comes….but the combat arms branches of Infantry, Armor, Artillery, Air Defense,

Combat Aviation, Combat Engineers, and Special Forces…..those are the actual

combat arms branches….the frontline warfighters…..

What most people also don’t know is that the physical training standards for men

and women have always been different…..on the old PT test men did more

pushups, but women did more situps…..its a question of anatomy, bone structure,

muscle base…..maximum score for men might be 70 pushups and 65 situps, but

for women the maximum score might be to reach 55 pushups and 72 situps……its

just science….two soldiers, both max scores, but not equal….just equivalent…..but

not any more…..liberal heads will now be exploding because Hegseth has ordered

that there will be one single standard for fitness in the combat arms…..men and

women, same standards…..equal treatment? Then equal standards. Not just

equivalent.

Why is this important? I was at Fort Benning for my Battalion Commanders

Course about ten years ago…..we met with the Commandant of the Ranger

Training Brigade…..he told us then to expect that women would be in Ranger

School soon after….but he swore, with a wink and a nod that the standards would

not be lowered…..there is plenty of evidence to the contrary…..liberals desperately

wanted to portray that women are equal to men in every respect…..they needed to

have Ranger qualified women to prove that….and in truth, the women who passed

the course were indeed studs who could outpace most men in the world….but were

they equal, or just equivalent?......

And I’m going to clarify that I don’t have a beef with women in the military….not

at all….they serve with every bit of selflessness and sacrifice and love of country

as anyone else…..but I also believe that there will be times when men and women

should be separate and distinct…..

And truthfully, we all know that much of the forced integration of women into

combat arms roles was politically driven…….Now before my trolls go summon up

their keyboard courage to send me mean tweets just know that I get it……in a

society like ours…..with civilian oversight of the military there will always be

some measure of politics……on spending, on action, on inaction…….Where it

goes over the line is when national defense is degraded to make a political

point……or lives are lost……to make a political point……

Personal experience here…….in Afghanistan as a part of the special operations

community my team inserted early…….my six man team was collocated with 12

special forces, 2 psyops, and 1 AF CCT……..we wore civilian clothes…..drove

civilian vehicles…..sometimes rode horses……we lived among the Afghan people

for the better part of a year……and we all had beards……In the austere

environment we operated in the beard was more than just a lack of shaving…..it

was identifying with the populace……it was identity with our allies…..it removed

a small amount of stigma when I met with the Warlords, the local leaders, the

mullahs and the average folks…….I had a good beard too! Full on coverage from

ear to ear! Epic! ….we also lived in close quarters…..a group of guys who shared

the same outhouse, only bathed out of a bucket once in a while…..it got a bit ripe

around there sometimes…..

Well politicians back home cared what they cared about……when it finally came

time for my team to rotate out after nearly a year downrange I was asked to submit

my recommendations for the makeup of the team that would backfill my own…..it

was an old world environment….despite the Taliban being on the run women still

wore Burqa’s in public, there was a stigma associated with the west….when I had

first arrived my team was asked to stay off the roof of our safehouse because we

might see the women working in their yards on the other side of the walls near our

location….everywhere we went we dealt with village elders, government officials,

warlords and bandits, all of whom were men and it was made very clear that this

was not just the Taliban, it was thousands of years of cultural taboos that were not

going to unravel overnight…..so when I was asked about who should replace my

team I specifically made note that in my area they would do well to send an all-

male team …..and so, the powers that be sent out a team with two females…..and

it caused problems….lots of problems….especially when one of the females

insulted a village elder because he questioned her…..nothing like sacrificing

mission security and effectiveness to make sure that we had diversity in the

field……politicians issued a decree that the Sec Def caved to…….and a small

group of no more than 20 American special operations troops operating in austere

conditions without support or a flagpole anywhere in sight got an order that was

purely political……

Push that to a bigger picture………

But this is what liberals do…….they see the military as nothing but a Petrie dish in

which to grow their liberal experiments……I recognize that not all Democrats feel

or act that way…..but too often the far left side of the political spectrum is able to

use the military to assist them in feeling better about their progressive

policies……by means of experimentation……by means of coverage for their bad

mistakes…..and by means of accomplishing their purely political objectives……

Let’s be very clear……the military is subject to the directions…..and sometimes

the whims of the civilian leaders of our nation……I get that…..and they should be.

But civilian direction is not supposed to degrade readiness……it is not supposed to

equate to experimentation……it is not supposed to abuse servicemembers…..

The military exists for the sole purpose of defending our nations interests……to

win wars…..to kill enemies…….to do all that is necessary to ensure that the

national defense and the nation’s interests are preserved and promoted…….

Politics mixed with military solely for the purpose of political gains do nothing but

degrade who we are as a nation, as a people, and its gets people killed.

It is beyond time for civilian leaders to go back to a position of strength and

readiness…..not equity and wokeness

Women will continue to serve in our military with honor and distinction but there

needs to be a dose of reality mixed with that service….there will be times when the

needs of national security transcend whether or not some politician desperately

needs to virtue signal something about gender equity…..going forward, unless

some activist judge jumps in again….we will have women in the combat arms,

going to Ranger School, and serving in frontline deployments, but only if they can

meet an equal standard required for all…..equal, not equivalent……

And that’s a wrap for the Rightside Way!