Hailing his potential to be the first U.S. veteran to become president since George H.W. Bush, Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis unveiled his "Mission First" military policy agenda Tuesday in Columbia, South Carolina.
"We're now in a situation where we find ourselves seeing the military go down very different paths," DeSantis said in his speech which aired in part on Newsmax. "It's a military that has been ordered by civilian officials to pursue political ideology, to pursue social experimentation, to be yet another institution in American life that gets infected with the woke mind virus.
"This is changing the character of the military. It's changing the culture of our services, and it's creating a situation in which great warriors have been driven away.
"And recruiting is at an all-time low post-abolition of the draft in the Vietnam conflict."
The four key pillars of DeSantis' "Mission First" plan, his second policy agenda unveiling since declaring his candidacy (border security was the first):
- Ripping political agendas in military.
- Restoring military standards.
- Breaking the swamp and promoting accountability.
- Turning the tide against Biden's military recruitment crisis.
"When China sees the Navy, for example, using drag queens to recruit people, they are laughing in our face, when you see some of the nonsense that's gone on in the services," DeSantis, a Navy veteran, said in his speech. "These are things that would have been unthinkable even 10 years ago, much less in prior generations.
"Our enemies are whetting their appetite. You know why? Because they're saying America takes its eye off the ball. They're seeing America pursue other agendas at the expense of our nation's security agenda.
"So we need a military that is focused on being lethal, being ready, and being capable. And if there's anybody's agenda that gets in the way with that, that agenda needs to take a hike and that's what we're going to do.
"So our mantra on Jan. 20, 2025, as commander in chief will be very simple: Mission first. Accomplish the mission: That has to be the sole focus of everything we do, and that's going to require us to go in and overhaul how the military has been running over these last few years."
DeSantis volunteered to join the Navy after graduating from Harvard Law School where he deployed in support of SEAL Team One as a JAG officer in Iraq and was awarded the Bronze Star.
"There was no greater honor than knowing I was wearing the cloth of my country when I served in the military, but our nation's once-proud fighting force has been infected and paralyzed by a political agenda," DeSantis said Tuesday. "It is time to rip the woke out of the military and return it to its core mission.
"We must restore a sense of confidence, conviction, and patriotic duty to our institutions — and that begins with our military."
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Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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