Using vaccines as a political weapon, U.S. military leaders have wrecked the force’s combat readiness and morale
Under pressure from Republicans in Congress, the Defense Department announced at the start of this year that it would no longer require American service members to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
The policy change faced fierce resistance from the military’s top brass, including Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. In a memo sent in January repealing the requirement for soldiers to be vaccinated, Secretary Austin continued to credit the vaccine with “the many lives we saved … and the high level of readiness we have maintained.”
But critics of the military’s COVID-19 policy, including active and former service members who spoke with Tablet for this article, tell a different story. They say that the requirement for troops to receive the new vaccines, which included those with natural immunity after recovering from previous COVID-19 infections, was damaging to morale and hurt the military’s combat readiness. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., has repeatedly pointed to medical data which suggests that enforcing mass vaccinations on a generally young and healthy population may have actually caused an increase in non-COVID-19 related health problems in the force, though the Defense Department has not provided him or Tablet with a clear interpretation of that data.
By the time the Pentagon announced it was ending the mandate, 96% of service members across the armed forces had been vaccinated. However, a significant number of troops declined the shots, objecting on religious, scientific, or medical grounds. Of those objectors, 8,339 were kicked out of the military, a loss that was particularly acute coming in the midst of the worst recruitment crisis in 50 years, which saw the Army, Navy, Coast Guard, and Air Force all struggling to attract or retain members. The number of ejected objectors might continue to rise, as more service members who declined to get the jab are penalized for “refusing to obey a lawful order.” Many of those who were forced out, meanwhile, were given a “general” discharge rather than an “honorable” one, putting them at a disadvantage for future employment.
While a 96% compliance rate suggests general cohesion and a functioning military, the lurking reality is that a large percentage of troops who got the vaccine appear to have done so under duress. Tablet spoke with eight active and former service people for this article who come from some of the Army’s most prestigious units, as well as the Coast Guard. They paint a picture of a force that is divided and embittered and say that many of their compatriots resented being forced to take the shots against their will or even conscience in order to keep food on the table for their families. One soldier estimated that as many as 90% of his unit didn’t want to get the shots, and that many who caved now feel they should have held out for the mandate to be repealed. Another said he only knew three people in his entire platoon that got the shots “of their own volition” prior to the implementation of the mandate.
John Frankman, who declined the shot and left the Army in July 2023 after eight years of active service, including three as a Green Beret, told Tablet, “I’m getting out specifically because of the shot, even though it’s not mandatory anymore. I’ve lost out on enough opportunities, it doesn’t seem worthwhile for me to stay in.”
An Army infantryman from an elite unit who wished to remain anonymous told Tablet that he saw a senior noncommissioned officer from his unit tell a group of vaccine holdouts that they “were the reason America was in decline.” A paratrooper who spoke with Tablet anonymously said that leadership in his unit began an intense campaign to pressure soldiers to get the COVID-19 vaccines months before the Army officially implemented its mandate on Aug. 24, 2021. The paratrooper says that he heard a company commander in his unit say that he would “make my soldiers’ lives as miserable as fucking possible until they get the shot.”
They paint a picture of a force that is divided and embittered and say that many of their compatriots resented being forced to take the shots against their will or even conscience in order to keep food on the table for their families.
For the commanders, meanwhile, who were tasked with enforcing public health positions that turned out to be false, there are now concerns about reputational damage. “Soldiers know your position. You can say some untruths [and] no one’s going to give you a hard time about that,” said one former company commander. “But when you’re changing the story every week and obviously just saying nonsense because your higher command is telling you that … I saw personally that we were alienating our rank and file in a big way. We were losing their trust, and I didn’t want to be a part of that.”
In many cases, commanders embraced these policies with a commitment that went beyond the zeal for enforcing Army policies that is common among junior officers, according to the paratrooper. Rather, he calls the push to make soldiers get the COVID-19 vaccine the single most “divisive and destructive” event he witnessed in the military in more than a decade of service. As he would later write in a formal complaint submitted to the Army that was reviewed by Tablet, the COVID-19 vaccination “became by far the most important issue in our brigade and in the division.” That memo continued:
In order to get reluctant soldiers to take these experimental vaccines, commanders […] were encouraged to use all manners of persuasion and bullying, and even to do things that were plainly illegal (such as denying soldiers the right to attend career-enhancing military schools based on their vaccination status).
From the military’s standpoint, the mandate was not just a matter of life and death but also of national security. If infections swept through the ranks due to troops refusing to take available vaccines, not only would that destroy morale and discipline, but it could also leave the country unable to respond to an attack or emergency.
The problem with this argument is twofold: First, COVID-19 never posed a significant acute risk to healthy young people—the very demographic that overwhelmingly makes up the military—which means the vaccination drive was, at best, unnecessary. And secondly, according to several sources, the military’s approach to the vaccines, rather than emphasizing combat readiness, was used as a disciplinary tool to enforce political conformity and punish independent thought and ideological dissent.
“I’ve seen everything from [Don’t Ask Don’t Tell] repealed to gay marriage legalized to people are allowed to put gay pride flags in their offices now,” said a member of an elite infantry unit with over a decade of service. The jarring thing, he explained, was that the same military that boasts about its tolerance became rigidly intolerant on the question of bodily autonomy and vaccines. “You can get exemptions for religious beards if you’re Muslim, you can get an exemption to wear headgear, instead of your issued hat. That’s fine. I’m all for it … If you can do the job you should be allowed to do it … But then for a vaccine that’s violating the Nuremberg Code, and all of the sudden we’re the problem, that’s what’s bizarre to me.”
Many of those who refused the vaccines did so on the grounds that the mandate violated the Nuremberg Code of ethics for “permissible medical experiments.” The first line of the code reads, “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.” Those citing the code point out that these COVID vaccines had not even finished their clinical trials at the time troops were being pressured and/or mandated to take them, and were therefore being asked to sacrifice their Nuremberg derived rights. Health authorities in the U.S. dismiss that claim on the grounds that the vaccines had received emergency authorizations and were therefore not strictly “experimental.”
With two exceptions, all the soldiers who spoke with Tablet insisted that they remain anonymous—even those who are already out of the service. One former officer in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, the Army’s legal branch, said: “The fact that I am not subject to the UCMJ [Uniform Code of Military Justice], that there is no way that they can touch me, and yet I still don’t want to identify myself, should tell you something.”
That attorney, along with several other soldiers interviewed for this article (all of whom come from different backgrounds and do not share a clear set of political views) painted a disturbing picture that went beyond concerns about vaccine mandates. Given how intensely polarized national debates around COVID became, the Pentagon’s vaccination push—even in a best case scenario—was likely to cause some dissension in the ranks. But according to these current and former service members, the policy was not the result of medical or warfighting needs. Rather, they say that the emphasis on vaccinations was part of a larger push to overtly politicize the military—one of the only institutions left in the U.S. that still retains a degree of broad bipartisan support.
It may be tempting to dismiss this account as merely the grumbling of an isolated group, but their concerns echo a larger public debate. A series of recent reports, insider leaks, and congressional hearings have highlighted the tension between the military’s newfound adoption of ideological causes and its traditional warfighting mission. Indeed, there is no real question that the military has become more ideological in recent years since the top brass, moving in step with the White House, now openly touts the embrace of progressive diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies. The debate is over whether such policies strengthen the military, as leaders from Secretary Austin down insist they do, or cripple it as whistleblowers, watchdog groups, and conservative politicians have claimed.
Last October, U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar acknowledged that the military uses racial preferences as a criteria for acceptance to military service academies like West Point and ROTC contracts. The crucial point in Prelogar’s argument, and one that has been echoed by dozens of senior military leaders, including in an amicus brief filed to the Supreme Court last fall ahead of its ruling on affirmative actions policies in university admissions, is that engineering racial diversity is not simply a moral or social good but an imperative of warfighting. “It is a critical national security imperative to attain diversity within the officer corps. And, at present, it’s not possible to achieve that diversity without race-conscious admissions,” Prelogar testified to the Supreme Court last October.
This is how the difficult and divisive questions about vaccinations—were they really necessary for healthy young people? Did the government and medical authorities misrepresent their risks and benefits?—became truly explosive. The Pentagon now treats its medical policies, diversity goals, and national security missions as inseparable if not interchangeable. That makes it nearly impossible for the military to do an honest internal assessment of how specific decisions affected the force and the nation’s overall warfighting capacity.
While the Pentagon at present may be ill-equipped to act as its own auditor, there is still a vital need for a clear-eyed assessment of how and why the military imposed vaccine mandates, and what the consequences of those mandates have been so far.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/thinning-the-ranks
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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