Reality Check 101

Non-veteran civilians have no reference point from which to understand the military, especially within ground combat forces.  Our military’s mission is the defense of this nation through intimidating readiness and victorious war-making.  In order to accomplish the mission, the military is, by necessity, a completely unique structure, and culture.

Imagine a twenty-something surrendering independence.  They must liquidate or store all their belongings and leave family and friends behind.  They have no input as to who commands them and pledge by oath to obey commands simply because they are orders.  They are required to live a regimented lifestyle, with people in secured “cities” they do not choose while dressing and behaving in compliance with strict rules.  As a result of this, they are trained to rush into danger out of duty, honor, and obedience.

That military environment, where interdependence, uniformity, and singularity of purpose are paramount for efficiency, lethality, and survivability, has been aggressively degraded.  The Obama administration had been ignorantly imposing civilian leftest gender ideology into an environment where human biology matters the most.  This is no more telling than in the issue of transgender military service.

It is not naïve, genderphobic (of some kind) or hateful to acknowledge what Dr. Ben Carson recently schooled Katie Couric in, that biology and genetic markers don’t change simply because a person feels a need or compulsion to be the opposite sex.  The latest findings published in The New Atlantis demonstrate science still does not support the claim that transgenderism or gender identity are independent of biological sex (Sexuality and Gender; The New Atlantis, Fall 2016).

Until President Trump’s courageous tweet about barring transgender military service is formalized, the Pentagon is poised to embrace the absurdity of unverifiable radical genderism.  The Army, America’s largest armed service, has been warning female soldiers to expect biological males in their showers.  All of the forces are scrambling to accommodate a long list of possible taxpayer-funded operational booby traps:  “male pregnancies”, gender reassignment surgeries, pre-surgery counseling, hormone therapies, extra leave (vacation) entitlements, pre/post-surgery leave time and indefinite hormone treatments.

Our armed forces have experienced frightening increases in the numbers of sexual assaults and rates of unwanted pregnancies.  Into that mix, the Pentagon would  force-feed another list:  mixed-sex barracks and personal care facilities, living conditions “that are often austere, primitive, and characterized by little or no privacy” (The Army’s New Shower Policy: Bare With Us; Washington Update, June 2017), additional training for officers and non-commissioned officers, special accommodations and disciplinary systems for harassment and discrimination.  Of course, while trying to maintain morale, cohesion and readiness, fighting forces will have to do battle with the same well-documented civilian ills that are substantially over-represented within the LGBTQ community – depression & suicide, sexually-transmitted diseases, substance abuse, sexual abuse and same-sex assaults (Atlantis; also – The Health Effects of Homosexuality; Timothy Daily, 2003).

Three of the four armed services requested from one to two years delay for implementation of Obama’s sexuality engineering project.  They were given only six months to develop whole systems of support and intervention for all these attendant medical, social and psychological complications.

It is easy to forget that everything federal, including the budget for our military, comes out of our paychecks.

You and I would have been on the hook for big money.  For instance, in 2016 Defense Secretary Ash Carter requested an analysis of health care costs for transgender soldiers. The RAND Corporation analyzed the needs (Assessing the Implications of Allowing Transgender Personnel to Serve Openly).  The study claimed that impact would be minimal, only $24 million to $84 million over ten years.

But Family Research Council’s Peter Sprigg has done an in-depth analysis of the costs (Transgender Policy Could Cost Military Billions Over Ten Years, June 2017).  He found that gender reassignment could incur over 40 times

the RAND claims – $3.7 billion over ten years.  The RAND study did not monetize recovery times and substantially underestimated potential patient costs under the military’s 100% coverage environment.  The military pays directly but RAND erroneously based its data on estimated private employer premium increases by insurance companies.  In addition, RAND did not include pre-surgery counseling, prior year hormone therapy and leave time, recruiting/training costs or lost deployment costs.

As we pay for our armed forces’ “Gay Pride Month” commemorations next year in June, as we did this year, aside from religious liberty and free speech violations, we can only hope that the Pentagon’s propensity for all things civilian will also commemorate the whole story.