THE BIG LIE to SCOTUS: RACIAL PREFERENCING IN MILITARY ACADEMY ADMISSIONS IS A NATIONAL SECURITY IMPERATIVE?

(This article first appeared in NationalReview.com: Diversity in Military Not a National-Security Imperative | National Review )

Bullets snapping across a battlefield are equal opportunity employers. That’s because bullets don’t discriminate based on skin color, and soldiers don’t shoot more or less accurately because of their skin color.

But, yet, in oral argument this week in a case before the US Supreme Court, Students for Fair Admissions vs UNC, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar argued that “[I]t is a critical national security imperative to attain diversity with the officer corps. And, at present, it’s not possible to achieve that diversity without race-conscious admissions, including in our nation’s service academies.”

Of course, she’s never worn a military uniform, let alone set foot on a battlefield, so you would think she would have referred to some real evidence to support her assertion. She didn’t. Instead, she relied upon the opinion of a collection of retired general officers who, also without evidence, asserted the same imperative in an amicus brief they filed for the case.

They’re all blowing smoke.

Here’s why:

Because, if Prelogar and those generals are right, ie that racial diversity in our officer corps is a “national security imperative,” then the services would at least track racial percentages in their mandatory assessments of unit combat readiness, but they don’t. Racial diversity is not included, and never has been.

That’s because it is factually irrelevant to the violent imposition of our will on the enemy, which is the object of all war.

As a defining example, let’s look at Army Regulation 220-1, which establishes the official requirements and formal process to determine and report the readiness of Army units to perform their wartime missions. It requires unit commanders to measure, assess and report four, designated areas: personnel, equipment on hand, the serviceability of that equipment, and the unit’s collective training proficiency.

Racial make-up of units is not mentioned.

But maybe we missed it. Maybe it’s nested as a metric under one of those four areas. The obvious one would be personnel, but when we look there we find only these three metrics, “total deployable personnel strength, assigned military occupational specialty skills match, and the deployable senior grade composite level.”

Again, racial make-up is not a criterion the Army measures to assess combat readiness.

But maybe we’re looking at an Army regulation that is sorely out of date. Nope. The current one is dated, 16 August 2022.

Okay, you say, that’s a regulation, maybe out in the real Army things are different. Well, during my 32 years in an Army uniform, having commanded combat units here and on the battlefield, never once in those years did the Army ever require me, or even politely ask me, to report the racial make-up of my unit or assess race as a component of my units’ ability to put bullets into the faces of evil men. Never.

I can say with absolute confidence that this is the case for the entire Army, not just my units. How so? Because my final Army assignment was Deputy Director of Operations for HQs Army, and the monthly readiness report of every, soon-to-deploy, combat brigade in the US Army crossed through my office and was briefed to the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army. We scrutinized the statuses of scores of brigades during that period, and not once was the assessment or reporting of racial make-up a requirement. Not once.

If the racial composition of our military units was a “critical national security imperative,” then it would be imperative on the Army to track it and assess it. It’s not, so the Army doesn’t.

Consequently, with no such national security imperative, our military has no such imperative to force racial diversity into its officer corps, and without that, our nation’s service academies have no need to resort to racial preferencing in their admissions processes.

It’s time to remember that the essence of war is violence, not virtue-signaling. Let’s get back to selecting future combat leaders on the basis of their qualifications and nothing else. If we don’t, future battlefields will sort this out for us.

Ernie Audino is a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, and a retired Brigadier General, US Army.

How to Keep the Taliban Flush With Bombs

(This article was originally published in The Epoch Times: https://www.theepochtimes.com/how-to-keep-the-taliban-flush-with-bombs_3919804.html)

A terrorist can really express himself with 5,000 metric tons of explosives. That’s precisely why specialized teams of U.S. troops and contractors in Afghanistan helped account for and secure huge stockpiles of munitions stored at eight key sites across the country.

But not anymore. Those Americans have already headed home, and any remaining folks capable of assuming the mission are withdrawing along with all the other Americans ordered out by President Joe Biden.

The Afghan National Army (ANA) colonel left holding the bag and responsible for this ammo is worried. “What happens when everything turns bad,” he asked, “and this stuff ends up in enemy hands?”

His old boss, ANA General Hotak, former Chief of Munitions Management for the Afghan Ministry of Defense, may have provided the answer. “There are enough explosives here to supply operations for the next twenty-five years,” he said.

Retired U.S. Army Special Forces Colonel Ron MacCammon agrees. “This stuff is all vulnerable to Taliban advances and tribal and militia influences if the situation deteriorates. Some of this ammunition could easily find its way into the hands of malign actors and turn up in global terrorist or criminal networks.”

MacCammon should know. He spent years in Afghanistan directly involved in specific U.S. programs purposed to keep this stuff out of enemy hands. After ten years of Soviet military presence there and twenty years of American presence, it’s not surprising that the stockpiles, acknowledged and clandestine, are overwhelmingly of U.S. and Soviet origin.

The bulk of the tonnage is of small arms ammunition, but also included are large quantities of other classes of munitions, such as hand grenades, 82 mm and heavier mortars, RPGs and other light anti-tank weapons, Soviet-era anti-tank landmines, and various other explosive compounds including Composition C4. Of course, that’s just what’s on the books. The ANA has always maintained other munitions in other bunkers that they keep off-limits to American eyes.

The locations of the eight major munitions storage sites are known to everyone, including the Taliban. Located at various points along Afghanistan’s Ring Road, each site contains dozens of bunkers, depots, or 40-footlong containers. We know the tonnages and types of munitions at each major site but one.

That one is close to the capital, and the ANA are very reluctant to disclose the capabilities they keep close to the capital, so they haven’t told us much about what they keep there. It’s safe to say that its quantities are substantial, and its types of munitions include “specialty items.”

What are “specialty items”? Things like MANPAD surface to air missiles. Yeah, those. All told across all sites we’re talking nearly 5,000 metric tons.

To make matters worse, with the departure of American expertise, so went Afghan willingness to continue using the computerized munitions accountability system we helped install. Now the state of the art in munitions accountability for the ANA is a pencil and ledger system. No joke.

In fairness, an experienced international NGO supported by U.S. and E.U. funding is now providing munitions management assistance to the ANA. The problem is members of this same NGO, likely in fear of running afoul of Taliban desires, have a reported history of refusing to clear IEDs emplaced by the Taliban. That doesn’t exactly inspire confidence the members of this NGO will resist Taliban desires in the future.

So it’s not like we don’t know that this stuff is vulnerable. It just seems we don’t care.

Here’s when we WILL care—when a platoon’s worth of next-generation shoe bombers get their hands on several hundred pounds of C4, for example. C4 is 30 percent more powerful than the so-called Mother of Satan, TATP, the explosive that al-Qaeda member Richard Reid used in his attempt to bring down American Airlines Flight 63 in 2001. According to FBI sources Reid used only 10 ounces. Imagine how creative al-Qaeda members can be should they take possession of 5,000 metric tons of explosives.

We can reduce the likelihood of such an atrocity and worse from occurring, and doing so is squarely in our national interest, but doing so will require the honesty and the courage to say, “You know what? I was reckless. We need to put enough American combat power back on the ground to secure these munitions until they can be destroyed or otherwise rendered safe.”

A man who knows more than a little about violence in Afghanistan is Ahmad Massoud, son of the late Ahmad Shah Massoud, former commander of the Northern Alliance who was assassinated by order of Osama Bin Laden two days before 9/11. When I asked Massoud about the likelihood of these munitions finding their way into Taliban hands, he replied, “That is certain, so we should thank God that Afghanistan doesn’t have a nuclear weapon.”

Amen.

Ernie Audino is a retired brigadier general, U.S. Army. He serves on the staff of U.S. Congressman Michael Waltz and is a senior military fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy and at Soran University in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. He is the only American general officer to have previously served a full year on the battlefield embedded with Kurdish peshmerga forces.