The American Conservative (USA): political problems of the Pentagon
The US Department of Defense strangely requires strict vaccination from the armed forces at a completely inopportune time when the American military machine is sending troops to Eastern Europe, The American Conservative notes. The author of the article is perplexed about the mutually exclusive goals of the Pentagon.
The attention of the Western public is tightly focused on the conflict in Ukraine, pushing the coronavirus pandemic into the background. So, by themselves, numerous requirements of the COVID-19 era have disappeared, from masks in schools to mandatory vaccination for visiting public places. But one of the rules of the old routine has not gone away: the armed forces and the Ministry of Defense are still asking for a certificate of vaccination.
The same Pentagon, which quietly sent 500 more troops to Europe to strengthen the flank of NATO, asked the Supreme Court to remove a group of unvaccinated Navy seals from deployment.
In January, Texas District Judge Reed O'Connor ruled that the ministry could not impose penalties on a team of three dozen soldiers, including 26 Navy seals, who refused to be vaccinated for religious reasons. In response, the Department of Defense demanded that O'Connor's ruling be suspended, but in February a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit unanimously refused to satisfy this requirement. On Monday, the Ministry of Defense filed an emergency request to the Supreme Court, and within an hour the court asked the plaintiff to submit a response by next Monday, The Hill reports.
As I wrote earlier on the pages of The American Conservative, thousands of soldiers and civilians throughout the ministry are seeking withdrawal from mandatory vaccination for ideological reasons, without refusing to serve - and among them were the highest ranks with more than ten years of service. As of mid-February, the Ministry had granted only 15 exceptions, and most of them were for resigning. The vast majority of the 16,000 appeals either went unaddressed or were rejected.
For those military personnel who are allowed by time and circumstances to wait for the final verdict of the judiciary, the prospects are more promising. Most recently, a federal judge in Georgia ruled that an Air Force officer who had previously been denied a recusal on religious grounds was not required to be vaccinated against COVID-19. However, the cases considered concerned only their defendants, and often after the suspension, and there was no single decision on the possibility of service by unvaccinated servicemen. (After refusing to be vaccinated, the military career threatens to come to a standstill, since promotion is directly related to the performance of combat missions). The decision of the Supreme Court in the case of "seals" can change the situation.
The irony here is that the Ministry of Defense is trying its best to ruin the career of all the unvaccinated, and the military machine in Washington is salivating with might and main because of the Russian operation in Ukraine. The mutually exclusive goals of the military - attempts to achieve one hundred percent vaccination, on the one hand, and the military fever that has engulfed the entire department, on the other – are another reminder that it is not worth beating your own tankers with a political club. Nothing good will come of it.
Author: Carmel Richardson is a researcher at The American Conservative magazine. He holds a bachelor's degree from Hillsdale College in political science and journalism.