Tuberville warns that "wokeness" is undercutting military, foreign powers sense weakness

Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R, Ala., on Friday warned that left-wing ideology is threatening military readiness and that the perceived weakness of the Biden administration on the world stage had encouraged U.S. adversaries to seize the initiative in myriad conflicts.

Speaking on the "John Solomon Reports" podcast, Tuberville highlighted the military's recruiting shortfall, insisting that left-wing initiatives such as vaccine mandates and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs have demoralized current and prospective servicemembers, contributing to turnover and personnel shortages.

"[O]ur recruiting is going to heck, I mean, we can't recruit anybody. And so I think everybody should be very concerned about this. We'll continue to speak up about it," Tuberville warned.

"I'm on the Armed Forces Committee, and I'm very, very concerned about our military," he said. "Last week, I ran into a young Marine. He didn't look that old, but he says, 'Coach, I spent 22 years in the Marines. They made me get a vaccine. I didn't want to do it. So I opted out. And now I've kind of worked it all out getting out of the way. But I needed to do it anyway... Coach, we're in trouble. We're becoming more woke. They're teaching things in the military that shouldn't be taught.'"

"He said, 'I got two teenage kids. If we go to war, I'm moving to another country,'" Tuberville went on. "They will not fight within this military because it will be suicide. We're not prepared to fight one war much less than three that they're trying to get us into as we speak."

Apart from the sheer decline in new recruits, Tuberville lamented the drop in quality among the military's top brass, a situation for which he blamed Democratic apathy toward maintaining the military as a warfighting institution.

"[W]hen we we have hearings with [Defense] Secretary [Lloyd] Austin and and [Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark] Milley was in there," he said. "Now, it's General Brown, C.Q. Brown, who's head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but all the military comes through. And one of the things that four or five of us always say, 'Listen, we need a fighting machine. This country wants and needs to be protected.'"

"I want a military, I want a strong military. My dad was career military. And I think that's the most important entity that we should have. But the problem is that Democrats want something different. They want something that they can control," Tuberville warned. "Again, it's all about moving people up, not because of merit it's because of whether it's religion, or race or whatever."

"We need the best on the field... our military is there to play to win, there's no second place. And right now, what we're doing is we're not taking the best, all you have to do is look into recruiting," he went on. "But again, elections have consequences. And this group really doesn't care about a strong military, they'd rather somebody else ... fights for them. And that's exactly what's happening in Ukraine."

Pressed on the military's response to the litany of recent attacks on U.S. military personnel abroad, Tuberville contended that foreign actors, among them Iranians, the Yemen-based Houthi militants, and Islamic terror groups such as Hezbollah, see the Biden administration as distracted with conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine and have seized the moment to push back against the American presence in the Middle East.

"We should be protecting our troops. Number one, Israel has got a huge problem over there on our hands. And we all know that, and we all support Israel, understanding that, you know, they were attacked in a vicious way. But we don't need this to turn into a world war," he said. "I think what's happening is we're being tested from all sides, from Iran, from the Houthis, from Hezbollah. Everybody's trying to get their finger in the pipe to see – 'let's punch United States of America and see how far we can go with this."

"And right now, Joe Biden – I don't know who's making the decision. Surely he's not – we cannot count on this guy... to make these decisions," Tuberville asserted. "So we got to lean on Secretary Austin, Secretary [of State Antony] Blinken, people that hopefully, they've got their senses to them, and want to protect the United States of America, first and foremost, and then we protect our allies."

Ben Whedon is an editor and reporter for Just the News. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter.