French Minister of Defense Adolphe Messimy ordered that any officer who was "unable to ride a horse" to retire. The order was given as a way to force the retirement of elderly officers, but ws not really unprecedented. Theodore Roosevelt had issued a similar order, requiring a long ride, when he was President of the United States.
The French order was not in effect long as it was regarded as impractical.
Omar Bradley received notice that he'd been accepted to West Point.
When I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, I recall at home my mother was a fan of Israel. Basically, she sort of thought it was a small nation that really stood up to larger neighbors, sort of an underdog things. She also thought that it was a fulfilled promise of the New Testament that it existed, which is something I've heard the very orthodox Catholic theologian Jimmy Akin also express.
My father, however, was not as sympathetic. He didn't express a lot of views on Israel, but basically he thought it came about as a way for Western nations to feel better about the Holocaust but that it foisted a large European population on an Arab populace that had a different religion and didn't want them there, and that wasn't a good idea. He also felt that Israel had a tendency to pick on its neighbors a bit.
When I was quite young, I shared my mother's view, in part because it seemed like every time it got into a spat it really cleaned up on its neighbors. By my teens, however, my view was shifting and ultimately shifted a great deal. I didn't become anti Israel, but I frankly sympathized to a large degree with the Arab Palestinians in regard to what had happened to them. By my 20s, additionally, I was of the view that Israel's ongoing existence as a Jewish state was a demographic impossibility.
Later my views shifted more towards the middle, but I've never really been in the "support Israel at all costs" camp. One of my good friends, of an Evangelical background, holds the view that supporting Israel is mandated by the Bible. I'm reminded, however, that the Old Testament is fully of examples of the People of Israel acting badly, which was frequently a reason that God would send a prophet to them, with the prophets frequently being unwelcome.
I'm a Catholic, of course, and I hold a much more nuanced view of the modern state of Israel. It might be that modern Israel is indeed a fulfillment of the Biblical promise that the state would be restored, but I don't think that means at all that the country gets a free pass at everything.
And I'm much more of my father's view, and frankly probably well to the left of it, that American support of Israel has a lot to do with war guilt from the 1940s.
The 1940s are now a long time ago. Israel is a country and it deserves to exist, although I still feel that its existence is very tenuous given the demographics of the neighborhood. It doesn't deserve to be attacked, but it doesn't have license to wage genocidal level wars on neighboring territory, as the recent war in Gaza became. Long term, if Israel is going to continue to exist, it's going to have to come to some sort of accommodation with its neighbors, and that means the entire region needs to figure out what to do about the plight of the Palestinians, which nobody has demonstrated an inclination to do.
Under Benjamin Netanyahu I suspect the silent Israeli policy, opposed by a large number of Israelis, is to drive the Arabs out of lands that were within British Mandatory Palestine. That has never been openly stated, but if they were driven out, the thought would run, the demographic problem is solved.
The moral one certainly wouldn't be.
Anyhow, the modern GOP is more in love with Israel than any group of Americans has ever been, and that says something. Israel always had the solid support of both parties, but now the GOP is absolutely besotted with Israel. So much so, that we're integrating our militaries to a certain extent.
The irony of this cannot be overstated. Since he came into office Trump has beat the National Conservative drum that the US is to be an isolated entity until itself. He's come as close to taking us out of NATO as he can, and doesn't seem done trying, and he's ignored a major war that actually involves a major Western country, Ukraine. He's all be declared that if Russia attacks Western Europe he doesn't care. He's threatened to outright invade the territory of a NATO member, Denmark, in order to steal land from Greenland, which doesn't want us there.
But with Israel, it's totally different.
We're not only supporting Israel, with which we have no written treaty, we're backing Israel up in one of its wars, the one against Iran, which we can now not get out of and are basically carrying on, and losing on our own. In spite of that, we're about to significantly merge our defense industries to no benefit of our own, but major benefit to Israel. And in doing that, we might note, we're going it for a country that has periods in which its been governed by the extreme Socialist left. It's also been a country which actively spied on the United States.
This is just flat out nuts.
Israel has been in existence for nearly 80 years now and it can defend itself. I see no reason at all to tie the US to regional wars which have a heavy religious element to them. If Israel is going to persevere, it needs to find a way to do so with Arab allies, not the United States. It's come a long ways towards doing that, and facilitating that is in the interest of world peace, even if it really has nothing else to otherwise do with US interests. Fighting Israel's wars for it is flat out wrong, but this makes that more likely, and we're already doing that right now.
Indeed, if the US had a sane leader and a sane policy, we'd be looking for ways to pull out of the Middle East entirely. We don't due to petroleum oil, which provides a good reason, in addition to the environmental one, to do what China is doing, which is to pull away from petroleum as rapidly as possible. The whole world should be doing that, and recent actions by the Saudis, as well as some of the past decade, show that Saudi Arabia expects that to be done.
If we'd started it a decade ago, we'd be largely petroleum free, to everyone's benefit, right now.
So why are we doing otherwise?
It's really for the simple reason that the GOP has been captured by the American Evangelical right and that body has a strong theocracy behind it that views supporting Israel, and an eventually conversion of the Jews to (Protestant) Christianity as a prerequisite for the Second Coming. Israelis know this and make use of it, which is how Netenanyu was able to push Trump along into a major war it could not have pulled off itself.
If this keeps up, this is going to have a bad end.
It likely will not, however, keep up, which is the irony.
In the 2022 election Muslim Americans, enraged over Joe Biden's moderate support of Israel following the attacks on it by Hezbollah, voted for Donald Trump. But at the same time younger American voters were shifting their views towards the Palestinians. Younger Americans have no personal memory of the Holocaust. Their parents weren't swept up by it, and indeed, their grandparents weren't. It's something in the rear view mirror, part of history. Israeli attacks today, however, are not.
Also new is the large numbers of Muslims in the US.
Only 1.3% at most of Americans are Muslim, but only 2.4% are Jewish. There are, therefore, more Jewish voters than Muslim ones, but in both instances their votes are only significant where they are concentrated, and Muslims are very much concentrated in some places. They're making an electoral difference in those places.
The GOP is doing a really good job of angering massive numbers of Americans. By now, it's largely lost Hispanics, who helped pull it through in 2022. It's no doubt completely lost Muslims. Those people who really didn't want the US in foreign wars are now wondering what happened. Economic conservatives are horrified.
I very much doubt this provision will survive in the Senate. It shouldn't. But already, during the Trump Administration, we've seen the rise of outright antisemitism due to the war with Iran. We haven't seen anything like this since 1940. It will grow worse.
And this will be one of the factors that's going to drag the Republicans down in the fall. If passed, it won't survive the next administration. And not only is it going to be a factor in dragging down the GOP in the fall, it'll help drag down far right Evangelicalism in general.
Indeed, I suspect the Israeli far right knew that, which is why it had to strike while the iron was hot, and Donald Trump in office. It doesn't expect this era to last in the US.
The House of Representatives passed its version of a massive the 2027 National Defense authorizing an $1.15 trillion in spending for the military 216 to 212.
Six deluded Democrats voted for it, seven Republicans voted against it.
The bill dumps a record amount of money into the military and:
Substantially expands military technology cooperation between the United States and Israel, the latter of which has a leader who duped demented Donny Trump into the current ongoing unending war.
Had the fascist SAVE Act tied to it in the hopes that the Senate won't vote no on a defense appropriations bill.
It now goes to the Senate where its chances are doubtful.
It's no secret that Pete Hegseth is hostile to women in combat (one of the very few things I agree with Pete about), but that's not the same thing as not noting this milestone, which is pretty darned close to saying that women don't have a place in the Navy.
Well, actually, it's exactly the same thing as saying women don't have a place in the Navy.
Women have been in the Navy since March 21, 1917, as we noted on the anniversary of that occurrence:
Incorporating women into the Navy has been sort of a peculiar problem in some ways, and those ways are heavily biological, although honesty compels us to note that it's not as problematic now as it once was, or would be suspected as being.
Approximately 75% of all sailors are assigned to sea-intensive ratings rather than shore duty ones. Only about 19% to 20% of the active fleet is deployed or underway at any one time, however. About 20% of the Navy's manpower if female, with that figure applying to both the enlisted and officers. There are instances you can find of ships that end up with a problematic number of female sailors pregnant, but on average only 0.7% to 1.5% of a female crew find that to be the case.
Not that there are not problems.* Having young men and young women in that level of close proximity is going to cause problems. Again, I'm not in favor of women in combat and while I don't think of the Navy all that much, about any ship at sea can be a combat vessel in some fashion.
The Navy changed its billeting policy in 2024 in order to allow pregnant female sailors to find land billets more easily than it had previously, so the Navy, in pre Hegseth Department of Defense it was moving towards being more accomodating.
So what's going on here?
I don't know, but it's part of a sub silentio drift in the DoD. If the Hegseth run DoD just wants women out, or out of some roles, it can move in that directly openly. Instead, it's been sort of just being hostile to them, of which this is one example.
And its not just female sailors, or servicemembers. It's being silently hostile to minorities as well. People who normally would have been promoted to senior positions are not being if they're women, or black, etc. A portrait of a legendary senior black Air Force officer was removed from display without explanation.
Without explanation, it has the appearance of a harassment campaign to quietly discourage women and blacks from joining the service.
And I have to wonder, to some degree, if the DoD is trying to make it through November before it takes a formal step of eliminating women from all combat roles. It can't eliminate blacks from the service, of course, but it's also allowing Evangelical Protestant campaigning in the service, which is hostile to various religions, including various Christian religions. At some point that has the effect of telling Catholic Hispanics and African Methodist blacks maybe they aren't welcome, or at least that they don't want to hang around with a bunch of troops who look and act like Confederate Partisan Rangers.
Or maybe it's not that extreme. Be that as it may, the treatment of women in this fashion is hard to ignore.
Footnotes
*In recent years the bigger problem has been with the Department of the Navy's female Marines, who had to be expressly told to wear shirts while doing PT overseas. Their omission of shirts clearly wasn't because it was just hot where they were.
The United States completed its withdrawal of troops from Thailand and closed the last military installations that it maintained there. Thailand had played a major role in the U.S. air campaign during the Vietnam War.
The United States evacuated Americans and Westerners from Beirut by sea.
And a happy ending, or at least an ending, occurred to this story when the Pentagon redid its classifications to read as follows:
It's actually not a bad reclassification, although a person does hae to wonder why, in order to make a non Christian religion happy, the Christian identification was taken away from actual Christian religions.
One of the major newspapers ran statistics for the various religions in terms of the what percentage of the military is comprised of them. While there are Mormons in the military, the percentage is infanticidally small. As noted earlier, however, there would be units in the military that would be heavily made up of Mormons, principally Guard and Reserve units in Utah. Their spiritual needs would be different than those of Christian religions, however, which would gain importance in a large scale war.
According to exit polls form the last general election, 64% of Mormons voted for Trump in the last election. 20% voted for Harris. 56% of Catholics did, with 41% voting for Harris. Catholics are a much larger demographic than Mormons and Trump has interestingly shown little concern about enormously offending them. 68% of Southern Baptists, the largest Protestant religion in the country, went for Trump. Southern Baptist, I suspect, are probably the largest Christian denomination to be upset by the reclassification, if they are.
I don't know that I have a strong opinion on the list being reworked to address Mormon concerns, but I would note a couple of oddities about it. One is that that the U.S. Government didn't define them as Christian, although they seem happy with the result. The second is that what Trump may say aside, he doesn't love Mormons anymore than he loves anyone else.
The big flap over the Pentagon's new list of religions, mostly focused on the LDS insisting it be recognized as a Christian religions which at least conventional Christianity holds that it is not, is obscuring the fact that frankly the list may not matter all that much.
All the list does is to provide some guidelines on anticipating the patrol needs of troops. T/he prior list was so large there was no way that it was useful. The original list, Protestant, Catholic and Hebrew, was probably too narrow, in the modern world, to be useful.
Arguably the current list is too big. It'd make more sense, actually, to have Mainline Protestant, Evangelical Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, Judaism, Islam and Other. Every one of those categories, it might be noted, has various groups within it. Probably only Catholic expresses a singular religious group, but even there, there are a lot of Catholic rites. The Orthodox are a collection of Orthodox churches and have a major division between Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox.
Anyhow, that's probably more useful.
Of note, listing religions isn't an endorsement of them.
About 70% of all service members are some sort of Protestant. 20% are Catholic. I've given the figures already, but the number of LDS troops is very small, although in National Guard units from Utah the opposite would be true. At least one religion on the list discourages its members from joining the military and last had any presence in the military when there was conscription in place.
So, in our last installment of this, we sort of defended Pete Hegseth's Department of Defense. But we have to ask, is there more to this story?
Probably not. The classification is correct. Mormons are in fact not Christians in the fashion that Christians would define the faith. Mormons of course disagree, which is there right.
Under new military guidance from Pete Hegseth, the LDS Church is officially classified as a non-Christian religion.
My fellow Saints, you can love these Christian nationalists all you want, but they will not love you back.
"Dem Saints" is a really good and irreverent group made up of Mormon Democrats.
Yes, there are Mormon Democrats.
Branding their irreverence is the use of the "Dem Saints" name, which is really borrowing from Louisiana Catholics, whom minstrels' lampooned with the line "Who dat, who dat, who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints?" In the second half of the 20th Century it got picked up as a line boosting the New Orleans Saints football club.
That there are Democratic Mormons shouldn't be surprising. In most regions of the country they are actually a little known faith, but where they are strongly represented they are in all walks of life and all stations of education. Most Mormons are fairly conservative of a rule, but in no way shape or form does that mean they're all part of the far right. "Dem Saints" are probably what used to be regarded as middle of the road Republicans in the West. Of those I know fairly well, all are in the GOP but none of them are in the far right.
Dem Saints aren't the only ones taking note of this. Deseret Mike Lee, whose radical right wing political positions are highly informed by his being a devout Mormon is absolutely freaking out, noting:
I’m a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
My church membership is inextricably intertwined with my Christianity, as it is for 17 million other Latter-day Saints
Regardless of what the Pentagon thinks
Lee has absolutely hitched his wagon to Donald Trump. I've written about him here before, but his views are radially different than Dem Saints, and probably for the most part radically different in terms of religious views. We've discussed Mike Lee in that context before, and won't replough that ground, but a good guess is that Lee, like Mike Johnson and Pete Hegseth, is highly informed and often extremely motivated by a unique religious view of the United States and its mission, as he conceives of it. He'd fit into a minority group of Mormon's in that sense, just as Hegseth and Johnson do as to Christians. The difference here is that his view, if I'm correct, and I may not be, would be vastly different than the overwhelming majority of Americans, and probably the majority of Mormons.
Hegseth in particular has been the public face of the New Apostolic Reformation and there's no place for Mormons in it. For that matter, there's no place for Catholics or Orthodox in it either.
The question is whether Deseret Mike is too besotted with Trump to realize that. Based on his surprise to this reclassification, which likely isn't motivated by people like Hegseth viewing Mormons as really not counting, it would appear so.
Lee just totally freaked out and posted over 37 time over 24 hours on Twitter. Eventually he got an audience with Trump on the telephone, and reported back.
I just got off the phone with President Trump
We discussed the Pentagon’s “Christian list”
I won’t speak for him, but I’m thrilled about where this is heading
We’re most fortunate that President Trump (1) loves Latter-day Saints, and (2) is our commander in chief
Stay tuned
Based on that, Trump will probably issue some babbling change to the list, but the wake up call should already be there.
Trump isn't a religious man. Trump loves himself and at this point Mormon's don't really matter to him most likely. He shouldn't presume that Trump "loves Latter-day Saints" or members of any other religion. And we're not fortunate that he's the commander in chief. If he's going to order the list changed, it's to gain a little support from a group right now that's likely shocked, and frankly to address a situation in a state, Utah, that has shown a surprising willingness at the grass roots level to rebel.
But now Lee is out there. If his shameless sycophantly doesn't pay off, it's a lesson for people who think that Trump is carrying water for you. He isn't, you are carrying water for him.
And in terms of the back channels in the administration, it's the view of Doug Wilson on what sort of religion the Latter Day Saints is that may matter more than what Trump thinks, who doesn't really have any deep thoughts about religion at all.
