As previously reported on AFN, the United States Naval Academy recently announced it is actively seeking to hire a "specialist in Gender and Sexuality Studies" to bring midshipmen "up to date" with LGBT issues.
"This is one of the most blatant wastes of taxpayer money that I have ever seen,” complains Kirk Lippold, “in that it does absolutely nothing to prepare midshipmen to be professional officers in the United States Navy.”
Lippold graduated from the Naval Academy in 1981, where he later returned as an instructor, though he is most well-known for commanding the navy destroyer USS Cole when al-Qaeda terrorists bombed it in 2000 while in port in Yemen. The bomb blast killed 17 sailors.
The world is just as dangerous today, if not more so, Lippold tells AFN.
“This is not preparing midshipmen for the harsh world of what they're going to deal with,” he warns, “if we have to go to conflict with China or Russia or Iran."
Of those three U.S. adversaries, Lippold see China as the biggest looming threat facing our country.
"Every aspect of their government," he says of the Chinese Communist Party, "is focused on the short-term influence and long-term domination of the region and then the world."
A violent fight for control of Taiwan would involve the U.S. Navy in the Taiwan Strait, where roughly 100 miles separates the independent island from China's mainland.
Tabletop war games last year predicted a narrow U.S. win over China that comes with heavy losses including irreplaceable U.S. warships. In numerous scenarios, China was able to put two U.S. carriers, and 10,000 sailors, at the bottom of the sea.
China’s navy, which is called the People’s Liberation Navy, surpassed the United States in the number of warships around four years ago. In a sea battle, war planners say a numerical advantage could decide the winner and China is nearing a 100-ship advantage within 2025.
In a related story by The Washington Stand, Naval Academy alumnus Travis Weber said he was troubled to learn midshipmen are studying gender and sexuality, reading radical feminist writers, and even studying “Latinx” in an English Department course. All of those topics, he said, are divisive and therefore hurt unit cohesion.
“If it is being taught in a way that ends up forming worldview,” he warned, “not only is it unhelpful, but it is detrimental.”
It is possible the U.S. Navy is preparing for future combat at the same time it is using class time for gender studies, but the public also recently learned the Navy decided to use a Yeoman 2nd Class drag queen to boost its lagging recruitment numbers. A video released last year lectured sailors about proper pronoun usage.
