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The new Secretary of Defense wants to address the issue of extremism in the military.<\/p>\n
https:\/\/www.stripes.com\/news\/us\/defense-secretary-will-order-military-wide-stand-down-to-address-extremism-1.660899<\/a><\/p>\n From the article:\u00a0\u00a0Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told top Pentagon leaders Wednesday that he will direct a military-wide stand down to address extremism within the ranks, according to his top spokesman.<\/p>\n Austin wants all military units to take an operational pause to discuss extremism as he works to grasp the full scope of the issue and better address the longstanding problem, John Kirby, the Pentagon\u2019s chief spokesman, told reporters Wednesday. The pauses are expected to occur within the next 60 days, but Austin has yet to determine how the stand downs are to be completed, Kirby said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe intent is to reinforce the [Pentagon\u2019s] policies and values with respect to this sort of behavior and to have a dialogue with the men and women of the force and to get their views on what they are seeing at their level,\u201d Kirby said. \u201cHe wants commands to take the necessary time to … speak with troops about the scope of this problem. It’s a two-way conversation.\u201d<\/p>\n Austin spoke frankly with the acting service secretaries and uniformed service chiefs about his concerns about extremism in the military, including white supremacism, said Kirby, who attended the meeting. The new defense secretary, who is the first Black leader of the Defense Department, wants the service leaders to better grasp how pervasive the issue is within their formations and work with leaders to stamp it out, Kirby said. – article<\/p>\n I do not know why he thinks this is something new. It was common when I was in the Navy, back in the Stone Age when ships were moved across the bounding main by wind and sail and sailors climbed the rigging to unfurl the topsails. If you read the entire article, he’s leaning on the white supremacist thing, as if that is the only issue involved, because he ran into a bunch of ne0-Nazis at Fort Bragg some time back. So that makes all paleskinned military white supremacists and neo-Nazis and therefore suspect….<\/p>\n I’m simply posting this to make people aware that running a disciplined, well-trained military and a tight ship seems to be less important to this new SecDef than identity politics. Perhaps that will change as time goes by.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The new Secretary of Defense wants to address the issue of extremism in the military. https:\/\/www.stripes.com\/news\/us\/defense-secretary-will-order-military-wide-stand-down-to-address-extremism-1.660899 … New SecDef Austin Takes the Helm<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":653,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[220,430,84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-floggings-will-continue-until-morale-improves","category-2020-election","category-military-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/653"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=110190"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":110191,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110190\/revisions\/110191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=110190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=110190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=110190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}