Army No Longer a Social Engineering Guinea Pig

No more mandatory transgender training in the U.S. Army. The focus will be on readiness.

While it may not have felt like it watching Democrats and the Left lose their collectives minds over the election of Donald Trump, in reality it was the first sign that a semblance of sanity had returned to America’s political mind. As we have repeatedly observed, the election of Trump was a repudiation of Barack Obama’s leftist agenda. And arguably nowhere was Obama’s radical agenda more evident and less welcome than in his implementation of leftist social engineering upon the U.S. military. Maybe the most obvious example of Obama’s agenda to fundamentally transform the military was the implementation of transgender training regulations.

Now that Trump is president, he is seeking to return the U.S. military’s focus back to what it was originally intended to do — defend the nation from international threats and win wars. Army Secretary Mark Esper and Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley have approved a series of service-wide memorandums that relieve soldiers from unnecessary training regimen. Col. John O'Grady explained, “The Army’s regulations and policies that deal with training were pretty settled, and there were not a lot of detractors to it. … It was all the other [training] requirements that we levied on ourselves, or we had levied from other places.” He noted that those previously mandated training requirements on transgender transition and drug abuse “served as barriers to maximizing time … to build readiness and lethality.”

This change in mandatory training comes as Defense Secretary James Mattis shifts away from the George W. Bush- and Obama-era strategic focus on fighting extremist groups and prioritizes a return to traditional nation-state threats posed by the likes of China and Russia.

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