Where is Lloyd Austin?

Nobody joins the US military to get rich. Military members and their families make incredible sacrifices on a daily basis, and none expect to earn their fortunes in the service. But no one joins the military to be on welfare or food stamps either. Yet that’s happening today in the US military under Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

An official US Army web site recently featured a posting advising soldiers to apply for food stamps.

This is unfortunately not unprecedented. During the Jimmy Carter administration in the late 1970s, a period widely acknowledged as one of the lowest points for the armed services, many service members ended up on food stamps. But it remains a national disgrace.

The Biden administration’s budget request for 2022 was $6 trillion. Last year, the administration’s “American Rescue Plan” was a supplemental budget outlay of $1.9 trillion—on top of regular government spending. In response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration sent over $50 billion of aid to Kiev. We left behind $80 billion in military equipment when we abandoned the fight in Afghanistan.

Now Biden proposes transferring the student loan debt of thousands of college graduates to taxpaying citizens to the tune of somewhere around $400 billion. That means the average taxpayer will foot an additional $2500 for that giveaway.

The government is throwing around money like a drunken sailor while actual sailors, soldiers, airmen and Marines don’t have enough money to feed their families. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was no where to be found, while this money was being spent. He certainly hasn’t publicly fought for the troops under his command.

Austin has spent a lot of time and effort imposing COVID vaccine mandates and woke indoctrination training on the force, leading to a crisis in recruitment efforts. Were those projects so time consuming that he just forgot to look out for the welfare of the troops?

A proper Secretary Defense would have marched into his boss’s office and told Biden that it is morally repugnant to allow soldiers to be reduced to food stamps and asked him to help people in uniform as much as he has decided to help college graduates who took out loans to go to college.

Did it not occur to Austin that somewhere in all the trillions of dollars there might be maybe a billion or two to make sure our men and women in uniform can feed themselves and their families?

Should Congress change hands after the mid-terms, Austin should be held to account for his flawed priorities and the utter lack of leadership now reaping disastrous effects upon the all-volunteer force.

22 Jan 21 l SD NATO Call by U.S. Secretary of Defense is licensed under CC BY 2.0