Liberal college campuses typically try to distinguish and distance themselves from the military. For the longest time, many campuses had banned or essentially banned ROTC, although that has waned in the past decade. The longtime myth was that the military was a place of last resort for people who couldn’t otherwise make it in college. Given the recent trend of college life breeding anti-semitism and people that can’t seem to perform basic activities like reading, I give the military the upper hand on this one.

College and the military now share one very dark truth when it comes to prosecuting crimes. President Biden recently changed many Trump-era Title IX regulations that required due process in dealing with sexual harassment claims. In the past, if you accused someone of sexual assault on campus, the accused person had a right to confront the accuser and demand evidence. That seems so basic, yet campuses howled in pain at being required to take seriously accusations and, you know, actually look for evidence before disciplining students.

That’s entirely gone now. You can now, quite literally, accuse a fellow student of sexual assault, not provide evidence, and if the judge is persuaded by your story, your fellow student can be kicked out of the school without ever getting the chance to provide his or her side of the story.

That sounds insane to anyone who thinks justice is important. But its exactly like another system that exists in the US Military called non-judicial punishment (NJP).

Now, the “non-judicial” title might make you think it is some sort of proceeding that will be swept under the rug and not really hurt you. That couldn’t be further from the truth. NJP can impose some harsh punishments, such as cutting half of your pay for up to 2 months as well as restricting you to a barracks room for up to two months. More importantly, any NJP action can basically end your career. The military’s high year tenure system means if you don’t advance to a certain rank after so much time, they can separate you with the stroke of a pen.

The military has been under the gun to “do something” about sexual assault, so its not uncommon anymore to see someone accused of sexual assault get punished at NJP even with a lack of evidence. That’s because NJP, like Title IX, uses the “preponderance of evidence” standard, meaning that you don’t have to prove something beyond a reasonable doubt, just that there is some evidence that might point to the person being guilty. It could simply be a statement from the accuser. It doesn’t have to be scrutinized, it just needs to be persuasive to the military officer holding NJP.

The military and college campuses can now both hold claim to being centers of injustice in America.

I retired from the Navy yesterday after 20 years of service. My career started in the shipyard onboard a submarine. At the time, the shipyard was a miserable place to work, we were constantly fighting to stay on schedule, and it seemed like the shipyard was fighting us nearly every day. The location, Portsmouth, was miserable to: I remember we were warned about parking our cars because the locals nearby would break windows just for fun.

When I and other junior officers complained to our Commanding Officer, he threatened to send us to Afghanistan. Yes, telling people to suck it up because Afghanistan is worse was a thing long before MCPON Smith told the Sailors onboard the BUSH in 2022 the same thing. When four Sailors committed suicide in a row onboard BUSH, and Congress-people starting asking questions, Navy leadership quickly rolled out a…study…to figure out how to improve WiFi and parking.

WiFi and parking. These were issues 20 years ago in the Navy. For 20 years, Admirals gazed at the problem and did absolutely nothing to fix it, yet they found time to standdown the military for extremist training and to add nonsense books to the required reading list.

Here non-warfighting Admiral, let me fix this for you:

• Pay a company to put WiFi on the berthing barges and in the barracks. Find one that does WiFi for hotels and just copy/paste the contract.
• Calculate how many people work on the shipyard when all the piers are full, add 30%, and build parking structures to accommodate those vehicles.

Done. There’s your study. Someone will say it’s not perfect. I agree. We’ve had 20 years of morons in charge of the Navy. We need change now, and this is far better than our current situation. The study will take a year. You could roll out WiFi and build at least parking structures using precast concrete in one year. That would show some actual care for our Sailors and yield immediate results.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.