Michigan congressional candidate leaves Army to run for office, criticizes current military leaders

Michigan GOP Congressional candidate Tom Barrett said he left the Army to run for Congress with goals to restore readiness in the military and stand up to President Joe Biden. 

"I retired from the army two years ago in large part because of the failure of leadership of Joe Biden and decided to run for Congress to stand up to Biden, and really bring about a course correction in our military," Barrett said on the "Just the News, No Noise" TV show. "It's a major part of why I'm running."

Barrett served for 22 years in the U.S. Army and was deployed to Iraq and Kuwait. He criticized the current military leadership put into place by Biden, arguing the military has a readiness problem. 

"Right now we have a recruiting problem in the military," he said. "We have a retention problem and we have a readiness problem. These are all because of Joe Biden and the senior leadership that he's appointed to these positions that have simply lost the trust of the American people."

Conservative politicians have been sounding the alarm about leftist ideology infiltrating the military and its implications for national security for the past four years. 

Former Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf said last year that he's concerned about the rise of "wokeness" in the military, stating they have degraded physical standards and have gone "woke in their teachings in the Pentagon and elsewhere."

"The withdrawal from Afghanistan, there was that drone strike a few days later that we later learned blew up a carload of children, which they tried to double down and tell us was a success," Barrett said. "So this lack of candor and the lack of seriousness about our warfighter skills and our warfighter posture in the military is something that is absolutely dire."

Barrett is running for Michigan's seventh congressional district and currently serves as a state senator. 

A lot of the issues he is supporting include protecting national security, border security and security in everyday neighborhoods. "We don't have a secure border," he said. "We don't have safe communities. We're overspending on failed priorities."

Barrett also criticized how Biden handled the Afghanistan withdrawal, saying it was one of the worst disasters in American political history. The United States haphazardly withdrew its troops from Afghanistan in August 2021, resulting in the Taliban retaking the country and 13 United States soldiers dying.

"We forfeited billions of dollars in equipment, but more significant than that, the lives of the 13 service members who were lost on that day during that withdrawal that was overseen by Joe Biden," he said. "And then his own Pentagon chain of command tried to tell us that this was some kind of massive success."

Barrett is just one of many former veterans running for office who are calling for accountability in the military.

"We need to bring that trust back, and it starts with fiscal discipline," he said. "And it starts with a robust, capable military as well."