The Demoralization of Our Nation's Armed Forces and Law Enforcement

Under the Obama Administration, the morale of our Armed Forces, Border Patrol, CIA and Local Police Departments have all been under assault. When one considers how the policies of the Obama administration are demoralizing our armed forces, our intelligence agents, our border patrol and our local police departments, the question that must inevitably be asked is how can this administration continue this mismanagement. It’s policies serve not only to demoralize the personnel but also result in hampering the recruitment effort that is necessary for staffing. That is obvious. The defense of our country depends on high caliber, quality individuals joining these departments and agencies. That is a given. Our country relies on these high caliber individuals for our preservation and security.. That is a fact.

The Armed Forces:

• Obama broke with one of the military's most deeply rooted traditions and vowed to lift the ban on women in the military.
• Military Pay and Housing: The Obama Administration asked for and Congress approved a 1 percent basic pay increase for the upcoming year, the second straight year of such a raise which constituted the smallest pay raise ever realized by the armed forces for a 2 year period since the military became an all voluntaeer force.
• Many of the promises that our government has made to the military with regard to severance and retirement benefits have been broken in and the care that our government has given our veterans has become pathetic; witness the degradation of health care services and the apathy the government has exhibited in correcting the shortcomings exhibited in the latest VA Hospital scandal.
• In addition, the administration has now embarked on a course to trim the miltary to pre-WWII levels. Many quality individuals who joined the miltary in the hopes of making their service a career are now finding themselves cast into the streets by an unappreciative administration

The Obama administration has created a serious morale problem within the armed services, one that is worse than the crisis created by the government apathy of the late 1990s. At that time, the country experienced a serious recruiting and retention crisis; one can expect it to be significantly worse today, especially in view of everything this country is asking the armed forces to do and all risk this country is asking the military to take. In addition to more servicemen retiring and less people volunteering, one can also expect the quality of the individual who decides to join the military drop. When assessing one's future career, a military life does not look as appealing and rewarding as it once did regardless of how patriotic an individual is.

To be sure, the Obama administration is undermining the abilty of the military to retain or recruit quality individuals by the implementation of policies and actions that detrimentally affect the well being and safety of its active soldiers and inactive veterans.

Border Patrol:

• U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Agents have had the authority to detain illegal aliens reduced by the Obama Administration
• Some have been disarmed, just recently many automatic weapons have been confiscated by Homeland Security which claimed that weapons were defective. The agents whose waepopns were confiscated have to “share” their weapons with other agents
• They have recently seen cuts in their paychecks.
• Over the past year, they were made to withdraw from large sections of the border, while being given the task of acting as “babysitters”, caring for the waves of illegal immigrant children coming from Central America (due to Obama’s policies and “political” statements made about immigration) until the administration was able to stealthily distribute these children to undisclosed centers around the United States.

All of the above is taking its toll on the moral of the military

The CIA:

• The intense scrutinization of the CIA by Obama and the Democrats in Congress over the last 8 years has severely demoralized America’s intelligence personnel, particularly those in the CIA. With Senator Diane Feinstein’s purely political attack on the CIA’s interrogation techniques, many agents are wondering whether it is worth risking their lives, career and property by taking direction and command from the executive and legislative branches only to be criticized, reprimanded and more by these same institutions, indeed the same people, for purely political people.

Needless to say, all this is happening at the expense of moral.

Local Police Departments

Local police departments are being demeaned, harassed and, through the use of various policies (or guidances), having their ability to perform their jobs effectively hampered throughout the country due in large part to the politicization of race by the Obama administration and the Obama Justice Department in particular.. In 2014, with the highly publicized police killing of a black man in Ferguson, Missouri and the police killing of a black man in New York City, the Obama Administration set the tone and led the way, along with MSNBC TV hosr Al Sharpton and New York City Mayor Deblassio, in depicting the nation’s local police forces as out of control, rogue racists. They no doubt ignored the fact that during the year 2014, slightly over 1000 people were killed by police officers, while around 300 of those killed were black while 126 police officers were shot in 2014 and the 93% of blacks killed in the U.S. were killed by blacks

Needless to say, the morale of local police departments is being affected.

If this is happening because of mismanagement, then the people making the decisions that affect the policies of this administration are not qualified and must either resign or be dismissed.

If these events are happening because of mistakes in judgement, then they can explained since everyone makes mistakes. However, if these events keep recuurring then the laws of probability and statistics tell usthat these are not mistakes or random occurrences.

If the mismanagement and lack of leadership of these departments/agencies is nor a mistake or random occurrence, can it be said that these occurrences are then deliberate. If so, why?

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.