As Andrea Widburg chronicles today, the top levels of the military have been purged during the Obama years, and as a result have gone overboard in attacking Tucker Carlson on Twitter for his remarks criticizing prioritizing flight suits for pregnant women and other obsessions over feminizing the military.  She presciently wrote:

By Sunday, people were beginning to realize that the commanding officer in charge of the social media accounts should have stepped in and disciplined these people.

At the time she wrote this, the following dispatch was not available.  Zachary Stieber of the Epoch Times:

A U.S. Marine Corps unit's Twitter account says it "messed up" in its comments while responding to Fox News host Tucker Carlson as part of a debate over his commentary about social justice initiatives in the U.S. Armed Forces.

The official account for the II Marine Expeditionary Force Information Group used a pejorative on social media in responding to Carlson's recent statements on how the military should be focused more on adversaries and less on culture issues.

The Marines shared a picture of a female soldier carrying a male one and tagged Carlson, writing that the photo showed "what it looks like in today's armed forces."

"Get right before you get left, boomer," the account said, using a word widely considered a pejorative term.

After intense pushback for using an official military account to slam a private citizen, the Marines unit wrote in tweets: "We are human and we messed up. What was intended as a tweet in support of our female Marines and sisters serving in uniform was clearly not aligned with our standard practices or an appropriate representation of the Marine Corps. We will do better and serve the people.

"We can do better and we will collectively take a knee, review our procedures and get back in the fight. Our focus is to train, fight and win and we have a hard time doing that without your support."

It's a start, but not adequate. For one thing, despite writing, "We are human…" there is no human being's name attached to the apology.  It is entirely impersonal.  Who was it, at what level, that approved the slur?

Even more importantly, since when does the U.S. military mobilize a formidable group of commissioned and non-commissioned senior staff to attack a journalist who is legitimately offering criticism?  Streiff of RedState provides an answer:

The amateurish attacks on Carlson were only stunning because never before has there been a coordinated campaign issued out of the Secretary of Defense's office targeting a member of the media, by name, over an opinion expressed by them. Never. In fact, there has never been such a shameful episode directed against a specific member of the media for divulging secret information or false reporting. The men and women in the Armed Forces know there is a double standard, they know about the campaign of wokeness being carried out. Carlson not taking it all that seriously is going to resonate with a rank-and-file that is becoming culturally detached from the senior officer ranks. That is not a good thing. In fact, it is a dangerous state of affairs only exceeded by the way that same leadership is failing in its primary duty of winning wars.

Purging a nation's military of leaders based on political considerations has the potential to be disastrous.  Stalin purged his generals based on his perceptions of their political loyalty to him, and many historians blame that for Hitler's ability to penetrate so deeply into the Soviet Union when he abrogated the Hitler-Stalin pact.  The USSR suffered horrendous casualties — in the millions — as a result of the Germans' deep penetration.  A military led by politically reliable people who replaced those who won their leadership posts by competence is a recipe for disaster.

The days in which Americans could assume that no military conflict would threaten our peaceful lives are over.  China is aggressively building up its military capabilities, and has population 4–5 times bigger than our own, as well as an economy that is generating vast resources for the government to invest in the military.  It openly targets the United States as the hegemon it wishes to displace.

We cannot afford a politically correct military.

Photo credit: Twitter video screen grab.