Order of Man - BRUCE FLEMING ｜ Saving Our Service Academies

00:00:00.000 The state of our U.S. service academies is in continual decline, which tracks considering

00:00:06.160 every branch of the military has and will continue to struggle to meet its recruiting

00:00:11.340 and retention goals. But how can the premier fighting force in the world find it so difficult

00:00:17.260 to appeal to the millions of young men it has historically recruited? My guest today has been

00:00:22.700 a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy since 1987. His name is Bruce Fleming. And today we talk

00:00:28.680 about the dangers of the diversity, equity and inclusion or DEI agenda that is infused

00:00:34.980 into our service institutions. Why many young men are turned away from the direction and

00:00:40.420 messaging of the U.S. military. What service academy attendees expect to find when they

00:00:46.420 join versus what they actually find on campuses. And why academia and politics is ruining the

00:00:52.820 future of our military fighting force. You're a man of action. You live life to

00:00:58.140 the fullest. Embrace your fears and boldly chart your own path. When life knocks you

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00:01:08.660 Rugged. Resilient. Strong. This is your life. This is who you are. This is who you will become

00:01:15.220 at the end of the day. And after all is said and done, you can call yourself a man.

00:01:20.820 Gentlemen, what is going on today? My name is Ryan Michler. I'm the host and the founder

00:01:24.420 of the Order of Man podcast and movement. Welcome here today and welcome back. If you're new,

00:01:30.120 this is a podcast and a movement dedicated to reclaiming and restoring masculinity by giving

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00:01:45.480 to lead others, to serve well, to protect, to provide, and really to fulfill our duties,

00:01:50.460 responsibilities, and obligations as men. So I'm glad you're tuning in. Before we get into

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00:03:01.460 company.com use the code order of man. All right, guys, let's get to this conversation. Very interesting

00:03:07.320 one, a little different than we've done in the past. My guest today is Bruce Fleming. He is a

00:03:12.120 professor at the US Naval Academy. And he's also the author of over 20 books, including two we talk

00:03:18.140 about today, saving our service academies, the battle with and for the US Naval Academy to make

00:03:24.120 thinking officers, and also his book, masculinity from the inside. He has been honored with many

00:03:31.060 awards, including US Naval Academy's award for excellence in research, and a US Navy

00:03:36.400 meritorious, excuse me, civilian service award. And his articles and papers have been published in

00:03:42.900 countless outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic,

00:03:48.480 and the Federalist to name a few. Enjoy this one. Bruce, thanks for joining me today. Glad to have

00:03:54.800 you on the order of man podcast. Sure do appreciate being here. Yeah, this is very timely. You came out

00:03:59.420 with a book called saving our service academies. And I think it is not coincidence that you wrote this

00:04:05.180 book, especially on the heels of information that up to I think it's, I saw a statistic that up to 70%

00:04:11.500 of our young men in this country are not eligible to even join the military, let alone, you know,

00:04:18.880 be involved with one of these service academies, and then obviously joining our military. It's a

00:04:23.840 rough environment for a military. It's a rough environment for a man, I think. Well, I would agree

00:04:28.540 with that. I didn't, I was unaware of the 70%. But I know a lot of them are, are obese, they can't,

00:04:34.400 they can't get through boot camp. That's one problem. I thought you were going to talk about

00:04:39.280 something else, which has hit me over the more than the 36 years I've been at the Naval Academy.

00:04:44.420 And that is that, because so many marriages in this country, end in divorce, many of the boys coming

00:04:50.720 to the service academies, lack to father figure, and are looking for one. So the unfortunate truth is

00:04:57.340 that they don't find it, but they are looking for it. So I don't know about you, you're talking about

00:05:02.240 probably physically unfit for the military. I'm maybe, maybe I'm talking about, I don't know,

00:05:07.940 unfit mentally or hungry, certainly. Yeah, I think that's the statistic I read is that they

00:05:12.840 would not qualify without some sort of physical or medical waiver to qualify for military service.

00:05:19.580 So I think we're talking about two different things.

00:05:21.120 I was unaware of the number, but I'm aware that boot camps have started out as, I guess it's cruel

00:05:28.800 to call it fat boy camps, but that's what they are. They take them on board knowing that they're

00:05:33.240 not going to be able to hack it. And that's what gets them into shape. I guess that's better than

00:05:40.260 nothing, right?

00:05:40.860 I hope it's a little scary with our readiness to fight in foreign conflicts or even domestic

00:05:48.220 conflicts that are on the rise over the past three to four years. So I, I hope that they will

00:05:55.020 get in the position when they're, they're actually ready to fight, but I'm not sure that's going to

00:05:59.500 be the case.

00:06:00.820 Well, I'm, I, you know, we're, we're kind of talking, throwing a couple of balls in the air

00:06:05.240 at once. There's the physical side, which is sad, obviously, but I guess what interests me is,

00:06:11.980 is a little bit more the mental side of the, the Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, who is well known to a lot

00:06:17.900 of people as the author of Hillbilly Elegy, which I, I reviewed for a publication in Washington called

00:06:24.780 the Washington Free Beacon. And it's basically him to the Marine Corps. And he, he says he was

00:06:31.220 raised by wolves. I mean, he wasn't physically unfit, but he was clearly mentally, he admits,

00:06:37.480 that's the story that he was mentally unfit. And he went to Paris Island and it's like something out

00:06:43.480 of 1935 took a boy and made a man out of him. So it still happens. I mean, the good news is that

00:06:50.440 it can still happen. That was his story. Yeah, no, I mean, a lot, a lot of, a lot of kids out there

00:06:57.480 that, uh, spend way too much time on the internet and not enough time running around, running around

00:07:02.700 the block. But I think also with the mental readiness, you talk about the lack of a father

00:07:07.560 figure and, and joining the military for that reason. I think part of the reason I joined the

00:07:12.040 military right out of high school was to have some guidance and have some structure. And then the,

00:07:16.820 the, the value of, of service to my country, those were my primary motives for doing so.

00:07:22.240 Uh, but it seems like any more, the military recruiting agenda is to come find yourself or

00:07:28.800 express yourself. And the military I knew wasn't to express myself, but to, uh, assimilate to a set

00:07:35.920 of values and begin to adopt those values as my own. And then to be able to defend and protect this

00:07:41.480 country. Uh, what, what branch was it? Was it army Marine Corps, Navy, army, national guard, army,

00:07:47.000 national guard? Okay. Yeah. No, um, obviously those are my values too. Um, I guess guys come to

00:07:55.640 those if they come to them at all via different, uh, pathways that, I mean, we're, that the service

00:08:02.780 academies are something else. Um, they're not, they're not Paris Island. They're not, they're not,

00:08:07.180 uh, bootcamp. Um, and unfortunately the gist of my book on that is that they don't find those

00:08:14.000 figures that they're looking for. So I'm glad you did, uh, maybe enlisted is the way to go. It

00:08:19.520 certainly was for J.D. Vance. Um, I mean, he not going to talk about J.D. Vance's politics these days

00:08:26.480 because it's irrelevant, but it, it, uh, he certainly would say that, that it made him made

00:08:32.020 him a man. Uh, yeah, it's, uh, I mean, aside, we can tear our hair and wring our, wring our hands and

00:08:38.900 say, well, why, why isn't more of this happening? But the military is not going to make men out of

00:08:44.200 American boys more than the less than 1% it already has. I mean, it's, it's, it is less than 1% in

00:08:51.240 uniform in this country. Uh, and of course veterans are, are a much larger backlog, but currently 1% in

00:08:58.180 uniform. They, you know, there are all sorts of data about, uh, how after World War II, a huge

00:09:04.000 percentage of, of Congress men and women had served in the military, obviously we'd just come

00:09:09.260 off a world war and now it's very, very small indeed. Um, and you know, you have goofballs in

00:09:16.300 Congress that, uh, well, not just in Congress, but, uh, who denigrate that service. So it's a,

00:09:23.540 it's a huge issue. I mean, as I say, in my book, we have to consider the fact that the military,

00:09:28.640 that the United States military or the United States hasn't won a war in 75 years.

00:09:32.760 And it's not joining the military is not what he, not what it used to be. It used to have

00:09:40.080 a clear goal. It used to have a clear purpose. Um, now, unfortunately it's been spun off into

00:09:47.400 play. I mean, a lot of boys, you know, they're full of testosterone at, uh, 16, 17, they go to

00:09:53.620 seal movies, they play, uh, video games, uh, video games and so on. Um, and that's about as far as it

00:10:01.980 goes. They don't, they don't actually do it. And then the unfortunate fact is that when they do,

00:10:06.800 if they do enter the military, at least at the service academy sounds as if you had a much more

00:10:11.700 positive experience than many of the guys and gals I've had, had contact with, but they find that

00:10:18.280 we're all about it. They're not, it's no longer about what you're talking about. It's, um, because

00:10:24.820 to some degree, the military has become largely about show. I mean, it, it, it's, women entered

00:10:32.560 the service academies in, in 1976 against the, the wishes of the, uh, you know, the military

00:10:38.000 breast, but that's what Congress said was going to happen. Uh, for the longest time, you know,

00:10:42.800 gay guys were thrown out. Um, now that is no longer the case. Uh, they've gone back and forth

00:10:48.380 on transsexuals, uh, now they're in. So, uh, the emphasis certainly in Annapolis is, um,

00:10:55.720 it, it, it's not on what it used to be, but some, I, I'm sort of the lightning rod for, uh,

00:11:03.420 uh, all the guys that came expecting sort of what you're describing and found something else

00:11:08.860 entirely. Uh, where I put it is that they, they think it's going to be buds, you know, like the,

00:11:14.560 the, the, the seal training camp and they find that it's, uh, you know, a lady's afternoon tea.

00:11:19.660 It's all about not, it's all, it really is all about the things that unfortunately a lot of

00:11:25.080 colleges are about, which is, you know, no microaggressions, don't look at somebody the

00:11:30.420 wrong way. Don't do this. It's all, you know, words. Um, so it, it, it's, the service academies

00:11:38.540 are largely about show they're not boots on the ground. It's not, they have four years they're in

00:11:43.400 the military and in Annapolis, they're in the Navy. When they graduate, they're commissioned as

00:11:47.840 officers in the Navy or Marine Corps, about 25% of our, our guys and some gals. Marine Corps has,

00:11:54.320 has the fewest women of any, any of the services, about 9%. Uh, so it's most, mostly guys. Uh, and,

00:12:01.580 and they, they spent four years putting on parades. So, so they come in, they think, I mean,

00:12:08.380 I've had students that say to me, they all, they're told to address us as sir, which sounds,

00:12:14.560 I don't, a little bit of that goes a long way with me. You know, if you're not, if you're not

00:12:18.620 respecting me for who I am, I don't need the sir, but sure. Throw it at me every once in a while.

00:12:23.140 So they say, uh, yeah, you know, sir, I, I, some of them say, I didn't even know. They didn't even

00:12:30.300 know, sir. I didn't even know that there were going to be college classes here. Wait, what did

00:12:34.480 you not get about these places? You thought it was going to be Paris Island and, and buds all wrapped

00:12:39.460 into one. And they're the guys that I'm closest to, which are the hard charging ones that typically

00:12:46.040 the ones who go Marine infantry, the ones who go, uh, seals, the ones who go EOD, which is the

00:12:51.300 bomb disposal guys. They'll sit in my office and either they're in my classes, they, they, they,

00:12:56.740 they talk to their buddies about, you know, whose class should they sign up for? So they sign up for

00:13:00.820 mine or they just come. Um, and they sit in, in the big, big red chair there and they talk about how

00:13:08.280 disappointed they are that they didn't find what they thought they were going to find that it's,

00:13:13.240 it's really just show. So the service academies are a subset of what we're talking about, which is

00:13:19.920 poison to men. Um, but unfortunately I would say that the service academies do not, uh, do not do

00:13:26.460 that. Um, it's because it's all in Texas terms, it's all hat and no cattle. So they're frustrated.

00:13:34.240 They're frustrated. I actually was in the beginning stages of the application process for the Naval

00:13:39.620 Academy and decided that I wasn't going to go that route, but it sounds like that would have been a,

00:13:44.360 a, an interesting route to put it mildly should I had gone that direction.

00:13:47.680 Well, I think you would have been disappointed. Most of them typically are they, uh, you know,

00:13:54.960 they, they, they, they come for what's called plebe summer. The plebe is the lowest rank. It goes

00:14:00.180 sort of opposite of what, uh, the way it's calibrated in most places. It goes fourth class,

00:14:05.860 third class, second class, first class, first class is about to graduate. And so the plebes,

00:14:10.460 the fourth class, they come for a kind of a bootcamp summer, but that's been watered down to begin

00:14:16.480 with. And they, they do get disappointed, uh, to the point where they undergo what I call the

00:14:23.300 October surprise, because by October, they figured out that the place is not what they thought it was

00:14:28.280 going to be. I mean, the hard charging guys, the Marine infantry guys, the guys who go seal and so

00:14:33.280 on, they, they kind of sit in, in my office and they just, they just kind of go limp in the chair

00:14:37.740 like this. And I say, you know, what the heck, you know, show, show me some spine. And they're so,

00:14:44.120 they thought, I don't know how many times I've heard that they thought they were going to be

00:14:49.440 surrounded by guys that they were going to have to really puff hard to keep up with. And it's,

00:14:55.820 that's not what we're admitting. So the reason that it's not what we're admitting is that we have

00:15:01.080 basically racial goals. That's a subtopic. Uh, let me just touch on it right here. I'm sure you're

00:15:08.060 aware that the Supreme court in, uh, I guess it was June of 2023 outlawed, uh, affirmative action

00:15:16.280 admissions to race in civilian schools, but they specifically chief justice Roberts specifically

00:15:21.640 made an exception for the service academies. So the service academies continue to admit not to,

00:15:28.980 um, quality, you might say, but to race. So, um, and I, that knocked me flat basically. Well,

00:15:38.040 nothing knocks me flat anymore. Um, but that's certainly the Brits say you're gobsmacked. You

00:15:44.640 know, I like that term. It means you, what you're doing, what? When I was on the admissions board in,

00:15:51.780 uh, maybe it was 2005. And I discovered that we have these two tracks and you don't have to be,

00:15:57.180 everybody uses the word stud at Annapolis. I've heard, I've heard female professors say, what you,

00:16:03.640 you use the word stud. Yeah. It doesn't have any sex, sexual connotation. It means the guy is

00:16:09.460 sort of what we're talking about, a real man and so on. So, uh, it's not their degree of studliness.

00:16:16.780 It's, um, you know, do you check a racial box? So that's problem number one. Problem number two

00:16:22.480 is, uh, that they have, they do have to do pull up a few pull-ups to, to get in. It's not the,

00:16:29.920 the puff balls cannot get in, but a lot of them really suck air during this bleep summer and bleep

00:16:36.220 summer has been watered down. The real hard charging guys sit in my office and they complain

00:16:41.200 about what a walk in the park bleep summer was. They thought it was going to be Paris Island where

00:16:46.360 even, you know, the, the, the quarterback in down in Texas was going to have to really work as you

00:16:53.920 know, what's off to keep up with it. That's what they want. That's what they want. And they read

00:16:58.980 these books and it's not that they have, oh gosh, I mean, I've forgotten the long list of things that

00:17:04.560 runs are limited to three miles. And if it's bad air, we get bad air in Annapolis. A lot of places do,

00:17:10.880 they put up a black flag and you can't do anything outside. And they kind of, they, they, they get all

00:17:16.100 upset and they roll their eyes and they say, sir, you know, if we're in battle and there's bad air,

00:17:20.280 are they going to, are they going to make us stand down? It's, they had these dreams. I mean,

00:17:27.160 this is essentially what we're talking about, that all guys of a certain age, we want to,

00:17:33.080 we want to be put through the ringer. So by, I mean, this just sounds so cliched,

00:17:39.500 but it's cliched for a reason. We want to be put through the ringer by this huge guy who makes us

00:17:45.400 sweat and who knocks us around. And finally we please him. And he says, you know, it gives us a

00:17:50.540 bear hug, sweaty bear hug. And he says, you know, welcome. All right. Welcome to the, welcome to my,

00:17:55.600 welcome to my Marine Corps. We want to pass the test, right? We want to, we want to make it clear

00:18:01.700 that we've earned being where we are. And that is completely gone from the service academies.

00:18:07.040 And from what I hear it's going in bootcamp elsewhere. They, like I say, plebe summer is a

00:18:17.020 joke. They have to run a PRT. They call it a physical readiness test once every semester, but

00:18:23.700 to go back to the admissions board, another huge category that we take are recruited athletes.

00:18:28.820 And you'd think that would be a good deal, but intelligent, you know, you gotta have,

00:18:34.340 you gotta have smarts. All right. I, I'm, we don't want dumb beef. We want smart beef coming,

00:18:40.280 coming out of the service academies. So the, the smarts part is if you recruit guys or gals

00:18:47.040 for a specific sport that has a specific, that requires a specific body shape, you're not necessarily

00:18:53.560 going to get all around physicality. In other words, the football players are going to be huge

00:18:58.680 lumbering guys. Um, and they're just not going to be that physical. And I say, well, why are we giving

00:19:04.960 a slot to a football player? I mean, this, this was another one of my, my axes that, you know, they,

00:19:12.580 I started writing about everything that seemed wrong to me and I'm a tenured, supposed to be a tenured

00:19:17.220 professor. I'm a civilian. Most people, most professors at Annapolis are unlike West Point or Air

00:19:23.440 Force. For example, they do have a few, but most of us at Annapolis are civilians and I'm supposed to

00:19:29.900 be able to write. And I'm supposed to be able to, for, you know, places like the Washington Post or

00:19:36.560 the proceedings of the, of the Naval Institute. So I started writing about these things.

00:19:41.420 We've got a couple more coming down the pike in this conversation. One is the sexual assault

00:19:45.760 tsunami. That's directly relevant to what we're talking about. And the most recent of course,

00:19:52.280 is the DEI so-called diverse equity and inclusion, uh, which is also relevant to what we're talking

00:19:59.940 about. But I started writing about the football team, which to the point where it became, people

00:20:07.380 would say, Oh, I, I walk into class where, you know, half the class is football players and they

00:20:13.380 would, and that happens because I've taught we're undergraduate. Right. And, but I've taught the

00:20:19.720 whole gamut in just the four years and the gamut runs from pre-college classes, remedial, frankly,

00:20:26.140 remedial classes to our honors classes. I've taught, taught them all. So here I am in this

00:20:31.720 remedial class and these kids have all been sent to our prep school because they couldn't get in

00:20:37.940 the regular way. Every service academy has a prep school. All this is military, by the way,

00:20:43.460 once you go to the prep school, you're in the military. Once you're at Annapolis,

00:20:46.480 you're in the military and it's all paid for by, by taxpayers. So what I'm saying about the

00:20:52.020 service academies, uh, taxpayers ought to be paying attention because they're hugely expensive,

00:20:57.780 cost about a half a million dollars per kid. That's four times what an ROTC officer costs and

00:21:04.040 eight times what an OCS officer costs. You can go to college anywhere and then say, Hey, I want to be

00:21:10.880 a Navy officer. Oh, they'll say, okay, we'll send you to the OCS. And if you pass it's eight to nine

00:21:16.760 weeks. So a summer you're an officer. And those two plus what are called direct commissions where

00:21:23.480 adults who've typically gone to law school or med school, uh, joined as typically O fours in the Navy,

00:21:31.980 that's a Lieutenant commander. Um, those are our commissioning sources, right? So you don't,

00:21:41.100 why, why do we have a football? Why, why do we have a D one football team that we have to recruit

00:21:45.880 big? Some of them have been brilliant, but some of them have not.

00:21:51.320 Well, these big guys, why aren't we looking for the best all around material? No, we're not. We're

00:21:58.600 looking for a football team that can win over, you know, SMU or temple. So I walk into a class

00:22:04.420 that's this remedial class. So it comes, it's remedial in college and they've just come from

00:22:11.380 a 13th remedial grade. All this is taxpayer money. Like how much, how much can we remediate them?

00:22:16.940 We're not letting in the best and the brightest. No. And they kind of, they're, they're waiting for me.

00:22:22.020 Right. And they say, Oh, professor Fleming, he's the one who hates the football team. I do not hate

00:22:27.460 the football team. I love these guys. I love these guys. And typically those classes go very

00:22:33.540 well. Once they, they, the ice is broken. I do not think it is a wise investment of taxpayer money

00:22:42.000 to give slots. And about half the class is what I'm talking about. So you think, I mean, you hear

00:22:48.180 the hype presumably about best and the brightest and all around whatever's. And that's what they'll

00:22:53.260 tell you. When I started writing about these things, like, why are we, what are we to have

00:22:57.500 a football team for? The Navy, the Navy, the big Navy does not play football. So I imagine the case

00:23:03.180 for a football team, correct me if I'm wrong, is purely a recruiting mechanism.

00:23:08.680 No, it's that, it's that old saw about the, you know, the battle of Waterloo was,

00:23:13.680 was one on the playing fields of Eden. It's, it is relevant to what we're talking about here.

00:23:18.260 It's this, you know, it makes, it's, it's the manly thing to do. Big guys crashing into each

00:23:25.660 other. And by golly, we're going to be division one. And the alumni like it. I mean, you know,

00:23:30.780 again, relevant to our topic, older guys like to see younger guys crash into each other. It just,

00:23:37.160 you know, it's a, it's a thrill. So, but should they be using those slots at the service academies

00:23:42.980 for that? I mean, we could have a walk on division three team, no sweat. There are enough guys who

00:23:48.520 played football in, in high school that we could do that with no problem. We'd play D3. What's the

00:23:54.460 shame in that? No, they want to do D1. So that, you know, they say the pushback to my articles,

00:24:03.980 and it's been for people who haven't read my book. I started writing about these things that seem

00:24:10.520 wrong, wrong, wrong to me, maybe 20 years ago. I came to the Naval Academy in 1987. So

00:24:16.760 I've been there on the books anyway, for 36 years. I started writing maybe 20 years ago,

00:24:26.180 just about after I'd gotten off the admissions board. And I just couldn't believe what we were

00:24:30.460 giving our slots to. And I couldn't believe what we were, even the slots that were competitive,

00:24:36.620 were just not that competitive. And I thought, well, wait, what is, this place has got its

00:24:41.640 priorities all wrong. So I started writing and they didn't, the administration didn't like that at

00:24:46.520 all, to put it mildly. And it started with an angry two-page letter about how it was unprofessional

00:24:53.520 for a professor to write an article. Wait, that's what professors do. They write articles and they talk

00:25:00.360 about things. And it escalated through the subsequent 15 years, through two official

00:25:06.260 letters of reprimand that put me on probation for two years, very bad, very bad boy, investigations

00:25:13.120 and scare quotes that were just completely cooked up and designed to, they did go out and they'd send

00:25:19.540 out an all hands email to the entire, it's called the brigade, the entire student body. Does anybody

00:25:24.460 have a complaint against Professor Fleming? Really? To us? Yes. So I was, they, the dean who was my

00:25:33.420 nemesis, he's now gone. But, but he got his orders from superintendents. And I've actually heard as a PS

00:25:42.080 homie paranoid that all this was coming from the Pentagon. You've got to get rid of Fleming. He's

00:25:48.300 making us look bad. So, you know, the top kicks the one, one level down and that kicks one level

00:25:54.200 down and finally the dog gets kicked at the bottom of the line. Well, that, that leads me to a question

00:25:59.740 about what, what, what is the purpose of this? If we see this going off the rails and I would agree

00:26:04.580 with you in, in large part, not, not entirely, but if, if we see the direction of our service academies

00:26:11.540 being denigrated and allowing other individuals that may not be the best of the best into these,

00:26:16.180 which obviously translates into military readiness. Why? What is the point of this

00:26:22.040 erosion of what we see as these incredible institutions?

00:26:26.740 Oh, well, I thought you were going to ask another question. What's the point of the erosion? There's

00:26:31.180 no point to the erosion. That's the sad part. But I think the real question is what's the, what's the,

00:26:36.520 I don't know why, I'm not sure what the question is. Why, why did, how do they continue to exist if

00:26:41.340 they're, as I claim, uh, sucking air, uh, in, on, on life support? And the answer is they're what I

00:26:48.680 call, uh, the vanity projects of the military brass. They're, they're military Disney lads. Uh,

00:26:55.620 the brass love them, uh, because we're, we're told that the, the, the chief of naval operations is the

00:27:02.120 head Navy guy. Right. Um, and we're told it's always been a guy just today, the first female

00:27:08.460 superintendent of the United States Naval Academy was sworn in. So it's been, you know, meant all

00:27:13.760 the way back. Um, but so we were told that the post of, of, uh, superintendent of the, of the U S

00:27:19.640 Naval Academy was a consolation prize for the guy who didn't get the, the CNO job. So they love this

00:27:26.440 stuff and they themselves were all graduates, uh, you know, 20 years ago, they, they don't, they don't

00:27:32.840 really know what the, what the reality is. Um, and they had no experience there, they're to put it

00:27:38.580 mildly blithering incompetence. They're a Navy Admiral and they're supposed to be running what

00:27:43.720 bills itself as a college. So they don't know what they're doing. And there's another problem

00:27:50.020 with the brass. Um, and that is that there's a joke that says, once you make Admiral, you'll never

00:27:56.420 eat a bad meal or hear the truth again. And the bad meal, you know, you know, you're weighted on hand

00:28:02.340 and foot. You, you have servants, you got a chauffeur for the car and everything is sir, sir, sir, or

00:28:07.260 nowadays, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am. But I'm talking about the sirs. Uh, why will you never hear the truth?

00:28:14.140 Because the way the military is set up is in a series of, of what I think of as increasing

00:28:19.300 bottlenecks, uh, as in the guy on the bottom has to, it's like the stack of turtles in Yertle the

00:28:25.860 turtle. If you remember that, the Dr. Seuss book, the guy on the bottom has to please one level up

00:28:31.740 and he has to please one level up and so on all the way to the top. And at each level,

00:28:36.520 there's pressure to not tell the next level up bad news. So it's, you know, you, you tell them,

00:28:44.400 I mean, I've had countless students say to me, basically a version of if this, if your CO

00:28:50.260 commanding officer ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. You find out I had one guy who, who was an

00:28:55.840 NFO, which is the backseat guy in a, in a, in a, in a plane airplane, there's the pilot and there's

00:29:01.460 the NFO class in 1990, great class. I'm still in touch with a lot of those guys. In fact, the guy

00:29:07.400 who was the temporary, uh, superintendent while Tommy Tuberville coach was putting a hold on

00:29:13.540 promotions who just stepped down today. His name is Fred Kacher. And he was also in that group. So I've,

00:29:19.340 I can chalk up one admiral, but anyway, the, another guy in that same class, the NFO guy,

00:29:24.960 he said, you find out what your commanding officer wants and give it to him.

00:29:29.400 That is not the way to win force. And what happened to me at Annapolis was I was making

00:29:36.280 them look bad or I was saying things they didn't want to hear. So they want, they, you know, the places

00:29:43.080 look great from the outside. Even you considered it for a while. They're gorgeous. They're physical.

00:29:49.280 I mean, Annapolis is pretty. I think West Point is, you know, but ugly, but that's just me. It's

00:29:54.420 in a pretty place. It's on the, on the Hudson. I mean, no, no prejudice there, right? Exactly.

00:29:59.360 It's on the Hudson, which is beautiful in the fall. I've been there in the fall. You just look out at

00:30:04.340 the, at the leaves on the other side of the Hudson and that's gorgeous stuff. That's really gorgeous,

00:30:08.440 but the buildings are awful and it's an hour North of New York city and there's nothing around it.

00:30:13.620 I mean, whereas Annapolis is, it's, I compare it. I was a Fulbright scholar in West Berlin. So

00:30:19.980 there's a wall, you know, you can walk up to the wall and touch it and you can go through the wall

00:30:23.880 if you know how to do it legally and so on. So there's a wall in, around the Naval Academy

00:30:29.140 and you can walk up to it and touch it. And there are houses that, you know, look down into,

00:30:33.840 into the, into the yard it's called. So it's the, the, the, the, the place is, it's, it's so

00:30:43.500 accessible. It's in Annapolis, which is our state capital, Maryland. It's less than an hour from

00:30:49.300 Washington. So it's a tourist destination. The students, they're 18 to 21 or 22. Some are a few,

00:30:56.440 a few of them are a little bit older for, you know, there are kind of exceptions that are left,

00:31:00.880 but they can't be older than 23 on what they call eye day, induction day. So let's say 23 plus 4,

00:31:07.340 27 is the absolute. They have to run this PRT, what I'm talking about. They are inspected in their

00:31:13.640 uniforms. They're, the guy's hair is short. They can't, you know, lie half naked on the grass.

00:31:19.740 There's a place where they can do that. It's on the roof of their, roof of their dormitory,

00:31:24.440 back off tall. They call it the red beach, which is hilarious. It's a red roof, you know,

00:31:29.480 they're there because, but nobody sees them and tourists just flock to us. They're beautiful.

00:31:35.420 The question on the table is why, what are we doing with these places? And the answer is

00:31:39.320 their military is Disneyland. They're, they're a Potemkin village. If you remember what that is,

00:31:46.460 that, that Catherine the Great's, I forget what exactly what his title was. He was her general

00:31:50.880 that took the Crimea for her incidentally. He would, he's supposed to have put up

00:31:56.240 wooden facades of really spiffy looking houses in front of the crappy peasant dwellings that she

00:32:04.780 would see from her coach. So she'd be in the coach and she'd look over there and it would look like,

00:32:09.540 you know, everything was hunky dory. That's a Potemkin village. That's the service academy. I know

00:32:14.520 that West Point is the same. Check out the book by my counterpart at West Point. His name is Tim

00:32:20.100 Bakken, B-A-K-K-E-N. His book is called The Price of Loyalty. And I have to admit, he quotes me a lot

00:32:30.400 because I've been writing for far longer than he's a professor of law at West Point. And it's,

00:32:37.640 they're, they're the same. They're, they're, I guess in Texas terms, like I say, they're all had

00:32:42.820 no cattle. So that's not where men are going to be, where boys are going to become men. And the

00:32:49.080 girls are just as disappointed incidentally. I mean, you, I'm going to let you focus on anything

00:32:56.120 in what I've just said that, that interests you. Man, let me just step back from the conversation

00:33:01.880 very briefly. One of the most powerful ways that we fulfill the mission of Order of Man

00:33:06.280 is by hosting various events throughout the year. And this week, I'm very excited to tell you,

00:33:11.380 I'm going to be releasing a few of the dates for our upcoming events. These events are their men's

00:33:17.560 events, their father and son's events, and also a large men's conference. In fact, we're going to

00:33:22.160 create the largest men's conference ever. So if you want to learn more about what these events are,

00:33:27.840 and also to be the first to get notified of upcoming events, so you can secure your spot before

00:33:32.540 anyone else does, because they are limited spots, then head to orderofman.com. So again,

00:33:38.560 orderofman.com, you'll see the events tab there. You can check on those events, and we'll get you

00:33:43.340 the details and the registration information. And we're going to be doing this again. We kind of

00:33:48.460 wound it down at the end of last year. And so this will be the first upcoming events of this year.

00:33:53.800 So again, head to orderofman.com to check when those dates are and what those events are,

00:33:57.580 and we'll be happy to see you there. All right. Do that right after the podcast. For now,

00:34:02.200 let's get back to it, Bruce. Yeah. Well, we'll get into that. I do want to ask just to go back

00:34:09.160 to my previous question and maybe ask it a different way. Is the reason that we see this erosion,

00:34:13.540 is there an agenda to undermine the military or these service institutions? Or is it, for example,

00:34:20.580 the inevitable outcome of the culture, the degenerate culture that we live in? Or is it just

00:34:27.520 ignorance and incompetence? I would check the last box, which you haven't noted, which is all of the

00:34:35.540 above. The ignorance and incompetence I've already flagged. And what infuriates me is, look, I've

00:34:43.960 taught between 3,000 and 4,000 students. I've talked to hundreds of them. I know what they actually

00:34:48.700 think. I mean, we'll talk about, we're trying to talk about a short story in class and all I want

00:34:54.000 to talk about is some crazy thing that happened that day and how little respect they have. I could

00:34:59.000 tell these people things. So that's willful ignorance. Instead of that, they punish me and

00:35:05.580 shut me down. So, okay, you're not going to get your information that way. And that's troublesome

00:35:10.300 because that translates to the military and from the military. The equivalent of me is some,

00:35:16.920 you know, grizzled Marine guy in a forward operating base who sees just how bad things are

00:35:22.140 going in, let's say, Afghanistan most recently. And he'll probably get through to his platoon

00:35:27.840 commander because they live together. These guys sweat on each other. But is the platoon commander

00:35:33.360 going to be able to get through to the guy ahead of him or the guy ahead of him or the guy? No,

00:35:39.600 at some point, this buffer system. That's why we haven't won a war in 75 years. So this is not just

00:35:45.600 about me at Annapolis. This is about problems, I think, endemic problems in the military. But to

00:35:52.520 answer the rest of your question, partly it's our culture. And partly it's because the part that I

00:36:02.600 can fix some of this. I mean, just my fingers are itching. Just let me do it. Let me do it.

00:36:07.480 And I can give you the short list in just a minute if you want it. But I mean, there are some immediate

00:36:12.820 fixes that would make things better, not perfect. But the service academies have lost their way

00:36:20.760 because far fewer officers come from the service academies than used to. After World War II,

00:36:27.120 it was close to 100%. Now it's down to one in five, not even, 18%. So of course, they go on to the

00:36:35.060 students about the best and the brightest. They tell them that multiple times every week. The students

00:36:41.660 don't believe it. The midshipmen don't believe it. But that's what they're told. So you better hope

00:36:47.320 that's not the case, because that means that 82% of the rest of the, in this case, the Navy and Marine

00:36:52.300 Corps are subpar. There are no data. There are no data that show that these guys and gals are better

00:36:58.920 officers. And so that's one problem that the world has changed. And two things, the world has changed and

00:37:07.320 the service academies have changed. Now I'm working on the world that's changed. The number of officers

00:37:11.500 that come from service academies has dropped. And that is because ROTC has been beefed up so radically.

00:37:17.820 There are, for example, twice as many ROTC Army officers as there are from West Point. It's about

00:37:22.720 the same in Annapolis, but the Navy is much smaller than the Army. It's about a third of the size.

00:37:27.980 So the Marine Corps is half the size of the Navy. The Navy and Air Force are about a third of the size of

00:37:32.780 Army. So the world has changed out there. We're, it's not, we're not going to have any more D-Day

00:37:41.740 landings. All right. The same, we do have some guy, and I'll just stick with guys who are doing what

00:37:48.520 the movies think soldiers and sailors do. That would be, in my case, it's Marine infantry. It's

00:37:56.840 the SEALs, it's EOD, those guys that, you know, the ones that make your heart go thump thump when

00:38:04.260 you think, oh my God, are they really doing this for us? You know, it's like, what did I do to

00:38:09.240 deserve this? And by the way, that's been the joy of my life that I get to interact with these,

00:38:15.520 those guys. But most of the Navy and Marine Corps has got a lot of things, right? And

00:38:21.020 Marine Corps has a lot of planes, for example, but nothing wrong with being a pilot. The Navy has

00:38:29.880 got what they call SWO, surface warfare. They're on the ships, and that's a really thankless job.

00:38:36.460 And what they do is, you know, it's not what you think of. So now we win wars by drones, by

00:38:43.860 artificial intelligence, by where, where's the, this is our topic, where's the macho in it, right?

00:38:50.440 Especially in that, that's not, you're right, that's not how we, well, it is to some degree how

00:38:56.900 we try to recruit them, which is why they're so disappointed when they get there and find that

00:39:01.340 that's not it at all. But warfare has changed. And it's, you know, the Navy in, in Iraq and

00:39:11.000 Afghanistan, we lost something like 7,000 service members. 224 of those, I looked it up,

00:39:18.040 were Navy. So Navy is in ships. And now I've been in ships, but early when I arrived at Annapolis,

00:39:24.900 they would send the civilian professors out on, on ships. And I went on a sub, which was really cool.

00:39:30.260 They even let me drive it. I can't believe that, but I guess there was nothing, there was nothing to

00:39:34.940 hit. You know, the fake wheel and the real guy was on the other side or behind the curtain.

00:39:39.740 It must've been that, it must've been that, but it was the craziest darn thing. Oh, that was an

00:39:45.180 experience. Believe me. I've written about that in my first book about Annapolis, which is called

00:39:49.560 Annapolis Autumn. I think you can still get it as an ebook. But so the problem is that warfare has

00:39:56.200 changed and they don't, it's not all male. It's now something like 40% women. Go women. I mean,

00:40:02.540 I have a mother, I have a wife, I have a daughter, all those good things. Also two college age sons.

00:40:09.280 So I want to be a good father too. I read the blurb on your, on your blog. But it's, you're right. The,

00:40:17.120 the, it's all about, I just, I'm sitting in Philadelphia right now in our apartment. I actually

00:40:22.660 live outside of Annapolis, but on the way into town in Philadelphia, you turn off 95 onto 76.

00:40:28.560 Signs say Valley Forge, which of course means something to a lot of us. And there's this big,

00:40:34.800 big billboard of a woman in a, in Marine Corps getup. And it's all about, she's found her place

00:40:41.420 in the Marine Corps. Okay. Nothing wrong with that. You know, the whole, can she carry a 200 pound guy

00:40:51.000 if he's wounded, blah, blah, blah. But you're right. It's, it's inclusivity, but it's, it's inclusivity

00:40:57.300 to some degree out of desperation. There, no service is meeting its recruiting goals. And to go

00:41:06.140 back to your question, why, what's going on with the service academies? They decided they wanted to

00:41:12.880 be like the cool kids. They decided that they were going to move with the times. I have nothing bad to

00:41:19.920 say about moving with the times. Only they never admitted that that would cost something. The guy to

00:41:25.240 read the old guys, Jim Webb. I don't know if you, James Webb, who was the Ronald Reagan secretary of

00:41:32.640 the Navy. He was a Senator from, from Virginia. And he's also an author. He, he, he wrote a book

00:41:39.600 about Vietnam. But he also wrote a book about Annapolis called A Sense of Honor. And that was,

00:41:46.220 and, and, and he's notorious in feminist circles for having written an article that he did not slap

00:41:52.540 a title on. So as I say, you know, hold your fire, but the title is women can't fight. That's not what

00:41:59.460 the article says, but it does make the point. This is, it was written in 1980, which was the first year

00:42:05.160 that women would graduate from the service academies. And his point was that if you put

00:42:10.380 any number of women, starting with one, that's probably even the worst into an all male battalion

00:42:17.720 or group, you're going to change the chemistry of the group. The guys are going to start.

00:42:21.860 I mean, it's like this with 11 year olds, let alone, you know, 18, 20, 25 year olds.

00:42:27.860 Sure. And, you know, especially if they're far from home and, you know, they don't have any other

00:42:32.520 partners. So the guys are going to start, the best thing that could happen is that the guys are going

00:42:37.000 to start showing off for the girl. You know, they're going to treat, they're not going to treat

00:42:41.060 that. And they say, no, just treat her as one of the guys. Well, really? That's that? No, no. So we,

00:42:47.000 we have, he's writing, James Webb is writing in 1980 about the problems that, and all of those of course

00:42:54.780 came to pass. And I've talked to women from the first classes, not the first class, but the first

00:43:01.800 several years at Annapolis. And the way they were treated was you wouldn't want your daughter

00:43:06.320 treated that way. I wouldn't want my daughter treated that way. I mean, it was really crappy.

00:43:11.780 Understandably, I mean, they plop these women in the middle, they do nothing to accommodate them.

00:43:17.100 But some things had to change. So the guys, you know, it took them a while to get over that. Now

00:43:22.080 the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme. And that's the sexual assault training, which was

00:43:27.720 the marquee topic maybe 10 years ago, or under the Obama administration, little fill in here.

00:43:36.320 The Obama administration announced that Title IX, which most of us understand is saying, hey,

00:43:41.040 women can play ball too. Let's have women's sports, rah, rah, was going to be used on college campuses to

00:43:49.260 say that a guy, let's say a guy and a girl have what the guy thought was consensual sex.

00:43:54.560 And the girl, even weeks later, even months later says, well, I felt, to tell you the truth,

00:44:02.280 my girlfriend's convinced me that I felt pressured into this. She makes a complaint of sexual assault.

00:44:08.460 And that was what anybody could talk about 10 years ago is there were reports from Congress,

00:44:15.140 the service academies are required to put out a yearly report, I think it's biannually for the

00:44:22.460 Defense Department, you know, sexual assault in the ranks. It's like, wait, you didn't see,

00:44:29.300 first of all, you have way too broad, I've written about this, you have, read my book,

00:44:33.420 you have way too broad, a definition of sexual assault, you go to the UCMJ, obviously, it's the

00:44:41.180 bad stuff that is already illegal. I mean, rape is at the end of that. But it's also, quote, unwanted

00:44:47.740 sexual, unwanted physical contact. So I read a pushback to this, and I'm going to steal a phrase

00:44:56.360 from it. What about what guys would call a test kiss, as in, you know, things are looking pretty good,

00:45:02.160 let's see how it looks if you kiss her, that if she didn't like it, or she decided the next day,

00:45:08.140 she didn't like it, or the next month, that he could be charged with sexual assault, not just

00:45:14.880 harassment, assault. And harassment is even murkier. Harassment is, it's not pulling your pants down in

00:45:22.460 public. It's making and it's not, you know, like, like the bad old days of guys making sexist comments,

00:45:29.440 you know, all of a sudden, now we have women on submarines, you're presumably aware that that was

00:45:33.700 one of the last holdout submarine quarters are like this, I've been on submarines, they, so, you know,

00:45:39.720 you brush too close to her in the passageway, you know, most girls are there, most women, you know,

00:45:45.740 they're, they're rational. And, you know, they're not going to bring accusations of sexual assault or

00:45:51.180 harassment. But if one of the guys kind of rolls his eyes at, you know, wow, she's got, you know,

00:45:56.220 she's got a pair or isn't she talking about some hot actress that can be, can be reported as sexual

00:46:03.100 harassment. So the, the definitions were just way too wide, but it's like, who didn't see this coming?

00:46:10.900 That's the problem with the service academies, right? Just who didn't see it coming to happen.

00:46:15.480 So they didn't deal with it properly. I, I have a metaphor for that. And that is that when my daughter

00:46:21.400 was young, I would have her sometimes after hours, so she needed to go to the bathroom. So I would go

00:46:27.140 with her into the women's room, deserted, otherwise deserted building. And the men's urinals were still

00:46:34.120 there. And all they changed was, you know, the sign on the door, the women, but nothing else was done.

00:46:41.560 So except, so the women felt pushed out and the guys felt resentful. I mean, it's, it's a, it's a,

00:46:50.260 a lose, lose situation, but some things have now, as I say, they've, you might say, gotten with the

00:46:56.800 program and they've gone to the other extreme. And the other extreme is what I'm talking about here,

00:47:01.680 that the girl has only to, you know, make the claim and immediately she's called the victim. Of course,

00:47:08.860 the military didn't invent this stuff, but they imported outside agitators, I call them outside

00:47:14.600 advocates. And that's the vocabulary that we were, we were trained in. I mean, I had to go to

00:47:21.120 mandatory faculty, it was, you know, the guy, there was officers to the left and right and faculty,

00:47:27.600 civilians dressed in this kind of clothing. And they told us that, you know, all these things were,

00:47:33.680 were, were, were sexual harassment. So they've just gone way too far in the opposite direction

00:47:40.020 with that. They don't know. They didn't want the women. Okay. You got women. They never sat down

00:47:46.120 and said, well, how is this going to change? How it has changed. And the guys, these hard charging

00:47:51.560 guys that are, you know, the biggest complainers and the most disappointed, the most alpha are the

00:47:57.640 ones who are the most disappointed by the service academies. Sure. And they, they complain to me,

00:48:04.700 they say, you can't, again, this is Jim Webb's world versus our world. I don't think we can't

00:48:11.860 return the question. This is a big question. So I'm still working at what's changed. Is it the

00:48:17.200 academies? Is it the culture? It's both. The academies wanted to play the same game as the rest of

00:48:24.580 culture. We, if we didn't give a bachelor's degree until the 1930s, we didn't have majors until the

00:48:31.220 1960s. We didn't have women until 1976. We didn't, don't ask, don't tell disappeared in what, 2013,

00:48:38.580 something like that. So in, in, in that period, if you even intimated that you were gay, you were

00:48:44.880 immediately thrown out of the military and the military academies. So I have to say, I mean,

00:48:50.660 it's a, it's a normalization of the service academies. So I'm not going to pass judgment on

00:48:56.820 that. But what's, what I do pass judgment on is the fact that they, it, what it makes, does is it

00:49:01.600 makes the pot boil more. And this DEI diversity stuff makes it boil even more because they delineate

00:49:09.280 kids into racial groups and they give, they give preference to, they give preference, not only

00:49:16.860 racial, but gender. They give preference to women over men in disputes. And the boys are aware of

00:49:23.360 that. There was a big article in our local newspaper, which is called the Annapolis Capitol, about how

00:49:28.140 justice was tilted towards women. Now justice is tilted towards the minority students, the non-white

00:49:35.040 students, not only in admissions, but they're desperate to keep them. So what it does is create

00:49:40.860 divisions. You can speak, I think from experience, I'm not going to put words in your mouth, but I

00:49:46.640 would bet serious money that unity and cohesion is the basis of military discipline. You have to

00:49:53.980 do it as a, as a group, right? And what we're doing is introducing all these divisions. Of course,

00:50:00.240 they're doing it at Harvard as well. Everybody's been following, I think been following the Harvard

00:50:04.640 DEI stuff, but the military, if the military is divided, you know, Abraham Lincoln quoted the

00:50:12.240 Bible, house divided against itself cannot stand. That's what we're doing, uh, with, with the

00:50:19.260 military. I mean, it's interesting to me that in order to address racism and sexism, we incorporate

00:50:29.420 and adopt racism and sexism. That's a bit ironic to put it mildly, but the frustrating part of this

00:50:36.620 DEI agenda is it's all based on immutable characteristics. I mean, I can certainly

00:50:41.480 understand how diversity could be considered a strength if we have a differing opinion or

00:50:46.900 perspective or experience in life, but not based on the melanoma in your skin, not based on your

00:50:53.220 biological makeup. That's nothing that you can change or have any control over. It's nothing you earned

00:50:57.900 even. Well, you're absolutely right. And the problem with DEI is that it's imposed at the

00:51:03.780 service academies. It's imposed with the power of the UCMJ, the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

00:51:10.400 And, you know, it's at a, at a, at a civilian school, maybe they can, I don't know what they

00:51:14.780 do to the kids that, you know, microaggressions they get lectured at is what happens, but they

00:51:19.620 can actually be punished with the, using the UCMJ. They can be, they can be at the worst possible

00:51:25.440 case scenario. They can be court, court-martialed and sent to jail to the, to the brig. So it is,

00:51:33.440 you, you've put your finger on, you know, I'm a writer. I've written more than 20 books.

00:51:38.180 This is only the most recent one. And I'm, I got up minutes before I turned on my computer to talk to

00:51:44.520 you to work on an article that I'm, that I'm trying to finish on precisely DEI. And the paradox that

00:51:53.440 it is exactly what you said, that it is, it divides into groups, ostensibly to address the fact that

00:52:02.520 people are being divided into groups. So if you, if you impose these things from the outside, if you

00:52:10.120 have at, at, at Annapolis, let me just talk about Annapolis as opposed to Harvard. You, there's,

00:52:16.240 there's Mando training. Okay. So it comes out, you know, Mando training today at Odark 100 or something.

00:52:22.120 And somebody's done, you know, a lieutenant commander is going to stand up and tell the

00:52:27.420 midshipmen who are all in the military, what they have to do, you know, what they're allowed

00:52:31.660 to say, what they're not allowed to say. And, you know, the guys, they don't even, this, this is me

00:52:37.600 trying not to look at the guy to my left. There's no guy to my left, but, you know, they're sitting

00:52:42.360 there. They can't even roll their eyes. They can't even roll their eyes. So they just kind of get,

00:52:47.320 they do that thing, you know, where they, sir, yes, sir, yes, sir. And they listen to it, but it

00:52:52.620 is, it's, it does, it sets one group against the other. It is completely birdbrained in the military

00:52:59.380 and very counter, it's counterintuitive logically from what you're talking about at the Harvards of

00:53:06.040 the world, but it's counterproductive in the military. So we, we have a, Houston, we have a problem

00:53:12.420 here. They're, they want to, you said, we've done the question on the table, maybe we're wrapping it

00:53:16.980 up, is what, what's changed and so on. Well, society's changed. Congress wants to see, Congress

00:53:23.060 wanted to see women at the service academies. They took, I don't know if you, geographically what

00:53:29.420 you're close to, but at VMI, which is the state of Virginia's military college, they were told also

00:53:36.060 they had to have women. And they said, well, can't we, can't we have a women's leadership institute

00:53:40.500 at another college? And they, no, you can't have that. You got to have women right there.

00:53:46.080 So, okay, fine. We're going to have women at the service academies, but it's going to change them.

00:53:51.300 It's going to change them to, you want to have, you want to have 40% female. And here's the paradox,

00:53:58.620 anything from anything remotely so-called PDA, public display of affection, you cannot hold hands

00:54:06.540 with your girlfriend if you're in a uniform on the Annapolis campus, or indeed on, in technically

00:54:11.760 on any military installation. You can't, which means you're not supposed to be having sex in the

00:54:18.260 yard, but they do. They go out to the graveyard, which is a little desecratory maybe, but where else

00:54:23.600 are you going to go? Or they hope they don't get caught in the, in, in the mother bee, they call it

00:54:29.120 Bancroft Hall, which is their common dormitory. All 4,500 of them in one building, huge building,

00:54:34.560 a lot of wings, but one building. They, and they can be punished for it. So it's weight,

00:54:42.280 you let in women and you remove PS, you remove the stricture on, on gays. And yet you forbid

00:54:49.320 any sexual contact, like they're 18 to 21 or 22, typically they're full of hormones. What, you know,

00:54:56.340 if you want to play the game of the outside world, you have to do some things differently. So

00:55:02.900 at the end of my book, I do suggest some immediate fixes. And one is, you know, we've got to change

00:55:09.120 the status of like the no sex rule was not a problem until 1976 because it was all guys. And,

00:55:16.580 you know, gays were not tolerated anywhere in the military. So of course somebody's doing something,

00:55:22.760 but I'm not, we're not asking, we're not telling. All of a sudden women come in and they've kept the

00:55:28.400 same strictures. They need, those things need to go away. So that's the, you know, the world has

00:55:35.100 changed. The service academies have changed and they're marching forward with blinders on like a

00:55:39.760 horse's blinders, not realizing that they have failed to change. They've failed to add two and two

00:55:47.120 and they have to get four, but they apparently haven't done that. But the guys, the hard charging

00:55:53.680 guys, they're roped in, this just breaks my heart. The hard charging guys are, are, are roped in with

00:55:59.200 all this, you know, hoorah. If you look at the, look at the recruiting videos, you know, the,

00:56:04.920 or there was a movie called Annapolis, which wasn't even shot at Annapolis, but a lot of,

00:56:09.160 a lot of shirts off boxing. And, you know, you want to see ripped guys knocking the crap out of each

00:56:14.260 other. That's just what guys want to see. They all love the movie Fight Club, by the way.

00:56:18.180 Um, I can tell you the movies they love. Who doesn't love that? 300, you know, anything with

00:56:24.120 these chiseled, chiseled guys, uh, Gerard Butler and so on. I mean, they just, they just swoon over

00:56:30.420 that stuff. Um, but it, which they could not actually shoot at Annapolis because there were

00:56:36.380 things that contravened the UCFJ and like, uh, a student hit an officer. So I can understand why

00:56:42.720 the brass said no on that one, but they, they watch movies like that and they think that's what it's

00:56:47.220 going to be. And they arrive and it's a, it's an egg walking on eggshells thing of, you know,

00:56:52.560 don't, don't say this to somebody. Don't object when somebody who's clearly, I mean, God forbid,

00:56:59.140 you should object when somebody who's clearly less competent gets elevated to a student leadership

00:57:04.480 position for reasons that seem pretty clear to most people, a skin tone or a, you know, a gender,

00:57:12.540 what they got below the belt. Um, and the guys, it just bums the guys out. So they don't find the

00:57:19.060 bad news is that they're not finding the masculine role models that, that many of them come looking

00:57:25.480 for. And it's, it's, it's no longer what they used to be. So is this a, is this a situation that

00:57:31.300 you feel like eventually, you know, we scrap the thing or is this something that isn't even,

00:57:36.660 even redeemable? Well, obviously I've had to ask that question or increasingly with increasing

00:57:41.940 frequency, increasing intensity. Uh, the solution that I offer at the end of my book, which is called

00:57:47.060 saving our service academies, uh, was not my title. I think it, my title would have been a little more

00:57:52.920 negative, but you know, think about it. People don't, don't not scrap. I can't sell a book that's

00:57:58.280 called scrapping our service academies. Um, I think that we, I mentioned earlier that there's some

00:58:04.700 potentially quick fixes, uh, what the United Kingdom did with Sandhurst is one very definite

00:58:11.460 possibility. And what they did was to get out of the undergraduate education business and use

00:58:15.780 the facilities, uh, for, uh, graduate courses of eight to nine months. So you go to, you go to

00:58:23.380 college. I think that would be a good solution for the service academies. It would be sort of a

00:58:27.960 generalized version. The Naval War College does not fit that bill. Naval War College is for,

00:58:32.260 you know, people writing specialized dissertations on why Napoleon's campaign and so-and-so was

00:58:37.360 superior to somebody else's campaign and something else. So, but what I imagine is that you would

00:58:43.720 either go through OCS or ROTC and very disparate experiences, which is precisely the diversity

00:58:50.500 we're looking for. If you ask me, uh, plus it gives them four years. Uh, you have to go to college

00:58:57.200 too. There are a few exceptions, like some of the guys that come up through the ranks, Mavericks and so

00:59:01.640 on, but mostly you have to be a college graduate to be an officer. So you go to college wherever

00:59:06.700 and you sow your wild oats, let's hope. And you get some of the, some of the piss and vinegar out

00:59:12.840 for the guys. And the girls learn to deal with guys, which is a big deal about, you know, men and

00:59:18.820 women. There's a women's side to it as well, which is, I have a whole series of, you know, imaginary

00:59:24.140 lectures for everyone. They're not so imaginary because I delivered them one-on-one to female

00:59:29.740 midshipmen about how do you deal with a guy who does X and Y. You make clear what the boundaries

00:59:34.820 are and you enforce them. All right. I mean, guys are going to, they're going to try to push the

00:59:38.800 boundaries. They just are. It's their, their, their self, their self-image, our self-image,

00:59:44.080 right? You, we, you don't want to feel like a wuss to yourself. So that's where there's also a level

00:59:48.640 of risk-taking for a, for a perceived reward. And that's generally more attributable to men than it is

00:59:53.620 women. Sure. Sure. Absolutely. I mean, plus it's fun and it defines us as who we are, but there's

01:00:00.960 a whole lecture to women. This is not quite where I was going a second ago, but I can come back.

01:00:07.440 What to do with the service academies, make them into Sandhurst. And that's, that's my, I'm going to

01:00:11.960 put my finger on that point. Cause I'm going to come back to that. That's one option. Then there are a

01:00:16.600 couple of shorter term options that I also want to add, but what do I say to women? Nowadays I've

01:00:25.980 written this. Is it okay if I talk about, just hold up this other book that I've written called

01:00:31.800 Masculinity from the Inside. And that my, it came out, I don't know, a few months ago. So that's also

01:00:39.720 required reading. Ladies and gentlemen, there will be a quiz. Unfortunately, it's kind of expensive

01:00:45.240 because it's an academic book from an Anglo-American publisher named called Routledge. But my starting

01:00:52.420 point for that was, was I started looking at the so-called gender studies departments in

01:00:59.560 dozens of universities, mostly American, but, but some. And what I realized is that any theory of men

01:01:08.540 on the table that gets knocked around in academia and, and bleeds out of academia to

01:01:14.440 politicians is feminism. It's, you know, they now call it all, I mean, 99, I think maybe even a hundred

01:01:23.400 percent of certainly of the gender, so-called gender studies departments that I looked at

01:01:29.000 started as women's studies. And then they said, oh, well, we have to be more inclusive. So let's call

01:01:34.620 it gender studies. Right. And there'll be a picture of the class and there'll be, you know,

01:01:39.060 25 girls and women, young women and one guy sitting there and any, there is gender theory

01:01:49.800 written by men, but it's mostly men who have been, I don't want to be snide about this, but they've

01:01:54.620 been basically co-opted by feminism and their, their solution. Feminized, of course. Okay. All right.

01:02:00.260 So I can't use that word. Their, their solution to excesses of male activity is to make men more

01:02:09.120 like women, which I don't approve of that and it's not going to work. So why don't we just think about

01:02:15.700 how, how else to think about this? So I decided that I had to come up with a theory. Again, the title

01:02:23.140 is masculinity from the inside, the subtitle is gender theories, missing piece as in, why don't

01:02:29.100 you listen to a straight guy who says who a smart, straight guy, I think I'm pretty smart here.

01:02:36.540 Who's been around the block and who can articulate how men actually do how we see ourselves. And I

01:02:44.480 realized that to, to make my point clear that men were not going to get that discussion from gender

01:02:51.520 studies. They weren't going to get, because those are all basically feminist studies and

01:02:56.200 feminist studies are very important. I'm certainly in favor of women defining women, but women defining

01:03:02.740 men is not going to get it right any more than their accusation was that men defining women wasn't

01:03:08.480 going to get it right. And they're probably right about that. So fine. They did it themselves. We now

01:03:13.220 have library shelves grown under, under feminist literature of women defining women. Let's have some

01:03:18.460 men defining men. So that was my starting point realizing that there was no essentially was no

01:03:25.500 correct description of what it's like to be a man in academic terms. I mean, we all kind of do it by,

01:03:33.680 I feel right, we grow up, we, I mean, I've had guys sit in my office and say, Oh, hey, sir, I have a,

01:03:42.320 I got a guy crush on somebody, you know, they all, like I say, they all love Gerard Butler,

01:03:46.280 we're, we're all about, you know, pecs and arms. You go through your guy crush phase, you,

01:03:54.100 you, you know, if you don't have a father at home, typically, it's the coach in a sport, if you're

01:03:59.720 lucky, you, you, you piece it together by by taking role models, but it's all, it's not an intellectual

01:04:07.640 process. And so that's my point that there's no theory of man. Okay, so what am I offering

01:04:14.400 in play to fill the void, right? That there's just nothing there. There's no, that's gender,

01:04:20.180 this is gender theories, missing piece. And I think that the center of my intuition was to realize that

01:04:27.640 men are, men are, men are okay. We, let's go to, let me use the sexual harassment, sexual assault

01:04:35.660 thing. The perception of people, of women looking at men from the outside is that we're big, hairy

01:04:41.980 brutes that will do absolutely anything. And we have to be squashed back into our box with these

01:04:47.700 draconian measures, you know, the, at Annapolis, it was the, the guys would sit in my office and,

01:04:53.180 and, you know, tell me about the, the training that they'd been subjected to where the, where

01:04:57.720 they, where they had to basically agree that gang rape was, was wrong. Excuse me? I mean,

01:05:03.220 I think they know that gang rape is wrong. That's not the kind of situation I'm interested in. What

01:05:08.260 I'm interested in is at a frat party, you know, the girls will get all, all dialed up and come to the

01:05:15.320 frat party and they have a, you know, they're, they have a skirt that's way too short and a blouse

01:05:20.500 that's, you know, way too low and they, they're all made up and they're all flirty. Does that mean

01:05:26.880 they want to have sex? No, but it means greater availability than a soberly dressed woman sitting

01:05:33.700 in a restaurant having dinner with her family. All right. So women have control over what signals

01:05:39.280 they send. If you don't, if you're not interested in sex, I'm not saying don't get all dialed up,

01:05:45.880 but, you know, be aware that if you go to a frat party looking like that, the guys are going to be

01:05:52.320 thinking certain things and they're going to try because their, their masculinity is on the line

01:05:56.660 for them. So if you, I guess it's justifiable that you get all dialed up and not really want to have,

01:06:04.240 you know, anything like that go on. It seems like an odd thing, but, uh, if that's the case,

01:06:11.060 then, you know, put on a, make the skirt shorter, make the skirt longer, put on a jacket and just

01:06:17.500 be more businesslike. I mean, give the right signals. Women have to be taught. Women have

01:06:22.240 some control over this because feminist theory with the sexual assault business is it's all the

01:06:27.160 men. It's all the men. The woman does nothing to invite it and the men are all just going to roll

01:06:32.820 her over. So I wrote a whole piece, um, for actually for a sociology journal that I incorporated

01:06:38.420 into the book that I just showed, um, that, uh, I invent, I think I invented anyway, the concept of

01:06:45.720 male, what I call no fly zones. And as in, we know who we're not supposed to come on to. Uh,

01:06:53.920 it's just the edges of the things that get a little dicey, like this girl, you know, we're 20,

01:06:59.780 I'm 20, she's 20. She's come to my frat party. She looks like that. We're closer to, to,

01:07:06.740 you know, does she really, does she want to sleep with me? Unclear, but it's giving more signals

01:07:11.960 that maybe, yes, that's, that's edging towards a fly zone, but we all, we all live in no fly zones.

01:07:19.220 I mean, I mean, to get gross, I have a mother, I have a daughter. I mean, I have work colleagues.

01:07:26.700 Those are all no fly zones. I'm perfectly well aware of those. So no, I am not as a male,

01:07:32.760 I am not ungovernable. I know what those are, but so what we have to tell men is to be aware of

01:07:40.720 getting towards the edges of these things. Um, and you know, you have to, there are gray areas

01:07:46.980 in a lot of things. I mean, I don't read a lot of the, a lot of the advice columnists in the

01:07:51.980 newspapers, but the ones that I do, they're almost invariably women, by the way, men, you know,

01:07:57.240 in the old days, the joke was that men would never ask for directions. Now that's not a factor.

01:08:01.120 You just look at your phone. Um, but you know, they'd be lost in the middle of nowhere with the

01:08:05.760 map out in front of them. And, you know, the wife would say, honey, don't you think the time

01:08:09.200 is coming? There's a gas station. Let's ask for directions. No, I'm going to get, I'm going to get

01:08:13.280 out of this. You know, we're going to, we're going to do this and so on. Um, that men, the agony,

01:08:20.380 the Brits call them agony agencies, which I kind of like all these advice columns are from people

01:08:26.560 who are edging towards the gray area of all of our, all of our social conventions. It's like,

01:08:33.100 all of us know the things that are absolute knows. And we know the things that are probably knows.

01:08:38.960 Then there are things that in the non-sexual realm, it's like, oh, I know I should have written a thank

01:08:45.120 you note for a present, but now it's three, it's three months later. Should I still write the thank

01:08:49.660 you note? It's like, it's gotten gray, right? So you don't know. And the agony auntie always says,

01:08:54.880 yes, write the damn, write the damn note. But men can guide men about the gray area. I mean,

01:09:03.120 first of all, to make it clear to them that everybody has these no fly zones. So, you know,

01:09:08.260 gentlemen, and I assume a man talking to men, gentlemen, you are, you know, not out of control

01:09:13.560 thugs. We know that. Um, but you have to be aware of the following situations. Uh, and there are some

01:09:20.780 that are genuinely puzzling to younger guys, especially, I mean, everybody's focused on

01:09:24.640 colleges. When you get to be my age, you know what the rules are, right? You don't, you don't put your

01:09:30.820 hands in the wrong place and so on. But in college, I like the idea of, I like the idea of, of obviously

01:09:38.360 men teaching other men. That's what we're doing here. But I would like to get back to the other

01:09:42.060 solution that you had suggested. Uh, and then we'll wrap up for today.

01:09:46.140 Okay. The other solution is I think that we should turn them into centers. That's the,

01:09:51.520 the, the big picture thing. But the short version is I was invited some years ago to a lecture at,

01:09:57.700 uh, the Canadian service Academy. They only have one. It's a lot, all their services go to the same

01:10:03.800 one. They've rejiggered their system. They used to have a couple of smaller ones, but now they all go

01:10:08.720 to this, this one, the Royal Military College. And it's the, as a pressure situation, it is much more

01:10:15.980 livable than any of our service academies because, um, the students, they're, they're, they're not

01:10:21.880 patrolling the sex. Number one, the students can be married. Ours can't be married. So they think of

01:10:27.080 it as, you know, marriage is a hoot, but, um, you might agree with me. It's, you know, it's got,

01:10:33.560 it's, it's got its issues. I mean, it's not for the faint hearted. So all of our students think

01:10:38.260 marriage is great and they all get married. A huge proportion of them get married in the days

01:10:43.200 following graduation. And of course the divorce rate is exponential because they don't know what

01:10:47.840 they're doing. So they can be, they can be any age at the Canadian Royal Military College, um, as long

01:10:55.020 as they can, you know, do the pushups and stuff. Um, and there's no wall around it. They can live off

01:11:00.840 campus. They can, it's much more civilianized. So the girls, you know, they, they, there's a,

01:11:07.840 a panoply of uniforms anyway, because it's many services. Um, but, uh, you know, it's, it's just,

01:11:15.000 it's just much more relaxed. So we could institute those changes tomorrow. Um, you know, you just say,

01:11:21.740 okay, these, they no longer have the legal status of, of Navy, uh, midshipmen. They have the legal

01:11:28.340 status of ROTC students. They can come, they can go. I mean, logistical problems. It's like I say,

01:11:34.560 it's right in the center of Annapolis, Maryland. So where are they going to live? If they can live

01:11:38.300 off campus, the colleges solve that. Um, we, we've got to, if you want to keep them as undergraduate

01:11:44.320 institutions, which I don't think we should, because I think they're untenable for all the

01:11:48.700 reasons that, that, uh, I've, I've mentioned where they're, they're trying to, they're trying

01:11:53.140 to civilianize without civilianizing. So, uh, just loosen the reins, loosen the reins. Um,

01:12:00.020 so, but that's not, I don't see that happening because we have 20 years ago, I suggested that

01:12:07.340 what we needed as a president, it's called the superintendent. Now it's this admiral,

01:12:12.300 this female admiral who's just come in, but male admirals, they don't know squat about higher

01:12:17.120 education. They don't know what they're doing. They're three years away from retirement and all

01:12:21.700 they want is for the ship not to sink. So they're not going to change anything. They just want to

01:12:26.300 keep it. Don't rock the boat. So what I'd suggested was, uh, I even had a name to, to drop.

01:12:33.100 My wife went to an all, all women's college, Wellesley college outside of Boston. And the

01:12:37.760 president of Wellesley college was a woman named Nan Kahane who subsequently, subsequently became

01:12:42.520 the president of Duke. And she was one of the first women. Now they're all the Ivy's and Ivy

01:12:47.440 levels have, have women presidents. We saw that at the congressional hearings, but it was Nan Kahane.

01:12:52.660 And I said, I offered Nan Kahane, the moon, anything she asks for, get her to be the president.

01:12:58.660 And she would have, I imagined that she would have a military XO, typically a Navy captain.

01:13:05.260 And if there was something she didn't understand, she'd turn to the captain and say, captain, why,

01:13:09.380 why are they doing this? And if the answer wasn't to her satisfaction, she could dig a little deeper.

01:13:15.220 And maybe she could, maybe she could get rid of some of the rock. Maybe she could blow away some

01:13:20.000 of the dust and she wouldn't be beholden to, she wouldn't have graduated from there. She wouldn't

01:13:25.340 be beholden to the alumni, to the tradition. So that's what we're doing. They're these, these empty

01:13:30.460 vessels of, they claim we're keeping traditions up, but they're actually nothing like what they used

01:13:35.560 to be. So, well, how do we, Houston, we have a problem. How do we learn more about what you wrote in

01:13:40.140 the book, the solutions? Where do we get a copy of the book and learn more about what you're doing?

01:13:44.240 Well, it's, it's published by Post Hill Press, which is Nashville and New York, but it's

01:13:49.440 distributed by Random House. So it's everywhere. It's going to be in books. It is in bookstore.

01:13:54.260 It came out on Tuesday, the 9th. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, any of your, your ordering sources.

01:14:01.760 The other book that I mentioned, The Masculinity from the Inside, unfortunately, you just, just

01:14:07.520 Google the title. Unfortunately, it's going to cost a little bit, but maybe you can get it

01:14:12.840 from your library. So I, you know, love to have interactions with people who, who read

01:14:18.300 them and, and who have something to say. Great. We'll sync everything up. I really

01:14:22.020 appreciate your work and exposing some of this because that needs to be addressed. So I appreciate

01:14:26.960 the work that you're doing and anxious to get this information to the guys. Thanks for joining

01:14:30.480 us today. Okay. I appreciate it. Take care. Bye.

01:14:33.360 Gentlemen, there you go. My conversation with the one and only Bruce Fleming. I hope you enjoyed that

01:14:39.400 one. Obviously really informative, ton of good information in there about how we're going to

01:14:43.760 save our service academies and why it's even so important. And what is the battle? What are we

01:14:48.780 actually fighting against? So I hope that that gave you some information to consider. And this is

01:14:54.640 crucial. I mean, our job is to protect, provide, and preside as I often talk about and have been

01:14:58.660 talking about for almost nine years now. And part of that is making sure that we have a military

01:15:03.380 fighting force that's ready and able to defend our citizens in this country. So this is an important

01:15:10.140 part of that is how they're getting taught and educated and why it's so crucial to discuss.

01:15:14.560 Also guys, we have our events coming up. So go to order of man.com and check out those events.

01:15:18.540 And the last thing I'll tell you again today is my good friends over at Montana knife company.com.

01:15:24.020 If you end up picking up anything over there, use the code order of man at checkout.

01:15:28.660 All right, gentlemen, those are your marching orders. We will be back tomorrow for our ask

01:15:33.280 me anything until then go out there, take action and become a man. You are meant to be.

01:15:39.100 Thank you for listening to the order of man podcast. You're ready to take charge of your

01:15:43.380 life and be more of the man you were meant to be. We invite you to join the order at order of man.com.

Order of Man - January 16, 2024

BRUCE FLEMING ｜ Saving Our Service Academies

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