"In the Navy"

Navy's new drag queen digital ambassador reminiscent of 1979 Village People hit.

By JOHN LEAKE

The Battle of Leyte Gulf in October of 1944 was the largest naval battle of World War II, and probably the largest in history. About 3,000 sailors and airmen were killed, and thousands of others were wounded during 3 days of fighting.

Since then, the U.S. Navy’s seapower throughout the world has been largely unrivaled. The last times U.S. naval vessels were attacked by a foreign military was the USS Liberty incident on June 8, 1967, during which the vessel was attacked by Israeli Air Force and Naval units, and the USS Stark incident on May 17, 1987, when an Iraqi jet aircraft fired two Exocet missiles at the frigate, thereby killing 37 sailors.

US naval vessels have also suffered severe damage from the USS Cole bombing in 2000, and from accidents and fires, including the notorious 2020 Bonhomme Richard fire in San Diego harbor that destroyed the entire multi-billion dollar vessel. The Navy blamed the incident on a disgruntled sailor who was courtmartialed for arson, but the incident revealed widespread incompetence and lack of training, and the young sailor was ultimately acquitted.

And so, for decades, the experience of actual combat has been more or less limited to Navy Seals and carrier based Naval aviators—the most elite units in the service. The U.S. Marine Corps, which is technically a branch of the Navy, experienced heavy combat in the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns (with 378 killed in action in the former and 853 killed in the latter).

However, for the majority of the 343,000 personnel in the U.S. Navy, the mission is mostly one of readiness and deterrence, but rarely if ever of actual combat. This reality is apparently contributing to the challenge of recruiting new personnel, because as anyone who has read naval history knows, even during war, much of shipboard life is matter of dull routine. How to entice young men to serve on ships on which young women are a minority (16% in 2008)—that is, places of confinement, isolation, restricted in almost every conceivable way?

For the last two hundred years, the Roman Catholic Church has faced a similar challenge in its effort to recruit priests and monks. As an ex Catholic priest once told me, one approach was to recruit gay boys from poor regions of the world who, because they are naturally attracted to men, did not perceive monastic life to be an onerous deprivation.

The U.S. Navy seems to have taken a leaf from the same playbook with its new "digital ambassador,” 24-year-old sailor Joshua Kelly, who is also a drag queen.

The U.S. Marine Corps official motto is Semper Fi (Always Faithful). The U.S. Navy does not have an official motto, but by long custom, the unofficial motto is "Non sibi sed patriae" (Not self but country). Because few members of the younger generations have been taught to revere our country and, at the same time, to be deeply absorbed in themselves, they likely perceive this motto to be abstract and lacking persuasion.

Once the belief in a country and its institutions has been lost, it is very difficult to rejuvenate it. This is the principle reason why most conservative commentators often come off as sounding staid and uninspiring to the young. It’s as though the spirit has departed from the body that no amount of edifying rhetoric can reanimate. As Hegel pointed out in the preface to his Elements of the Philosophy of Law:

Philosophy always arrives too late to teach the world how it should be. As the thought of the world, philosophy appears only in the period after reality has been achieved and has completed its formative process. This lesson, also taught by history, is that only in the late stage of reality does the ideal appear in opposition to this reality, grasping it in the form of an intellectual construct.

When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then a form of life has grown old, and cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized; the Owl of Minerva takes flight only as the dusk begins to fall.

The dusk has apparently fallen on the U.S. Navy. Old men who revere the institution still remember the ghosts of James Lawrence, Stephen Decatur, John Paul Jones, Chester Nimitz, and Pappy Boyington (to name a few). To be sure, these were men who grew up in a completely different age, and had a completely different conception of what it means to be a man and sailor in the Navy.

I descend (on the paternal side) from an English naval family, and for many years I read the literature of the British and U.S. navies. My father served in the U.S. Marine Corps, and over the years he occasionally joked about Marines being the only true warriors in the service. For all of the lore of glorious battles and valorous sailors, much of shipboard life has always been drudgery, harsh discipline, and boredom. One of the best scenes in the 2003 film Master and Commander features a debate between Captain Jack Aubrey and Dr. Stephen Maturin about how the men on board are treated:

Peace has always posed (in a paradoxical way) a great challenge to the Navy, because during protracted periods of peace, the service and its young members have struggled to understand their mission. The usual answers are: 1). Keep maritime commerce safe from pirates. 2). Deter aggression from the country’s adversaries.

What exactly is the U.S. Navy’s mission today?

Post Script: After I wrote this post, I realized that—not being a Navy veteran myself—my perceptions of what is going on in the institution may be off-base, so I sent it to an old friend who is a decorated Navy veteran, and solicited his critical feedback. He just wrote back:

Outstanding. The navy (and US military in general) are hollow forces. I believe that if we get into a shooting war with China, it will not go well for us.

The Bonhomme Richard is a great example. I’m reasonably certain that the ship’s leadership had spent quite a lot of time chasing 100% vaccination compliance and diversity training. Not any time left over to practice shipboard firefighting. There are only 24 hours in a day. The more silly bullshit that gets piled on, the more crucial basics will be dropped.

The military (especially USMC and Army) have alienated their biggest recruiting block: red-blooded southern boys. I think the flag officers are mostly there now because they have finely tuned their abilities to read which way the political winds are blowing. Leadership ability is no longer required.

He is a stoical man and therefore doesn’t indulge in lamenting or regretting things that are beyond his control, but I sense he finds this a sad state of affairs, given that he dedicated most of his youthful years to the mission of protecting his country “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”