Rushing The National Defense Authorization Act

lame-duck Congress puts military lives on the line.

Canada Free Press

Arnold Ahlert 

A lame duck Congress is on the verge of sticking it to America’s troops. Before they leave for recess they will attempt to pass the FY2015 version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). It is a compendium of ill-advised ideas seemingly aimed at advancing the Obama administration’s continuing effort to “fundamentally transform” the finest fighting force in the world into something more closely resembling a social-outreach organization. Sadly, Republicans, apparently oblivious to the mandate just handed to them by the electorate, are on board.

Unsurprisingly, the effort to shrink the military to its smallest size since WWII will be borne in large part by those who do the fighting and dying. A scheduled pay raise of 1.8 percent will be reduced to one percent, there will be reduced growth in the troops’ Basic Housing Allowance (BHA) for those who cannot be accommodated on military bases, and a $3 copay will be added to the cost of prescription medication. For Americans who think this is no big deal, here is the 2014 Military Pay Chart revealing the troops’ relatively meager pay levels, even for those with decades of service to our nation.

Yet it is the ever-reliable Center for Military Readiness (CMR) that details the far more pernicious agendas advanced in this bill. While troops bear the aforementioned reductions, pork still prevails. Sections in a version of the bill conceived by the Senate Armed Services Committee would establish a feminist-oriented entity to be known as the “Defense Advisory Committee on Investigation, Prosecution, and Defense of Sexual Assault in the Armed Forces.” As the CMR explains, this “would establish yet another power base in the Pentagon for feminists who believe that a person accused of sexual misconduct is automatically guilty, unless he is somehow (against all odds) found innocent because of ‘anti-women’ legal procedures that must be ‘fixed.’”

Even as the military is enduring cuts that shrink every branch of our armed forces, a large increase in gender quotas, aimed at increasing the recruitment of women into military service academies by an additional 20 percent, is also part of the agenda. There is nothing wrong with recruiting women, but as indicated by both the Defense Department and the left-leaning RAND corporation, there has been no evidence of insufficient efforts to do so. What this is really all about is the ongoing effort to integrate women into direct ground combat (DGC) units, despite extensive evidence that standards of effectiveness would be compromised in the process. Regardless of biological reality, the Obama administration has embraced “gender diversity metrics,” allowing more qualified personnel to be replaced by those meeting minimum standards laughably referred to as “lower but equal.”

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Reposted with permission