Woker Dumber Military. By Anatoly Karlin.
Fundamentally, you need your military forces to be staffed with high IQ and well trained men with high morale and commitment to its cause.
High IQ is especially important in commanding positions and in the more “g loaded” services. According to a 2015 paper by M.F. Cancian and M.W. Klein, it seems to have been going rapidly down even before the diversity drives of the 2010s. The cognitive performance of US Marine officers has seen a 10 IQ point decline between the 1980s and 2010.
On the other hand, there has been an increase in physical fitness. But, good and aesthetic as fitness maxing is, brawn doesn’t do nearly as much for your combat effectiveness as brains.
During WW2, American officers were Chad jocks who could outrun their platoons, while German officers were nerds who studied military history, weapon specs, and did just one hour of athletics per week.
Consequently, German units were much more combat effective than American ones, with the best US Marine divisions only being equivalent to second-tier Wehrmacht ones. On the rare occasions that they were more or less evenly matched on the battlefield, with no American logistics or air power preponderance, the Germans almost always won.
This decline is systemic and probably unavoidable in so far as private sector salaries have become much more competitive relative to public sector salaries, including military ones. The attraction of military service as a civic and patriotic ideal has also declined. In academic terms, West Point is a decidedly middling school; it is not where the intellectual gifted go. …
However, in the past few years, these long-standing trends in deteriorating human capital have been turbocharged by the rapid infiltration of Woke ideology into the American military. …
- In September 2020, recommended reading courses at West Point included classics of military theory such as “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction” and “A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory”. …
- In October 2020, the head of the Air Force recruiting division says too many pilots are white men and that increasing diversity is a war-fighting imperative. …
- In December 2020, apparently unsatisfied with the existing decline in officer IQs, the military called for a “a thorough review of DOD aptitude tests to ensure they do not adversely impact diversity.”
Note that up until now, this was all still under President Trump. One of Joe Biden’s first acts in office was to reverse the transgender ban in the military, heralding it by choosing a transgender veteran to be part of the transition team at the Department of Defense.
By February 2021, the US Navy was recommending its sailors read racial grievance grifter Ibram X. Kendi on “How To Be An Anti-Racist” … as well as other classics in the naval genre such as “Sexual Minorities and Politics” and “The New Jim Crow”. Conspicuously missing: “The Influence of Sea Power Upon History” by Alfred Thayer Mahan, one of the most prominent naval theorists of all time. (The Chinese for their part are reading him). …
Is it possible to arrest these trends? Probably not — as we see above, it was already in progress throughout the US Armed Forces for at least the past couple of years, including during a period when Republicans were ascendant.
Moreover, it has its antecedents in the other Anglo-Saxon countries, having started off in Canada and progressed onto the UK from around 2015. A British military affairs watcher with whom I’ve occasionally exchanged emails presented the following timeline a couple of years ago:
Britain has gone from, in just 5 years, the ability to train, organize and deploy the highest quality brigade-level expeditionary forces in the world to having an eroded military now more focused on “wokeness” and “diversity” than combat capability. This decline is not an overnight, black and white phenomena, but appears intractable due to entrenched ideology.
Remember what happened to the French when they politicized their military prior to WWI?
