The Warrior Factory is Back in Business

The warrior factory is back in business!

That place where they take raw materials in the form of America’s best and brightest young men and women and turn them into warfighters. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines. A place where strength is developed, skills honed, and teams built. A 24/7 warrior factory where virtue is not virtue signaling, merit beats diversity, and standards are standards.

I come from a military family. Multiple consecutive generations of service who didn’t give one hoot about whether or not someone on high thought something about everything that had nothing to do with whether we would fight our nations battles with honor and come home to our families. In the Army my family served in we always saw stupid decisions from the flag pole as nothing more than stupid decisions from the flag pole.

But most recently the former Secretary of the Army, Christine Wormuth, announced that we don’t need generational military families. She feared that it would create a “warrior caste”. I submit that we need exactly that! A military so vaunted, so respected, so capable, that one generation desperately wants to follow the next in its ranks.

The Trump administration made very clear that the military will once again be a bastion of common sense, a fortress of fortitude. It starts with ridding the ranks of the notion that wars are won by sensitive efforts to break glass ceilings.

A myriad of actions have occurred in the first 30 days of Trump ’47. Senate leadership pushed through a resolution that includes major appropriations for military readiness and now goes to the House for consideration. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has mandated audits and is refocusing the Defense budget. General C.Q. Brown, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and who famously implemented DEI policies has been asked to step down. In his place the President has nominated Lieutenant General Dan “Razin” Caine, who he describes as someone who “embodies the warfighter ethos and is exactly the leader we need to meet the moment”. Force projection is once again about force projection.

In one of the most overplayed progressive moral posturing’s Fort Bragg became Fort Liberty. I don’t know a single “Bragg” soldier who ever cared about the name, but we by-God cared when they took it away. Suddenly every one of us who passed through the gates, jumped on the drop zones, or cleaned latrines in the barracks, were histrionically complicit in systemic racism. Vets have had to caveat their memories with a hyphenated description of where they served. No more.

In a chess-vs-checkers move the longstanding home of the 82nd Airborne, the Special Warfare Center, Army Special Operations and the Joint Special Operations Command, got its name back. In a classic end-around play the post was renamed in honor of US Army Private Roland Bragg, a silver star recipient of WWII.

It’s a sign to the world that our military is not filled with those who whimper, simper, and wring their hands about mean names. Our troops don’t have little bitty emotions and aren’t concerned with trigger words. They are warfighters. They are bigger than their circumstances.

And let’s be honest, “Fort Liberty” was a silly name. It sounded as if someone hand a name-the-post contest at a local elementary school. Changing the name back to Fort Bragg shows that we have a leadership that cares less about virtue signaling and more about readiness.

It’s a swagger. It’s a confident brashness. That cocky, devil-may-care attitude that won wars, defeated enemies, deterred danger. I predict the troops will love it. Indications are that they already do. Military recruiting since the November election has gone through the roof with recruiting commands posting numbers not been seen in fifteen years.

Whether it was an expeditionary fight or a battle here on US soil, there have been generations of Americans who have given the full measure to ensure that the interests of others were protected above their own. Honoring their memory means to never again allow them to become pawns in progressive social experimentation.

We have so much here at home for which to be thankful. At every turn in this country, we have more than we need and much of what we want. We have freedoms, rights, security. Generally speaking, we can say what we want, go where we want, worship how we want and associate with whomever we want.

This is not by chance.

This is not because of pious politicians or hand wringing pundits. The freedoms and prosperity that we know as a nation are made possible because of the lives of those who put on our nations uniforms and went to hard places to do hard things. We are free, and kept so because good people went to great lengths to do dangerous things.

What we are watching happen with new leadership in the Pentagon…… well, it just feels right. We will now get back to training young men and women to defeat and deter the enemies of this country. We will tell them that if they will join the big green machine that they will do more, see more, be more, than they ever could have been. They will be a part of something bigger than themselves.

And one day they will be the old vet saluting the flag, and telling the stories, and many of them will now answer the question: “Hey, where did you serve?” and they will say, “Me? I was at Bragg!”

The warrior factory is back in business.