Naval War College: A Gender Studies N-Code for Everyone!
...who doesn't need a little Oberlin College Gender Studies Dept. to win our nation's wars?
How should we end 2024? For a whole host of reasons, 2024 is the end of a certain period in our nation’s socio-political history. We all know it, but see it a little differently.
I was looking around for something that would put a marker down, and I think I found it.
If not an iron-law, perhaps an aluminum-law, is that once the government creates a program by law, it is almost impossible to get rid of it. Over time, they can be rather quaint, expensive and wasteful—if not self-spoofing—but quaint. Remember the National Wool Act in 1954?
During World War II and the Korean conflict, the United States imported half the wool required for military uniforms. Determined to reduce dependence on foreign fibers and to insulate American producers from foreign competition, Congress declared wool a strategic material and enacted the National Wool Act in 1954. The Act was designed to increase domestic production of wool by providing direct payments to farmers based on a percentage of their market sales. In other words, the more wool farmers produced, the more federal funding they received.
Wool was removed from the Pentagon's strategic materials list in 1960. However, the Act remains in effect … wool program subsidies will cost an estimated $923 million over the 1994-98 period. About one-third of the payments will go to ranchers who raise Angora goats for mohair.( Although mohair never had strategic value, it was included in the 1954 Act as an offshoot of the wool industry.
…and that was in mid-1990s dollars, not the well-diluted fiat currency at the end of 2024.
It wasn’t repealed until 1995. It has a 41-year run.
…and that is where we kick off the last post of the year, an example of an archaic, quaint program voted in to law that we just have to deal with until sane minds prevail by either starving it my neglect, or repealing when the moment is ripe.
So, let’s roll back the CD-ROM to those cringly years as 4th Wave Feminism took over from 3rd Wave Feminism in the frothy days after Obamaesque Lean-In Circles took root in The Pentagon and had a bit of wind at its back.
For the new readers, are you familiar with the US Naval War College’s 'Women, Peace, and Security' symposiums/conferences (they can’t decide what to call it. They use both terms)?
If not, click here for a discussion from JAN 2024 of why it even exists, here for an overview of a previous conference in 2023, and here for the last conference in May of this year.
Well, like taxpayers paying for a <reviews the historical record because it is so funny> Strategic Mohair Reserve, so too well after its moment in time, a living anachronism doesn’t just continue, it seems to be metastasizing, creating little Gender Studies Departments throughout the US Navy and beyond. I’ll point a few out at the end of the post.
Well, the good folks over at NOVA Campaigns stole a march on my this year and posted about the 11th Annual Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) Symposium that was held a little under two weeks ago on December 16-17th, 2024 at the U.S. Naval War College. I’m glad they did, that is how I heard about it. I thought we had our “annual.” In addition to not deciding if they are having a symposium or a conference, it appears that if given the choice of calling something "biannual" and "semiannual" — they instead are calling it the incorrect “annual.” IDK, I just pay taxes.
Forgive me if I am a little perplexed, or perhaps pedantic, because if the 10th Annual Women, Peace, and Security Conference was held just seven months earlier on May 2-3rd, 2024, then how can you have another annual conference in the same year? Someone needs to explain this to me in comments like I am a young child, or a golden retriever.
The people who run the WPS symposium/conference either were too rushed to put together a proper POA&M with an easily accessible conference schedule of events and an earlier call for papers as they did before, or they decided to make things a bit harder for ‘ole Sal this year/biannual/semiannual. I still cannot find online a schedule for the DEC 2024 biannual/semiannual/annual symposium/conference. All you can download is the banner, which I appreciate as it gave me a graphic to use today. I think that is supposed to be an origami dove. I just a “Man, War, & Anarchy” guy, so maybe I’m wrong.
Lucky for us though, they do have most of the presentations and panels on YouTube that we’ll post our Salamander Shortlist pair for you later downpost. You paid for it, might as well, but let’s pull a screenshot from the good people from NOVA who reminded us of what happened.
What is so lovely here is that it captures perfectly what WTS is all about at the end of 2024. It is about what their co-confessionals in the Diversity Industry are all about; finding jobs for otherwise highly credentialed but unemployable people in the productive economy and increasing their unearned bureaucratic power.
This is from, really…I can’t make this up, from the Maritime Security Panel.
Of course, more acronyms and more SES. So, to add to the LEGAD (Legal Advisor) and POLAD (Political Advisor) civilian positions, we now want a GENAD (Gender Advisor).
This is when I realized this could be a socio-political marker of sorts. How is a Trump Administration going to look at expending more manpower (if we can still use that term) and money on 'Gender Advisors?’
As for the slide below, I’m just adding it for three reasons:
LOL the typo in the title.
Yes, please brief President Trump that the Navy’s #1 challenge is “insufficient gender experts.”
Yes, yes, of course. The first mission is to support and grow the cadre. There are a lot of people out there who are otherwise unemployable with their PhDs in left handed Lithuanian lapdancing and bisexuality in the Cold War that need jobs too. H1B visas are not going to help here.
While there is a lot to see, I want to narrow down to at least two panel discussions for you to review. Behold this sample from the US Naval War College's 2024 Women Peace and Security Symposium:
1. Art of Filmmaking and Women's Agency:
2. Cultivating Allyship in Defense and Security Sectors:
Same vibes…
I wanted to highlight one of the panel members in the video above. I’m not going to call her out by name, you can quickly figure that out on your own. The story isn’t about her, she is well inside the standard academic Marxist-tinged worldview that is so common. No, this is about the Naval War College and the Navy itself.
As I outline a few things to you below, I want you to picture someone who would be her mirror image on the right. Would anyone like that ever be invited onto a naval academy panel…with others in the same socio-political quadrant…as part of a two-day conference where everyone is in that same political quadrant…totally without balance?
No way.
Here she is in an abstract from a 2017 paper she co-authored.
From Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, to the horrors of Aleppo and the global migrant crisis, 2016 was a year that seemingly hardened the global colour line. In the United States, the Black Lives Matter movement struggled against domestic racism and police brutality, punctuating the myth of a post-racial and colour blind America. In the Mediterranean, migrant deaths hit a record high as Europe increasingly slammed its door shut. In Cape Town and Oxford, students called for a decolonisation of the university campus and curriculum, as well as the immediate removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes. In the field of International Relations (IR), these events took place within the context of a growing conversation on the role of race and racism in the constitution of world politics. ... Where is race in IR theory and why is it so rarely addressed? How do racial differences, cultivated by transatlantic slavery, colonial conquest, and genocide, continue to inform debates on democracy, good governance, military intervention, and liberal empire? How can studying the practices of anti-colonial revolutions, feminist struggles, and anti-racist social movements in different sites of resistance help inform, interrupt, or destabilise the discipline of IR? By asking these and similar questions, the Millennium Conference sought to open up new and creative ground for scholarship that takes seriously the many afterlives of historical and ongoing colonialism.The articles in this special issue offer tentative answers: Examining the many racialized realities in world politics, they highlight and probe a variety of problematiques, ranging from racism in the theory canon and pop culture, to the racial origins of modern finance, the displacement of religion in critiques of Eurocentrism, the politics of whiteness in the settler colonial city, and the possibility of a decolonial IR."
She’s a fellow traveler in various foundations and non-profits of the hard international left, with a focus on gender issues, unsurprisingly. One of the foundations she worked for tickled my brain a bit and then I remember that its founder was a fellow traveller with communist and communist adjacent operators during the height of the Cold War in the 80s. I know those people. Ahem.
Nothing wrong with these fields of study in a free society…but, again, is any comparable figure on the right being invited to speak in Newport?
I could do a post a day on these panels, but I would not do my readers justice if I didn’t point out one more. Remember the summary of the symposium/conference from May of this year? No mention of the events of October 7th, 2023.
I looked for it to be mentioned during this conference, but I could not find it. Even where I would have expected to find it, the 53 minute long Elective Panel 2B –Gender Based Violence, there was no mention of the most extreme example of “Gender Based Violence” we have seen in the last few years, the wholesale rape, torturing of children, and direct targeting of civilians in the attack on Israel on October 7th, 2023. No mention of Israel, October…nothing. As if it didn’t exist. “Gaza” was mentioned…alluded to as victims and not perpetrators. Simply amazing.
There is a pattern at NWC that I wrote about in the months after the October 7th pogroms. Give it a read.
Three opportunities to tell the story of that nightmarish day, and they give it a pass. This is just another example of what is hopefully clear to any objective observer, the US Naval War College has a radical left problem that is a lot more serious than a quaint feminist legacy. Such a clear pattern of ignoring such a well-documented and widespread rape, murder, torture and ongoing kidnapping against Israel, with scores of American citizens, signals either a fear of Palestinian activists at best, or a latent Jew-hate at worst. Perhaps it is an intersection of both.
Yes, I could/should have said “anti-Israel” or “anti-Zionist” but let’s speak to each other as adults. Jew-hate=anti-Israel=anti-Zionist.
The argument could be made that it isn’t just NWC that has a problem of institutional capture from the left, I assume everyone here is up to speed on why this year’s Bancroft Lecture was indefinitely postponed?
So, time to wind this up.
I’m still perplexed why NWC would have two WPS symposiums/conferences 7 months apart.
There are two reasons I can see for this. Offer up other options in the comments, ranked in increasing likelihood of being accurate:
Is this SECNAV Del Toro’s swan song? I hope not. He deserves better.
With the second Trump Administration about to cross the military-left’s T like Oldendor’s Task Group 77.2 at Surigao Strait, they’re going to party like it’s 1999.
What an embarrassment. The world is in flames, our fleet is shrinking after falling to #2, what we have isn’t being maintained, we are expending more weapons than we are expending against non-state actors, our cruisers are trying to shoot down our buddy-tanking Super Hornets…yet here we are - storing mohair in caves after the end of the Cold War.
Pray for peace.
I have two sidebars I’d like to end up the post with. Yes, I know this is too long anyway, but thanks for sticking with me.
Uniforms. In the name of all that is holy. I noticed it while watching the panel discussions, and then when reviewing the DVIDS page of the event—is it now standard practice at US Naval War College symposiums/conferences for people on active duty NOT TO BE IN THE UNIFORM OF THE DAY? Really?
Did you know that WPS is not content to take up billets, TAD funds, and conference space in Newport? Goodness no. In a quick scan I can see that there are offices in at least NORTHCOM, SOUTHCOM, INDOPACOM, CENTCOM, and probably more? We even have the Tennessee National Guard flying all the way over to Bulgaria to hold WPS conferences? While is was encouraged and promoted by (D), don’t forget that in a legal sense, WPS and all that followed was all kicked off by a (R) House, (R) Senate, and (R) CINC in 2017. It has metastasized and will continue to grow until some sanity gets in place. The law does not mandate that everyone gets a WPS office and a gender advisor, but that is the direction they are going...and they left is succeeding. No one is fighting this.
Pray for peace.
UPDATE: It goes without saying that CDR Salamander has the absolute best followers. We now have the program that includes bios and hyperlinks.
You can find it here, but in case that link fails, I have it on Scribd here or you can download it below.
As you read it, I want you to start adding up all the TAD and travel money involved for everyone involved…not to mention the two lost workdays.
DOGE, call your office.
There is a whole lot to chew on, but I’d like to draw your attention to Day-2 of the conference in room 114 of Hewitt Hall. Writers’ Workshop: “Framing WPS through a National Security Perspective”:
One of the articles referenced is: Everyone Should Care: A Reintroduction of Women, Peace, and Security Framework to Conservatives, and the Like by Dr. Magdalena Bogacz, U.S. Space Force / Johns Hopkins University and Mr. Jacob F. Lanier, California State University, Bakersfield.
At the link it quotes:
Since its inception, WPS faces a recognizable degree of resistance on the implementation level. We believe that WPS faces defiance in part due to misunderstanding of what the framework is and in part due to conservative suspicion about WPS through this critical misinterpretation. Although empirical link between gender equality, peace, and security is well established, we offer another, deeply philosophical and conservative argument for WPS support. Our paper draws on the philosophies of the late British conservative, Sir Roger Scruton. Namely, if what Scruton explains about the nature of the subject-object relationship is true, then the treatment of women as mere objects of war not only violates women’s ontological status as person-subjects, but it betrays the duties afforded to members of a free society by the conservative ideal of “a love of home” or, as Scruton calls it, oikophilia.
OK, first of all…could there be a more partisan statement at a Naval War College than this? If it were part of a debate, then I’d have no problem with it, but there is not debate here. Everything is on the left side of the spectrum. If she is going to quote the great Sir Roger Scruton (BTW, I highly recommend a visit to the Scruton Cafe in Budapest for a coffee), then do it accurately, or better yet have a right of center Scruton scholar debate it with you.
If they are going to mention oikophilia, then let’s give it a proper brief:
Oikophilia leans naturally in the direction of history and the conservation of the past: not from nostalgia, but from a desire to live as an enduring consciousness among things that endure. The true spirit of conservation sees the past not as a commercialized “heritage,” but as a living inheritance, something that lasts because it lives in me. To exist fully in time is to be aware of loss and to be working always to repair it. It is to listen as “Footfalls echo in the memory / Down the passage which we did not take / Towards the door we never opened / Into the rose garden.” The past lives in us as a place of untaken pathways, of decisions and commitments, and it is by experiencing the world thus that we acquire the sense of stewardship. We come to see that this present moment is also past, but the past of someone else, who has yet to be
I’m sorry…but you have oikophilia completely wrong…but that’s not unexpected. As the great Iowahawk reminds us about the left,
Sorry, you can’t have Scruton. He’s ours.
On an even more serious note, there were two events in the McCarty Little Auditorium.
With all the foreign nationals given free range during the conference and everyone wearing civilian attire for some reason best known to Oberlin educated people, we should look at what McCarty Little Hall is.
That is the home of the Wargaming Department. It is a 110,000 square foot war gaming facility which opened in 1999. The building is named after Captain William McCarty Little, who was instrumental in the introduction and development of war gaming techniques at the Naval War College dating back to 1887. The building boasts a 180 seat auditorium, a television studio, conference facilities, ample office and classroom space, and 25 reconfigurable gaming cells.
The auditorium is equipped with high definition projectors, video teleconferencing capability, and a large floor that can double as an additional game cell or can hold a 25 foot by 40 foot map to conduct a Rehearsal of Concept Drill. The gaming cells can host over 400 computer stations that can be linked to one of four self contained networks. The gaming cells also have the capability to broadcast video teleconferences throughout the facility or externally to a worldwide audience. All gaming cells are capable of being secured during classified events. The Joint Command Center is the largest of the game cells and can host over 100 stations and contains a state of the art multifaceted projection system. It is home to majority of USN wargaming capabilities, as well as Newport's ONI Detachment.
SIPR, JWICS, Tandbergs, all manner of classified capabilities are there.
Why use that? Could it be a simple flex in inbue the socio-political, cultural-Marxist WPS program with suggested prestige and seriousness that comes with the impressive modern facilities?
I don’t know.
Well, that is a long enough update to an already long Substack. I hope everyone has a safe and fun New Years Eve.
As a 2X NWC grad ('73 and '84) I can only say (as we do down South) "Sweet Jesus". Hopefully the incoming Administration will uproot this crap and defenestrate those inflicting it upon our Navy who are inhabiting Semmes Hall and other NWC buildings soonest.
For reference, I grew up 5 minutes from Gate 10, Granddad was an eye surgeon on the base, Dad engineered torpedoes, had special privileges as a senior in HS to attend selected NWC lectures, son USNA 2013 grad. & Major in the USMC and I am now retired Blue & Gold Officer and devoted to our Navy. I am horrified to read this post. This Marxist woke gender efforts must be destroyed root and branch or soon enough these active participants will no know the difference between Port & Starboard. Pray for Trump and his SECDEF to spike this ideology immediately.