There have been great presidents who never did any soldiering, of course, but there has never been this long a run of American commanders in chief who haven’t seen war up close.
Now that the only veteran to have seriously contended for the 2024 presidency, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), is gone from the race for the Republican nomination, the conversation I had with him back in December feels different. Serving, after all, changes you in personal ways, especially if, like DeSantis, you actually served in a combat zone.
Noting he was my age, I asked, “When we were kids, did you have the G.I. Joe guys? Watch that old G.I. Joe cartoon?” It’s probably not a question he often hears. DeSantis laughed. “Oh yeah.”
I quoted the 1980s cartoon show theme song: “We’ll fight for freedom wherever there’s trouble.” I know, I told him, “It was cheesy and silly, trying to sell toys. But when they shipped me to the war in Afghanistan and told me that my unit’s mission was to help these [Afghan] people get back on their feet … to resist the Taliban. […] I wanted to believe that we fight for freedom.” I spoke of the way President Joe Biden destroyed our hard-fought Afghanistan mission and asked him how he felt about the betrayal.
DeSantis replied, “I was angry at how it went down, particularly the fact that we lost 13 service members in the disorder and in the chaos. And it was just the lack of leadership. He put politics ahead of what was right for the mission. And the results were of course disastrous. It was disastrous to lose people, to have all that military equipment left behind that the Taliban got, but then the signal it sent to other people throughout the world that, you know, this is America now and this is not somebody that you need to be worried about. That has had ramifications for what’s being done in China, Iran, Russia, all these places. They saw that, they took note, and the world’s less safe as a result of the ineptitude that the Biden administration displayed.”
DeSantis stressed the importance of peace through a strong military that he, as president, would only deploy with “a clear, achievable objective.”
It was possible for me to imagine tactical changes our military might embrace in pursuit of clearer objectives, but was DeSantis aware of how demoralized the military has become under Biden? I told him about my several determined lifer Air Force officer friends who simply gave up and got out, and about the former commander of my local American Legion post who, like me, can no longer recommend military enlistment. Signing bonuses are up, but recruitment is down.
DeSantis didn’t hesitate with his answer to what he’d do about this. “I have veterans saying the same thing to me too, that they don’t want their kids or grandkids to join today’s military. … They used to always take pride in subsequent generations that would wear the uniform, and we’ve lost a lot of that. And I think it’s a combination of military operations and the civilian leadership not doing a good job with how they’ve deployed troops. But I think it’s also … a focus on woke ideology, social experimentation, all these different things. … I’ve had pilots tell me they’ve had more DEI training than they have actually time training in the cockpit. So that’s just unacceptable. And of course morale is going to suffer. Of course recruiting is going to go down.”
He spoke of the service members who left or were fired over COVID shots. “When it was clear that the vaccines didn’t stop the spread of COVID, they still doubled down and kicked people out.” His solution? “You come in [as president] and day one, you rip all the politics, all the woke out, restore the military to mission first, and you can do that as commander in chief.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis sounded sincere and determined to overcome the serious problems Biden has brought to our military. Now that we know he won’t be elected this time around, hopefully the eventual 2024 Republican nominee will understand and care about these problems for our military.
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Trent Reedy, author of several books including Enduring Freedom, served as a combat engineer in the Iowa National Guard from 1999 to 2005, including a tour of duty in Afghanistan.
*Some names and call signs in this story may have been changed due to operational security or privacy concerns.