Plenty of people make New Years Resolutions. Plenty of those have been broken by this time already. It seems the Navy wants to engage in that silliness too. Check out NAVADMIN 003/24, titled America’s Warfighting Navy. Sounds cool right? Well, let’s take a look.

1. Who We Are. We are the United States Navy, the most powerful navy in 
the world. We are the Sailors and Civilians who have answered our Nations 
call to service. We are Americans who embody character, competence, and 
dedication to our mission. Our identity is forged by the sea and we serve 
with honor, courage, and commitment.

2. What We Do. We are here to preserve the peace, respond in crisis, and win 
decisively in war. We operate far forward, around the world and around the 
clock, from the seabed to space, in cyberspace, and in the information 
environment to promote our Nations prosperity and security, deter aggression, 
and provide options to our nations leaders. We deliver power for peace, but 
are always postured and ready to fight and win as part of the Joint Force and 
alongside our Allies and partners.

3. Where We Are Going. The threats to our nation and our interests are real 
and growing. The strategic environment has changed; gone are the days of 
operating from a maritime sanctuary against competitors who cannot threaten 
us. The National Defense Strategy makes clear that we must defend our 
homeland, deter strategic attack, deter and be prepared to prevail in 
conflict against the Peoples Republic of China, and meet the acute challenge 
of an aggressive Russia and other persistent threats. Our adversaries have 
designed their militaries to overcome our traditional sources of strength. We 
must move rapidly to stay ahead and continuously create warfighting 
advantages. We must think, act, and operate differently, leveraging wargaming 
and experimentation to integrate conventional capability with hybrid, 
unmanned, and disruptive technologies. Tomorrows battlefield will be 
incredibly challenging and complex. To win decisively in that environment, 
our Sailors must be the best warfighters in the world with the best systems, 
weapons, and platforms to ensure we can defeat our adversaries. We will put 
more players on the field platforms that are ready with the right 
capabilities, weapons and sustainment, and people who are ready with the 
right skills, tools, training, and mindset.

4. Our Priorities. We will focus on Warfighting, Warfighters, and the 
Foundation that supports them.
   a. Warfighting: Deliver Decisive Combat Power. We will view everything we 
do through a warfighting lens to ensure our Navy remains the worlds 
preeminent fighting force. We will prioritize the readiness and capabilities 
required to fight and win at sea, and the logistics and shore support 
required to keep our Navy fit to fight. We recognize that we will never fight alone. We will advance naval integration with the Marine Corps, and synchronize and align our warfighting efforts with the Joint Force. We will design and drive interoperability with our Allies and partners to deliver combined lethality.

   b. Warfighters: Strengthen the Navy Team. We will use the principles of 
mission command to empower leaders at all levels to operate in uncertain, 
complex, and rapidly changing environments, ready to take initiative and bold 
action with confidence. We will build strong warfighting teams, recruiting 
and retaining talented people from across the rich fabric of America. We will 
provide world- class training and education to our Sailors and Civilians, 
honing their skills and giving them every opportunity to succeed. We will 
ensure our quality of service meets the highest standards, and we will look 
after our families and support networks, who enable us to accomplish our 
warfighting mission.

    c. Foundation: Build Trust, Align Resources, Be Ready. We will earn and 
reinforce the trust and confidence of the American People every day. We will 
work with Congress to field and maintain the worlds most powerful Navy and 
the infrastructure that sustains it. We will team with industry and academia to solve our most pressing challenges. We will cooperate with the interagency to bolster integrated deterrence. We will align what we do ashore with the warfighting needs of our Fleet.

5. Our Charge. America is counting on us to deter aggression, defend our 
national security interests, and preserve our way of life. With the right 
tools, a winning mindset, and the highest levels of integrity, we will 
operate safely as a team to deliver warfighting excellence.

Well…good luck! You certainly have your work cut out for 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.

To nobody’s huge surprise, “Dr” Fauci revealed that the 6 foot “social distancing” rule was basically made up.

More made-up science. If you doubted it back then, you were ridiculed as anti-science, censored, silenced. Now it becomes clear: “trust the science” really means “obey authority.” https://t.co/pMETn98T4R

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) January 11, 2024

Lest anyone forget, there were plenty of 6-foot Nazis that screamed at you for getting inside the 6 foot distance…unless it was at a BLM riot. People were doing all sorts of logical backflips to justify riots while shutting down church services. I remember having to open church doors and stream service using a cell phone, laptop and projector so the people outside could still attend.

What frickin’ rubbish.

But that’s not the point of this article. During this time thousands of service members were dismissed from service for refusing the vaccine, which we are finding doesn’t work well, and that COVID is going to essentially be like the flu: annoying, even temporarily incapacitating, but not really a threat to young and healthy that (at least now) make up our military force. Most of these were General Discharges, which can negate the amount of VA benefits you receive. Worse still, this was done as businesses were recovering from the shutdown, so many servicemembers and their families suffered through unemployment and underemployment.

Plenty of Republican lawmakers are making it easy for those members to return to service, and most are…not taking it. These same lawmakers are proposing legislation to open VA benefits to these servicemembers and discharge upgrades. I don’t have an issue with any of this, except that this is first aid, and in reality people should be fighting back.

First aid helps people that have been hurt. In this case, servicemembers got screwed out of good jobs, retirement benefits, VA benefits, and all the other things they were promised if they raised their hand to defend our country. Restoring those things will help in the near term, but its not going to repair the long term damage done. Look at how poorly our recruiting efforts are going. More than a few young people watched how a loved one was poorly treated and said “Gee, I’m not signing up for that!”

First aid isn’t enough. People need to fight back.

Every official that pushed this nonsense needs to be punished.

• Send Fauci to jail. Sounds extreme? The man admitted to spending US money in CHINA developing bioweapons. I see people getting angry over retired service members caught helping the Chinese learn how to land on aircraft carriers. How is this any different?
• Court martial flag officers that pushed for General Discharges. At least the Navy had the good sense to use Honorable Discharges for most of its folks. Every flag officer that used a General Discharge knew they were screwing people out of benefits, and even late in the game they continued to push for it. Court martial every, single one of them. For the ones already retired, bring them back and charge them, which is still legal (although perhaps bringing back a few admirals and generals will get this thrown out).
• Fire the civilian leaders that pushed this nonsense. Their zeal and glee in punishing people needs to be matched with stiff fines and jail time.

First aid doesn’t save you when you’re being assaulted. Only fighting back will.

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.

Over the holiday period I didn’t bother checking the latest NAVADMINs, because spending time with my family was for more important. So when I looked this week, I saw I missed a doozy: the Navy’s message concerning retention boards.

In December the Navy announces its promotion boards, which are in January (for Captains), Feb-March (for Commanders), and April-May (for Lieutenant Commanders). Some years ago the Navy began convening the retention board immediately after these boards to decide the fates of anyone not selected for promotion. The overarching policy of retention boards is a direct measure of the health of the service, and well, the Naval Service is not healthy.

Take a look at NAVADMIN 291/23. I’ll break it down below:

Paragraph 2 states that any Captain (O-6) that has certain AQDs (basically, special training or expertise in a specific area) that relate to Acquistion can stay until 33 years of service. Normally Captains have to retire at 30 years of service. This isn’t a huge surprise, the Navy is in dire need of Acquisition Workforce personnel, so it’ll keep anyone that it can.

LCDRs (O-4s) that twice failed to select for CDR (O-5) will simply be kept until 20 years, when they can retire. They won’t even be considered for retention…it’s assumed. In the past the retention board could be used to shape manpower by removing the bottom performing LCDRs. That is not happening at all now, essentially if you have a pulse and made O-4, you can stay till 20 years.

Let’s say you’re a LCDR that is a flight instructor, chaplain, cyber warfare engineer, foreign area officer, information professional, maritime space officer, medical corps, nurse corps or supply corps. What if you want to stay past 20 years? Well, you can!

URL 1310 aviators with primary AQDs of DIP or DA5/DA7/DB2/DB5/DB6/DD1/DH3/DL3/DS2 (TACAIR), CWE, FAO, IP, and SC officers selected for continuation will be continued for a period of 3 years to 23 YOAS.  CHC, MSO, MC, and NC officers selected for continuation will be continued until the last day of the month in which the officer 
completes 24 YOAS.

That right there is a bad sign. That means we are significantly short in all those areas, and we’re willing to keep people for an additional 3-4 years to cover the gaps.

What about Lieutenants (O-3s)? Typically LTs that are passed over twice for O-4 are sent home at the end of the next fiscal year. The only LTs I’ve seen the Navy hold onto are people that were prior enlisted and needed another year to reach mandatory officer retirement criteria. But now:

Lieutenant (LT)  Aerospace Engineering Duty Officer (AEDO), CHC, CWE, Cryptologic Warfare (CW), Dental Corps (DC), FAO, Intelligence Officer (INTEL), IP, Judge Advocate General's Corps (JAGC), MC, Medical Service Corps (MSC), MSO, NC, and SC will follow the below as applicable:
    a.  2XFOS LTs covered in paragraph 4 with less than 18 YOAS and selected 
for continuation will be continued for a period of three years, but not 
beyond retirement eligibility at 20 YOAS.

FOS stands for “Failure of Selection.”

So now LTs can stay for 20 years until they can retire. I never thought I’d see that, but here we are. Granted, it’s not every officer, but it won’t surprise me if the retention board eligibility expands to include more officer specialties.

I want to remind everyone that this crisis was generated 100% by our own government:

• We changed the retirement system way back in 2016-2018, which was the number one thing that kept good people in past 5-10 years of service. I predicted this would end badly, by the way.
• Then we started losing wars, specifically Afghanistan. We drew out of Afghanistan in a horrible way, so everyone that lost limbs or part of their sanity fighting in that war felt betrayed. This in turn made them tell their kids to never join the military.
• Oh, and we stayed around in Syria so more of our people could die needlessly. Because nothing says we love our Special Forces more than allowing them to die needlessly in a crappy country where we don’t have an exit strategy.
• THEN, we kicked people out over the COVID vaccine. Instead of handling that crisis with care, we booted people with general discharges. But don’t worry, we’ll invite them back, I’m sure they’ll come in droves!
• THEN, the Navy played politics and openly told Congress to go f*#! themselves and used OPTAR money to pay for abortion.

NOW, we are SHOCKED! SHOCKED! that we are in a huge recruiting. crisis. I made a prediction back in February that the Navy would use its “BINGO card” to keep people in:

1. Not kicking people out for physical fitness test failures
2. Waiving darn near everything, from age to non-violent felonies
3. Asking people to pretty-please stay around a few more years
4. Opening OCS and other admissions
5. Raising bonuses
6. Make life better for officers
7. Reduce opportunities to leave early
8. Op-Hold people

The Navy has in fact done all the things in bold. The only missing one is making life better. Maybe that’s a draw, since if you wanted free time and per diem off to go murder your unborn baby, you can now get it. The only prediction that hasn’t held was that the Navy would remove marijuana from its drug test, although it was totally an option in Congress.

My prediction for 2024: it only gets worse!

• We’ll relax rules on marijuana, opioids and other drugs
• Mental health rules will relax
• Bonuses will be handed out just to get on the bus
• We’ll create some new ribbon candy to congratulate people on passing boot camp
• We’ll see Navy advertisements EVERYWHERE, especially on Reddit, YouTube, Amazon Prime and other streaming platforms

None of it will work. When we spend more time focused on renaming the John C Stennis aircraft carrier, continue to allow flag officers to violate rules and get away with it (remember, you can sexually assault people and not go to jail, so long as you’re a 3-star in the Air Force), and continue to allow a broke acquisition system to churn out expensive weapons, we can’t recruit the best people. The best men and women want to join the Navy to fight for their country, with people and leaders they trust and on equipment that works. They want people held accountable for their actions, and they want others to hold them accountable because that’s how they become better.

We’re doing all the wrong things, and I expect 2024 to be another terrible year for military manning.

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.

…about the issues that matter to us.

Republican lawmakers are some of the weakest people in the world. With the notable exception of Donald Trump and a few Senators and Representatives, the overwhelming majority of Republicans elected to office can be relied upon to negotiate like Pope Francis did with Communist China (as in, sell out on all accounts and get nothing), find excuses for not pushing reforms that matter to the voters, and then reliably asking for more money because otherwise the evil Democrats will come to power.

Meanwhile, progressive lawmakers on the Democrat side push everything from porn in elementary classrooms and allowing sexual assault to go unpunished if the person is transgender to EV mandates and our military bankrolling abortion. They get pretty much all of these things, and since Republicans maybe roll back half of them, this means that “progress” is happening.

I don’t want Republicans to be conservative. Conserving means someone focuses on maintaining the status quo. That status quo is never going to happen. Technology changes our environment. Advances in medicine and communication means we can live longer, instantly communicate around the world, and even travel into outer space. It also brings on new challenges. Who would have thought that we’d be asking ourselves what to do with one million frozen embryos babies? Or how we would keep our faith if we lived on Mars?

The typical conservative response is to stick one’s head in the sand and refuse to accept the change. At my church, I have a parishioner that believes WiFi is damaging to your brain and causes cancer. When I installed a campus-wide WiFi network, every young person was ecstatic, but this guy was incensed. He spent an hour verbally blasting me while I was working, finally causing me to express some notably non-Christian phrases and tell him to…well, you can probably guess.

Yet after the network was complete, every young mom could stream the Mass on YouTube in the parking lot when they had to take their screaming 2-year-old out of the church. My church didn’t want a Facebook page until I pointed out that most of our young people were on Facebook, and if we didn’t put a message out, someone else would. Now we have a Facebook page, a solid following, and another way to build our community.

We cannot afford to simply conserve. It is not enough to just reside in the world, protect what we have and hope someone doesn’t come and upset our little piece of the world. Someone IS going to upset it, whether they come rioting in the streets, stabbing people on the train, or coming for your kids in school. Most of our elected Republicans lack the spinal cord to promise anything but a return to what used to be, which is pointless. We aren’t going back to the age of steam, the 1950s, the Victorian era, or any previous time. Birth control pills, social media, and all the recent advances in technology won’t disappear. Instead of wishing for things the way they were in the past, lawmakers need to push for their own version of progress. Since they seem void of ideas, here are my proposals that would make 2024 a far better year for Republican progressives:

1. 100% free adoption for any unwanted pregnancy. Fund the health care, maternity leave and all adoption costs. We have so many willing families that end up adopting kids overseas due to the legal and funding hurdles associated with adopting American babies.
2. End Daylight Savings Time. We already have states that don’t follow it. End it in the U.S. permanently.
3. Eliminate Physical Education in schools, bring back driving class, home economics and shop class. I mean seriously, physical education is a joke. Just drop it already. Kids need to learn how to drive, balance a checkbook, cook a meal, and build things with their hands. Boys and Girls, we are far better off with more girls knowing how to use a power drill and the more boys knowing how to cook basic meals.
4. Bring back medical billing transparency. This was a pretty big issue that President Trump signed into law, but has gone largely unenforced. We can’t begin to talk about keeping health care costs in check when we have no idea how much it costs in the first place.
5. Turn Social Security into a TSP-like structure. Congress will rob Peter to pay Paul using Social Security unless its changed into a defined contribution plan.
6. Cap Congress Senators and Representatives at 30 total years of service. Seriously, do we need someone hanging around for more than 30 years? After 30 years between the Senate and House, folks need to move on to something else.
7. Legalize marijuana and tax it. It’s fine if the DoD or other places won’t hire if you use drugs, but we’re probably better off just taxing it instead of trying to ban it.

I’m sure there are plenty of other items to add to this list. The point is, rather than trying to return to the mythical “good ole’ days,” we should be pushing for better rules that reflect the reality we are in.

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.

The recent budget deal to fund the Department of Defense, once again, showed how much elected Republicans are absolute wimps about negotiating. While continued billions to Ukraine was halted, we got nothing banning paid travel for abortion and a very limited spending cap on DEI.

We’re in the middle of funding one war in Ukraine, watching Israel fight another and trying to prepare to fight China…and we’re still wasting money on DEI and abortion?

But honestly, I’m not surprised, because most Republicans fail to put their money behind their values.

An easy example is Starbucks. Starbucks has long championed abortion, yet I still watch hundreds of Catholics order their Unicorn Latte (or whatever other sugary nonsense they prefer) from a company that happily donates to Planned Parenthood and a host of other reprehensible organizations. There are now hundreds of small coffee shops and plenty of other chains, and there is zero reason you can’t drink coffee from somewhere else. Yet here we are, throwing money towards the people that hate us.

Worse still, Republican voters are typically the stingiest in supporting alternative media. I’m becoming more and more impressed with Daily Wire’s “Bentkey” programming that my wife and I are likely going to cancel our Disney+ membership. Given the increasing amount of dumb programming coming out of Disney, its harder and harder for me to justify sending money to them when there is plenty of good kids content on Bentkey. I might have to use the DVD to watch Star Wars once in a while, but that’s already paid for, and at least they can’t change Luke’s preferred pronouns in my copy of Empire Strikes Back.

This Christmas, you should look at where you are spending your money, and try to find an alternative if that source is a raging liberal dumpster fire. Budweiser was a great example of people waking up and going “Hmm, not going to support this anymore,” and it sent a strong message to other businesses. But more has to be done. Continuing to pour money into organizations that hate your values is going to continue to breed feckless politicians, who follow the money.

While you’re at it, since Christmas is coming soon, why not send a friend or relative a copy of my book? It’s available in printed and audiobook format, and you can’t go wrong sending money to me.

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.