Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier, the former commander of the 11th Space Warning Squadron at Buckley Air Force Base, was fired in 2021 after self-publishing a book about the rise of critical race theory in the military bureaucracy.
(LifeSiteNews) — A longtime military commander ousted from the U.S. Space Force in 2021 for criticizing the spread of woke ideology in America’s armed forces is speaking out again, sharing the details of his experience with Fox News and calling for new leadership for the nation’s defenders.
Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier, the former commander of the 11th Space Warning Squadron at Buckley Air Force Base, was fired in 2021 after self-publishing a book titled Irresistible Revolution: Marxism’s Goal of Conquest & the Unmaking of the American Military. In an interview at the time, he discussed the spread of critical race theory (CRT, the “view that the law and legal institutions are inherently racist and that race itself… is used by white people to further their economic and political interests at the expense of people of colour”) within the military through so-called “diversity and inclusion” programs.
In response, Space Operations Command head Lt. Gen. Stephen Whiting relieved Lohmeier from his position over an alleged loss of confidence in his leadership ability and opened an investigation into whether Lohmeier’s comments qualified as “prohibited partisan political activity.”
“There was a whole string of events that did lead up to my being relieved of command,” the lieutenant colonel told Fox in a new interview published Friday. “The ultimate reason was because I was willing to be publicly critical of critical race theory, which I understood to be rooted in Marxist ideology… that I saw dividing the troops (…) I wasn’t advocating for Republicans over Democrats, and I’m conservative myself. But it didn’t matter to me. And it’s never mattered to our troops what someone else’s politics were.”
Since his firing, which came with the “gut punch” of losing his pension, Lohmeier has remained committed to exposing and uprooting the ideological priorities that have infected the military.
“You give your life and service to your country and the American people, and you’re not doing it for the pay,” he said. “You’re doing it because you become (convinced) of the greatness of the American ideal. And … senior leaders (then) say, ‘We want you out of the way because your view is not welcome here,’ even as they pretend to care about inclusivity, even as they pretend to care about diversity, (but) not diversity of thought.”
“We need to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion trainings from the military, from the service academies, and strip all vestiges of critical race theory out of the military workplace,” Lohmeier declared.
The steady rise of “woke” ideology within the military, which has persisted and grown since the Clinton years despite the presidencies of Republicans George W. Bush and Donald Trump, has been intensified by current President Joe Biden, who upon taking office quickly moved to open the military to recruits suffering from gender dysphoria in a reversal of Trump administration policy, then had Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin launch a review of supposed “domestic extremism” within the military that many saw as a pretext to purge conservative views from the ranks.
In March 2023, the Center for Military Readiness (CMR) published an update on the administration’s work to infuse the armed forces with left-wing gender ideology, ranging from enforcement of preferred pronouns to allowing cross-dressing and the use of opposite-sex showers and restrooms on military bases to making it harder to access information on the negative consequences of such policies. Last November, the Pentagon requested an additional $114.7 million for diversity programs in the upcoming fiscal year, representing a total of $269.2 million in taxpayer dollars just on military diversity since Biden took office.
Until December 2022, Biden’s Pentagon leaders also enforced COVID-19 vaccine mandates on American service men and women, provoking lawsuits and threatening soldier and pilot shortages in the tens of thousands, which only added to broader problems of force strength, troop morale, and public confidence.
Such priorities have taken their toll. During a Pentagon press briefing in April 2022 on the Army’s budget for Fiscal Year 2023, Under Secretary of the Army Gabe Camarillo announced the Army had “proactively made a decision to temporarily reduce our end strength from 485,000 Soldiers to 476,000 in FY ’22, and 473,000 in FY ’23.” the Military Times reported at the time that this “could leave the service at its smallest size since 1940, when it had just over 269,000 troops.”
Gallup and Ronald Reagan Institute polls have both shown that the public has lost confidence in the military’s leaders, which presumably also has a significant effect on prospective soldiers’ willingness to sign up.
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