RUTHFULLY YOURS

The problem according to Mabus and his chief enlisted naval adviser is that, try as they might, their naval social justice retitling team can’t seem to come up with a satisfactory gender-neutral replacement for the Navy’s traditional title for a clerk, which, as it has been since the birth of the United States Navy, is yeoman.  I kid you not, folks: with all the problems our military faces in this very dangerous world, our secretary of the Navy has his top chief petty officer, Master Chief of the Navy Michael D. Stevens, busy changing the titles of the countless combat specialty ratings in that force, which includes the United States Marine Corps.  This quixotic quest is necessitated by the relentless insistence of the Obama administration that women be allowed to serve in all combat units and positions regardless of continuing demonstrations that this is a clearly foolish program with coming deadly consequences.

While my recent piece drew many humorous suggestions for a replacement title for yeoman, one commenter soberly noted that this is no laughing matter when it comes to the Navy’s real budget needs.  Barack Obama and the Democratic Party have taken an accounting axe to our military forces, demanding drastic reductions everywhere, across every fleet and every force.  In the Navy, that means not only fewer ships, but also fewer sailors to man and support those ships remaining.  Because of Obama’s budgets, naval aviators aren’t allowed to fly sufficient training missions to retain their flying proficiency.  Even special naval helicopter units that fly SEAL missions are being shut down, with their mission being shifted onto the Army.  Point is, money’s tight, and the budget constraints are affecting mission training and performance.

And yet Ray Mabus wants to spend scarce funds to rewrite hundreds if not thousands of Navy and Marine Corps manuals governing training, maintenance, and operations of those forces while reprinting virtually every form with application to the combat arms of both those forces.  I can guarantee you there is absolutely no one in the office of Ray Mabus who has a clue as to the needless and unaffordable costs of these changes they are pushing at a time when every penny of the budget should be earmarked for combat operations and not such administrative idiocy.

I’m particularly interested in how Rainbow Ray and his Unicornians are going to rewrite MCRP 3-02B, Marine Corps Martial Arts Program, so that it instructs 130-pound female infantrypersons in how to engage and overpower 180-pound male jihadists in the bloody, vicious, unrestrained fury of hand-to-hand combat.