Now, I don’t have any beef with General McConville. He seems like a nice enough person. And according to RAND studies, while the military has been struggling to recruit new members, its actually doing well overall on retention numbers, meeting around 100% of its retention goals.
But best shape in decades? The military is a young person’s game, and the Army more so than most. Retention spiked during the COVID pandemic because the military basically suspended all the rules to desperately keep people in, and people that were getting out were looking at a terrible job market, so it was a win-win for everyone. Then the military went on the COVID vaccine witch-hunt, lost Afghanistan and in general lost its way.
The high retention you see now is not going to last. If you had 18 years in and fell under the old “20 or nothing” retirement, of course you’re going to stay in. But the retirement changed in 2018, so we’re now at the 5-year mark, and retention for servicemembers that enlisted under the new retirement is going to become a problem. The Army has made up the overall numbers by lowering physical fitness standards and failing less people in boot camp, but that won’t make a difference when there simply aren’t enough people in boot camp.
People will continue to blast Senator Tuberville for “depriving” the Army of Senate-confirmed leadership, but insisting that the Army and all the other services focus on killing our enemies instead of innocent babies is the only long-term fix. Maybe we’ll get lucky and more of the generals and admirals that lost our last wars will retire instead of hanging around. One could only hope.
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.
Your lawn requires maintenance. If you don’t put time and effort into filling your lawn with nice grass, it will eventually fill up with undesirable weeds. Nature abhors a vacuum, so its going to fill the lawn if you don’t. Similarly, the Navy is going to fill its manpower requirements one way or another. Between draining its DEP rolls, slow-rolling retirements, suspending body fat and physical fitness failures, and even suspending high year tenure, you’d think for just a minute that it all might work, that this nibbling around the edges of the problem (instead of addressing it directly) would bring in enough recruits.
Nope.
The Navy, still circling the drain, has now decided to start draining the reserves. Reservists are folks who typically served an initial enlistment and then decided to leave the military but retain a connection to the service. They muster one weekend a month and typically serve a two-week period during the year on active duty. In return they remain eligible for health care and get a cut-down retirement. It’s not a bad gig, but in the past most reservists were barely meeting standards and were thought of as a “break glass in case of emergency” manpower solution. The terrorist attacks on 9-11 changed that and resulted in a bit of a change so that reservists were more available for extended deployments.
Not surprisingly, the Navy is making it easier to tap into reserves and making it harder for people to fail out of the reserves. Let’s look at the following NAVADMINs:
NAVADMIN 158/23: POLICY FOR ACTIVATION AND EMPLOYMENT OF RESERVE COMPONENT FORCES IN FY24 AND BEYOND
NAVADMIN 160/23: SELECTED RESERVE ADVANCEMENT TO WARFIGHTING POSITIONS PROGRAM PHASE I
NAVADMIN 167/23: SEPTEMBER 2023 (CYCLE 260) ACTIVE-DUTY AND TRAINING AND ADMINISTRATION OF THE RESERVE (TAR) E-4 THROUGH E-6 ADVANCEMENT AND MODIFICATION TO SELECTED RESERVE E-4 ADVANCEMENT ANNOUNCEMENT (CYCLE 113)
NAVADMIN 158 references the a memo that basically says Navy Individual Augmentees (IAs) are eating the force alive, and lays out a plan to have Navy Reservists fill more of these billets, even if they are involuntarily activated…meaning they get told “Drop your civilian job and take this crappy military job.”
I am NOT a fan of IAs. These were initially brought out during the invasion of Afghanistan because the Army was short people, and the Navy said “We can send some people to Afghanistan to fill slots!” Seems like a good idea, until 20 years later we were STILL filling IAs. Meanwhile, Navy manpower went missing at key places like shipyards, support facilities and the like, so our Navy platforms suffered, our shore facilities rotted, and Sailor morale went into the toilet. Somehow in 20 years the Army couldn’t staff its own war? Color me skeptical…
So even after we lost Afghanistan, we’re STILL using IAs…and why this is true still boggles my mind. Naturally, it kills morale to go to one job then get yanked to go to another, especially one shore duty when you were promised some time with your family. So instead of killing active duty Sailors morale, we’ll kill Reservist Sailor morale.
NAVADMIN 160 tells us that if you’re an E-4 or E-5, you can take a Selected Reserve (SELRES) job one paygrade above, and after completion you get a permanent paygrade bump. Not bad, you might think. But lets be honest…why would a Sailor not make the next rank? Perhaps he just had bad timing. But more often, he or she was probably not all that great of a Sailor. So now, performance be damned, you get promoted if you take the right job.
NAVADMIN 167 basically makes it even easier to promote. If you’re an E-3 wanting to make E-4, all requirements have been removed, so long as your Commanding Officer says OK, you’ll make rank. High year tenure (where you get booted from the military if you haven’t made a certain rank by a certain number of years in the military) is suspended through 2024…and my guess is they’ll suspend it again. This NAVADMIN is basically making it easier than ever to stay in the Navy no matter how dumb or bad at your job you are.
The sad part is…this won’t work. The Navy continues to not address the morale issues brought on by a restrictive COVID-19 “vaccine” requirement, white supremacist training and the inability to do basic things like fix ships, have decent berthing and fight naval wars. Even Navy veterans like myself are telling our kids not to join. Until the Navy addresses the fundamental issues at hand, these short-sighted efforts will fail.
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.
Because I run a business installing network equipment, security cameras and offline storage, my business phone number rings all the time with someone wanting me to sell their latest stuff. Most of the time its a cloud-based service, and I politely tell the person on the phone my clients aren’t interested in cloud based…anything. One person challenged me on this about a year ago, saying that I simply didn’t understand the technology.
Remember, I have a bachelors in electrical engineering, AND a masters in electrical engineering (with a 100+ page technical thesis), AND quite a few industry certifications, plus many, many years working in this field. To say I was insulted is an understatement. Rather than rage on the guy, I simply replied “All that cloud means is my data is on someone else’s computer, which gives someone else control of it, and my clientele don’t like that.”
Now, I still use cloud services for some storage and a lot of network access. It’s convenient and makes it possible to open the garage door while you’re on vacation so your neighbor can borrow your posthole digger. But I don’t depend on it. If the internet goes down tomorrow, I still have access to my data locally, still can see my security cameras, and still can operate my doors. False accusations can’t stop any of my stuff from working.
The one big thing that cloud services offer is security from fire. If your house burns down, you can still pull all your files from the cloud. And well, by the featured image, you can guess what happened.
My mom called me yesterday to tell me my dad’s shop caught on fire. Thankfully the firefighters got there in time to keep it from spreading to the rest of the house. But his shop is where all his business paperwork, business computer, Veteran’s Affairs paperwork, and plenty of other important items are stored. It’s a mess.
THANKFULLY, I had set them up with a QNAP Network Attached Storage (NAS) a while back. While I don’t know if my dad had scanned and backed everything up, most of his files are there. He lost at least two external hard drives and his computers, but the NAS is in a different part of their house and wasn’t affected by the fire.
The current theory (pending a complete investigation) is that a recent string of power surges damaged a power strip, causing it to smolder and then catch fire. My parent’s home lost a refrigerator, stove, microwave and other appliances after 3 days of surges and power loss affected their area due to ongoing storms. The NAS is plugged into a UPS with a monitoring cord, so it shuts down gracefully during extended power outages.
Which brings me to my main point: you should be thinking NOW about your data. If everything you have is in the cloud and the cloud company decides it hates you because you’re a conservative, or because the FBI thinks you’re a terrorist for being a traditional Catholic, or because you support Donald Trump, or because you opposed people brainwashing your children at public school, that company could wipe everything, or simply hold it hostage, like some kind of bitLocker scam. The cloud makes it deceptively easy to place yourself at the mercy of tech giants that want to keep you under their thumb.
My go-to setup is a local NAS hooked up to your robust home network with a VPN for remote access. You get the benefits of storing all your files in one spot and making it easy to access them from multiple devices, while also being able to remotely access them. If you needed to do it on the cheap side, it would cost about $500 dollars for the network and between $500 to $1000 for a NAS. You don’t have to be a tech person either, nowadays the network and storage solutions are well documented and the companies are typically more than happy to help you set it up. I am partial to Ubiquiti for networking gear and QNAP for storage, but there are a variety of companies you can use. It’s more important that you think and plan accordingly now so that when these disasters happen, whether man made or natural, your data isn’t affected.
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.
I never thought I’d see the day. In fact, I waited till this morning to write this post, because I thought for sure someone would cave in.
But it happened:
And even better:
Lose talent??
Wait wait wait wait a second.
DoD thought it would simply bypass the Hyde Amendment without any consequences? Remember when I wrote that the Department of the Navy basically threatened anyone that challenged spending command funds on elective abortions? Re-read that again and think about how condescending that last paragraph is. Apparently at least a few people called their Senators and Representatives, because now we have some action on it.
I find it insulting that the military’s free health care won’t pay for orthodontic work or specialized contacts to prevent myopia in my children, but they will bend over backwards for abortions and transgender surgery. I’ve had Tricare for quite some time now, and yet I continue to spend money on my kids medical care, often in cases where the doctor says “This is necessary care,” but Tricare refuses to cover the bill.
And in case anyone is wondering, I had one kid with two teeth that came in at an angle that would have had them punching out her lip. I had to pay over $2,000 for specialized braces with chains to pull them into place. Somehow Tricare said that wasn’t “medically necessary.”
So yeah, I’m totally fine with the DoD taking it in the shorts and being slapped around by Congress and told to enforce the Hyde Amendment. Even better, the first person that violates it (and you know that is going to happen) needs to be investigated and blackballed from promotion, because if you don’t take enforcement actions, it’s just a hollow threat.
As to losing DoD talent, spare me. The same generals and admirals that lost in Afghanistan, lied to President Trump about putting troops in Syria (tell me again how good that’s going), can’t fix our ships, can’t roll out advanced weapon systems to deal with China, and have now presided over a huge drop in morale and can’t recruit enough warm bodies for the coming slaughter new young people to be Sailors, Soldiers, Airmen, Marines, Coast Guardsman and Guardians….that’s the “talent” we want to recruit?
If I got to say anything Senator Tuberville, I would simply ask: can you run off more of that so-called talent?
If anything is going to make a difference quickly, it would be finding the O-7, O-6 and O-5 talented warfighters that are somehow still in the service and to begin cultivating them for high level jobs. Getting the right leaders into place can make a huge difference. Just ask Admiral Rickover, who single-handedly drove the development of the Navy’s nuclear submarine and carrier program.
If you have Republican Senators or Representatives, tell them to keep it up AND to start searching for the talented O-6s and O-7s, because its only by promoting these people that we can hope to save the military. They need to search now because you can trust the current promotion boards to find talented warfighters for tomorrow’s conflicts.
Overall, I’m happy House and Senate Republicans found their spinal cord. Let’s hope they continue to stay resolved on these matters.
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. That’s because it represents actual views from warfighters, and as we’ve already seen, our existing government agencies don’t want to actually win any wars.
A few years ago, a young lady knocked on my door in Hawaii. She happened to be a volunteer from the Census Bureau, and I spent about 30 minutes answering Census Bureau questions. Unlike most of the other door to door surveys that I promptly ignore, I actually wanted my voice heard by the Census Bureau. About halfway through the survey, I was asked by the surveyor “Do you approve of smoking in the home?”
Me: “Uhm, in my home or other people’s homes?” Surveyor: “The question doesn’t specify.” Me: “Well, that’s kind of important. I don’t smoke, and I don’t let people smoke in my home, but I really don’t care if they smoke in their homes.” Surveyor: “The question only has a Yes or No answers.” Me: “Then my answer is Yes, I’m OK with smoking in the home.”
Not surprisingly, the overall results showed something like 85% of people disapproved of smoking in the home, which was then used as proof that we should conduct more smoking cessation programs.
I’m willing to bet that more than a few people felt the same way I did but chose “No.” When you design a survey question without allowing for nuance or more than a binary answer, you skew the results. That’s not good from a simple truth perspective, but its really not good if you intend to base financial and policy decisions on the results. With that in mind, flash forward a few years and I receive an email asking me to take the Health of the Force survey for the Navy. I wrote about this survey before and how it showed that the Navy is VERY unhealthy in so many ways, so I was hopeful the survey would dig further to identify the areas where the Navy can improve.
Yeah….not so much. I took screen shots as I completed the survey so you can see just how bad it was.
Let’s start with the question “What factors are or would most likely influence you to get out of the Navy?” That’s a legitimately good question, and you get to select your top five options. Maybe the Navy should put something in the survey about readiness and shipyard issues, given the massive amount of news coverage on ship schedules slipping and Sailors committing suicide in Newport News. Or what about wokeness? Or the COVID “vaccine”? Maybe people are particularly incensed about it, or maybe they aren’t, so listing it as a choice would help shed some light on it.
Nope. All the answers are super generic responses that don’t ask any hard questions. They have responses for “Leadership at current command,” but nothing about shipyards, logistics, medical, or other support services that Sailors constantly complain about.
The best option I had was “Senior Navy leaders.” I selected that, and I expounded in the comments, but again, super generic, and not going to result in anything actionable.
Another set of questions asked about Command leadership, still focused on the local command. They did bring in enlisted leaders, which is good, because in the past they often only focused on the Command Triad (the Commanding Officer, Executive Officer and Command Master Chief). But there are no support questions. Plenty of Sailors are frustrated with Navy’s Mandatory Crappy Internet (NMCI), or the lack of investment in our shore facilities, but neither of those issues are the command’s fault. Those decisions are made by top brass, who are never held accountable for how miserable they make Sailors.
What about “How I feel in the Navy” questions? Again, touchy-feely stuff, but nothing that gets at the hard issues we have going on.
And then the DIE questions. That’s like a full 30% of the survey, but I’ll spare you the agony of reading the questions. All of these ask about sexual harrasment and racism and such, which are important…but aren’t the reasons Sailors commit suicide in their baracks room.
This survey was frustrating. I wrote paragraphs in the free-form section, which I am sure will be promptly ignored by the non-warfighter HR officer bent on using the survey to justify more white supremacy training in the fleet. This survey will provide no useful results and will continue to ignore the actual problems in the fleet. It will be used by the Department of the Navy to justify more money in DIE and other stupid programs when we need more efforts towards fixing ships and training our Sailors to be ready for combat. As a taxpayer, you should be angry over this survey and demand better from your elected representatives.
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.
I occasionally scroll down on my browsers news feed. I probably shouldn’t, since almost all the news “curated” for me is sensational click-bait headlines with weak, ad-packed articles. Despite this, I mistakenly scrolled down this morning to find this headline:
For those who (somehow) don’t know, The Witcher is a series of stories by Andrzej Sapkowski written in Poland in the 1990s that was later adapted into a very successful computer game series, and after that into a moderately successful (but now quickly declining) Netflix TV series. The books started being translated into English in 2007, around the same time that a Polish video game producer, CD Projekt Red, made the first of three video games.
The video games and books were wildly popular. The main character, Geralt of Rivia, is a witcher, a human mutated by different poisons and gene-altering drugs, to become an inhumanly deadly warrior, but with no emotions and a desire to stay neutral in most conflicts. Witchers were created to fight monsters that entered the world due to an event called the Conjunction of the Spheres, which is sort of like the Multiverse. The world of the Witcher features a variety of monsters, magic and warring kingdoms, all the things you would expect in a medieval fantasy world.
The Witcher is very different from other fantasy though. As he adventures in the world, Geralt discovers that many monsters are actually sentient and simply trying to live, while humans use the fact they are a monster to place bounties on their heads in order to steal their land and possessions. In many of his quests, Geralt sides with these beings, and when humans point out that he was created to fight monsters, Geralt asks who the real monsters are. This is captured in the video games, where you get to make choices about what quests to take and how to complete them. You can side with the humans, or side with the monsters, or choose a mix, and your ultimate outcome is based on your choices. In many cases, these outcomes are radically different. There is no “right” side…you can find fault in each faction, and even Geralt’s desire to stay neutral can become a fault all on its own.
The other big difference between The Witcher and other fantasy is that it is very adult. Geralt’s mutations render him sterile, so he sleeps around a lot. He has a competing love interest with two different sorceresses (Yennefer and Triss) in the books and the game, and the video games let you sleep with a variety of female characters. The books have plenty of gory fights, and the games don’t shy away from gore or nudity.
With a big following, intriguing characters, and different fantasy world, I was super excited when Henry Cavill was announced to star in the Netflix series. Cavill actually read the books and played the games. The dude is built like The Witcher, and in the first two seasons, he perfectly captured Geralt’s character. I immediately noticed that the writing was…lackluster. We weren’t getting the “choices” themes, we had a weird back story on Yennefer that wasn’t in the books and didn’t add much to the story, and the other supporting characters were twisted a bit out of context.
Which brings me to Jaskier, which is the Polish name for the character Julian Alfred Pankratz, who goes by the stage name Dandelion. In the books he is a sharp contrast to Geralt’s dower and moody behavior, often challenging the notion that Geralt can remain neutral in the middle of the conflict between the various nations. In the video games, he’s a skilled poet, avid business man and notorious womanizer, which gets him in trouble that occasionally requires Geralt to bail him out.
No where, ever, is it implied he is gay or bisexual. You might think that because he is a poet and a snappy dresser, but the books and games don’t ever imply it.
The Netflix series used him first as the butt of a lot of jokes. While he had some good moments (the Toss a Coin to your Witcher song being the best), he is too often a dumb, scared fop of a character. Then, since he’s a poet, and apparently its OK to paint a classist brush across all artistic people, the producer decides to explore his sexuality. Never mind that they are fighting the lore while doing this, that Henry Cavill quit over disagreements about the what the writers and producers were doing to the series, and attempts to add a prequel (The Witcher: Blood Origins) failed miserably. Nope, let’s make a bisexual character, that’ll make our series more popular!!
Funny enough, the world of the Witcher actually HAS a few homosexual and otherwise LGBTQ characters in it. Cirilla, one of the main characters in the book series, at one point has a homosexual tryst with the female leader of the Rats, a group of brigands that she joins after fleeing from the school of magic. Various factions, such as the all-female dryads and some sects of elves, are heavily implied to be homosexual. Most of the more powerful sorceresses have female lovers. The Dopplers, a race of shape-shifting creatures, are portrayed as enjoying the ability to explore both their masculine and feminine sides.
There is PLENTY of existing homosexual and erotic content in the novels and video games that a producer could bring into the Netflix series, and I doubt it would cause issues. Instead, they chose to dumb down an interesting character and shoe-horn him into a bisexual role he was never meant or written for, and to the surprise of nobody, caused serious angst.
Look, if you want gay characters, go write them in your novels. Do the proper character development and make them interesting. Not surprisingly, you might find that if you follow good writing practices and make your transgender warrior an interesting character that has to overcome issues, has flaws, and follows a story arc, people might actually want to read your writing, and if you want an example, look at Japanese anime. The laziness that modern producers have in simply taking good, existing characters and placing them on the LGBTQ spectrum exhausts audiences and reveals that these producers and writers have no real talent.
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.
I work as an instructor for a few companies, none of which reside in my local area. Whenever I finish a teaching gig, the company I taught for pays me, sometimes electronically, sometimes with a check. So naturally I was curious when I saw this headline the other day:
Now, reading a bit further (because I don’t trust any headline, and you shouldn’t either), I realized its NOT the Postal Service saying this, its instead a member of the Better Business Bureau. That person had good reason to say this, because she noted that check fraud jumped from 300,000 incidents to 680,000 incidents in 2021, despite Americans writing less checks every year.
The issue doesn’t seem to be with residential mailboxes, but rather with the large, outdoor blue post boxes. Post boxes are being broken into at an alarming rate. In some cases, the criminals rob the postal worker to get the key to open the blue boxes. In other cases, they simple beat the boxes open with some blunt instrument. Once they get the checks, it’s not hard to erase the amount with a chemical solution and re-write the check for significantly more than was originally intended.
Checks are probably one of the few items to still be regularly mailed, and the post office was quick to note that its still safe (in their words) to mail checks:
“The Postal Service delivers about 130 billion pieces of mail over a year to 163 million customers,” said Paul Shade with the U.S.P.S. “It still remains the most secure way to transmit anything from any type of mailing.”
Paul Shade, USPS
The Post Office also noted it was installing high security boxes that are more difficult to break into.
There is a trend in the statistics. Going city by city, each “bubble” lists the incidents and arrests. Take a look at California:
Los Angeles: 54 incidents, 1 arrest Oakland: 51 incidents, 4 arrests San Francisco: 20 incidents, 2 arrests
Although I didn’t have full access to the data to calculate an arrest to incident ratio, I suspect that California would come out on the losing end of that calculation. Florida’s numbers are significantly lower than expected, and I’d reason its the fact that they make arrests and actually prosecute crimes. If you knew you could simply steal a bag of mail, cash a bunch of washed checks and face little to no chance of repercussion, well, why wouldn’t you?
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.
On a recent visit to Colonial Williamsburg, I had the good fortune to listen to a speech by a Marquis de Lafayette re-enactor. He was good. He was really, really good. After his speech I chatted with him, and he recommended reading the book Lafayette by Harlow Unger. So I grabbed it off Audible and over the past two weeks it has entertained me on my drive to work.
If you need a book to read or listen to, get this one. Unger does a great job of being historically accurate while remaining interesting. He highlights not just the events that happened, but the personal relationships and how they influenced history. While I knew about Lafayette from my time studying the Battle of Yorktown, I did not know about how pivotal his financial contributions to the Revolutionary War were, nor how important he was to opening French markets to America after the war.
But perhaps the most stunning portions of the book relate to the French Revolution. Unger does not mince words describing how Lafayette blundered trying to replicate the liberty and ideas from the American Constitution into France. At multiple times, Lafayette turned down opportunities to lead his country in establishing a constitutional monarchy or a republic, which eventually fell into the hands of terrible men like Robespierre and Danton, whose bloodlust plunged France into terribly bloody revolution that likely killed over 1 million citizens and 2.5 million military in the ensuing wars. Random people were pulled off the street, beheaded and then had their heads displayed on pikes. Unger’s direct quotes from a multitude of direct sources, many of them Americans such as Thomas Jefferson. None mince words describing the horror of mob rule. While Lafayette himself would escape execution, France was never the same again.
The beheading of Robespierre, which “ended” the Reign of Terror in France
The chapters that describe the fall of France’s government were telling in that they had many parallels to modern-day America. The gradual descent into lawlessness, while good men either sat idly by or refused to take action, seems eerily reminiscent of the descent of many large American cities into chaos following BLM-related riots. The takeover of the government by the Jacobins, who seemed to lust only for more blood and power, resembles so many statements from prominent lawmakers, whether its to strike down white women from positions of authority, kill Trump supporters, or call people a threat to democracy. In French Revolution fashion, its even OK for people to display a severed head of a politician. I’m just surprised it wasn’t placed on a pike.
Anyone clamoring for revolution should read about the horrors of the French Revolution, and how multiple missed opportunities for a peaceful removal of the King resulted in massive violence that plunged France into darkness. Anyone who thinks they will run the mob should read about how Robespierre and Danton both faced the very guillotine that they used to execute thousands of their own countrymen. Anyone that thinks we should strive for this style of revolution is a madman.
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.
During the Virginia election, I had the pleasure of attending a veteran’s event where then-candidates Glenn Youngkin, Jason Miyares and Winsome Sears spoke. Youngkin was the typical, polished politician that one would expect, and his speech was as expected. Miyares, who I didn’t know a lot about, surprised me a bit by talking about his background, how his mom fled from Cuba to ensure a better life for her family. But by far the best speaker was Winsome Sears, a former Marine Corporal whose background and accomplishments would make a better story than 99% of the documentaries on Netflix.
Don’t take my word for it though…
Her speech at the veteran’s event got her a standing ovation, tons of laughs and the loudest applause out of the bunch. Since then, she hasn’t stopped, and she’s right on all the issues that matter.
She opposes CRT, but wants better education to lift more people up:
She has a moderate view on abortion. While it would be better to oppose abortion completely, I’ll take this over the euthanasia being allowed now:
The one view I think is very important is on prisons. The local TV station interviewed her after the campaign visiting a prison. The reporter asked why she was here, and she responded that prisoners “…are still my constituents, and I represent them as well as other Virginians.” This is a huge, underappreciated position that most Republicans are missing. Yes, its important to jail criminals, but what happens after they serve their sentence? If they have no way of righting wrongs and re-integrating with society, then they will simply return to a life of crime.
(I wish I could find this video, although I’m guessing Google black-holed it somewhere)
We saw this in Iraq after the invasion. Paul Bremer lead the effort to disband the Iraqi military and basically made it impossible to hire former Iraqi military members for any projects. All around Iraq, millions of dollars in investments were going to anyone, even foreigners, but not to any former Baath party members, even if the majority of them had joined simply because they had to and were happy to disavow any allegiance to Saddam Hussein. Not surprisingly, when different extremist groups came around and offered these former fighters pay so that they could feed their families, they signed up in droves, and we essentially created the next generation of terrorists.
While Glenn Youngkin was running for governor, there were more than a few skeptics that said he was going to be super-squishy on a lot of issues. That was not an unfair criticism, given how poorly so many Republican politicians turned out to be on issues of real importance. Thankfully, Youngkin has turned out to be pretty darn good.
Governor Glenn Youngkin Waves at Crowd at ITAC (Industrial Turnaround Corporation), May 31, 2023. Official Photo by Christian Martinez, Office of Governor Glenn Youngkin.
Yesterday his efforts finally hit the news when he removed the bachelor degree requirements for nearly 90 percent of state jobs. That’s a big deal. Bloated job requirements are a nuisance and make it difficult to hire and fill positions. Most of these positions are better served by someone with a credential instead of a degree. It’s also important to note that our higher education system tends to lean Democrat, so this should make it easier for Republicans that chose to not subject themselves to 4 years of Democrat indoctrination to obtain meaningful employment.
Sadly, more than a few trolls at Instapundit are simply saying this will make it easier to insert particular demographics into government. I seriously doubt it. Combined with his assault on DIE institutions and rules, this should open up jobs to constituents everywhere, and this move in particular was viewed favorably by a few Democrat lawmakers.
It doesn’t end there though, because Youngkin is addressing hundreds of individual issues. He passed legislation making it easier to adopt children. If you recall, that’s an area where losers in the system make it hard for good couples to adopt by making them jump through hoops that normal parents would never be subjected to. It’s a real issue I’ve discussed before, so its nice to see the governor care enough to work to fix it.
On top of that, Youngkin has signed good budgets, mental health initiatives, and credentialing plans to make it easier for people to transfer credentials into the state without additional testing. These don’t tend to make the news, but for the average Virginian, they are issues that affect them every day, so they make a difference.
I’m glad he’s doing this. We’ve had a fair share of Republicans that run on big issues like abortion and Second Amendment, but then ignore the normal day-to-day issues that aren’t big news. While its great to say you “fought the woke mob,” at the end of the day, I also want my day-to-day issues to get better. Passing sound budgets and making Virginia a state desirable to live and work in affects my family directly. Hopefully with more success we’ll have other Republicans wake up and take similar efforts in their states.
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.
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