Army Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin (ret.), vice president of the Family Research Council, wrote an open letter to Secretary of Defense James “Mad Dog” Mattis in which he suggests Obama administration holdouts are damaging the U.S. military’s primary mission.
He wrote:
The head of the United States Pacific Command, Admiral Harry B. Harris Jr. testified before the House of Representatives in late April that the threat posed by North Korea has grown sufficiently to endanger the Hawaiian Islands. All around the globe, serious national security problems are coming to the fore in places like Iran, Venezuela, Afghanistan and the South China Sea. Yet, because of holdover personnel from the Obama administration, and damaging Obama-era policies remaining in place, our military continues flailing.
Specifically, Boykin is concerned about the Obama-era policy that the military will begin accepting transgender recruits on July 1. He wrote this policy alone would have a devastating impact on President Donald Trump and Secretary Mattis’ stated priorities: mission readiness, command proficiency and combat effectiveness.
He wrote:
I received a letter from a known but confidential source in the naval service who asked me to inform the command structure in Washington about the damaging effects of these policies:
As part of the policy, COs must facilitate the requests of individuals for transgender treatment (surgery, cross-hormonal therapy, etc.). … [O]nce the service member is considered “stable” in their preferred gender, and their “gender marker” is changed in a DoD database, they must be accommodated in the berthing and bathroom facilities of their preferred gender regardless of whether they still possess their opposite sex anatomy! (And most are expected to do so). Given the close living quarters that most military members have to share, this is particularly distressing to many of us, especially women.
These policies will ultimately undermine recruitment and retention.
Secretary Mattis must consider the many complex ramifications of these Obama-era policies that remain in effect. The DOD and the Congress need to ensure the priorities of the U.S. armed forces remain those that the Secretary has outlined: mission readiness, command proficiency and combat effectiveness. Holdover personnel from the Obama Administration need to focus on these new priorities, and not on the last Administration’s social engineering projects that ignore military readiness.
Boykin served in the Army for 36 years, most of them in special forces, including Delta Force. The last four years of his military career were spent as Undersecretary for Intelligence at the Department of Defense.
Click here to read his entire op-ed at Breitbart.com. {eoa}
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