The Military and the Press: Two Centuries of Push–Pull

Ok guys, I see a lot of press hysteria about the new Pentagon rules. I’m going to lay out the history for you, objectively.

From 1812 to now, here’s how military reporting in America has actually evolved: when access expanded, when it tightened, and why.

This isn’t designed to generate rage. It’s to help everyone (especially the media) see the pattern. It’s an ebb and flow that’s been part of American history for over 200 years.

Strap in. It’s a long one. But I think it explains how we got here. 🧵 1) Overview

People keep saying new Pentagon press rules are “unprecedented” and “anti-First Amendment.”

History says otherwise.

America’s default is a free press—but access to military spaces and operations has always been managed. Let’s walk the 200-year arc.

🧵When the Game Breaks: Why "Defection" Destroys Neutrality in the Military

I get a lot of grief on my takes these days. After talking with @LibertySuperman today, I found some inspiration in trying to explain the problem.

He will deep dive it soon. But this is important. 👇 1/
The military is meant to be apolitical. That was the status quo: both sides cooperated by keeping partisan politics out of the ranks. It wasn’t perfect, but the trust held. That is, until defection toward ideology occurred.

🧵The Evolution of Post-War Military Promotions🧵

I get a lot of questions asking what happened to the great leaders of the Second World War.

Because the machine always resets to comfort.

George Marshall’s purge of deadweight colonels and generals was a wartime anomaly, a moment when the brutal clarity of existential war forced the Army to prioritize combat effectiveness over seniority, connections, or credentials.

But after the war, peacetime priorities crept back in like rot through a cracked hull.

Here’s why Marshall’s system faded, and how we ended up with the mess we have today:👇 🕊️ 1. Victory Bred Complacency
After WWII, the U.S. emerged as the undisputed superpower. That success, ironically, planted the seed of decline.

The Army no longer had to be ruthless, there was no imminent threat to force hard choices.

Promotions reverted to being based on time in grade, politics, and who checked the right boxes.

The institutional attitude shifted from:
“Who can win the next war?” to “Who deserves their turn?”

🧵 We Need A New Census

What keeps me up at night isn’t politics. It’s preventing American bloodshed. And I believe we’re getting dangerously close.

This post will be controversial. But if we care about preserving the fabric of our Republic, we need to act.👇 1.
The U.S. Constitution says we must count the “whole number of persons” every ten years for congressional representation.

But that word "persons" has a dark origin.

It wasn’t about fairness. It was about slavery.

Nah, you guys know what? I’m just gonna come out and say it. And when I’m done saying it, tell me if it’s “blatant Islamophobia” or just…. you know… reality.

Let me explain to you some of the things I witnessed with my very own eyes in multiple Muslim countries. This will not be for the weak or faint of heart.

1. They didn’t just massacre one another in Baghdad, they chopped each other up into little pieces and stuffed them in underground vats. SPC Plocica was the only one with a strong enough stomach to fish the pieces out with a coat hanger so we could confirm the report. Don’t worry @Primz94933160 was there too as a witness. Rib cages with rotted flesh, pieces of legs with shoes attached, arms, hands, you name it. It was the most disgusting thing I’ve seen with my two eyes.

2. The obsession with having sex with children or feminine men. The saying over there was women are for breeding and men are for fun. We had to protect our fairer looking male Soldiers from being molested CONSTANTLY. But that isn’t the worst part. I once stumbled upon an Afghan colonel r*ping his 11 year old assistant, I heard the unholy noises emanating from his tent on our FOB. When I moved to interdict I was stopped for fear of a Green on Blue incident. And then we were all “educated” on the fact that this was CULTURALLY ACCEPTABLE FOR THEM TO DO. It was as normal as breathing.

3. Women are less than nothing to them. I would always ask how many children elders had for small talk. They could have 10 kids. 7 daughters and 3 sons. What will they tell you? They have 3 sons. I watched a man carrying his dead daughter in his arms to my FOB. She died due to a malfunctioned bomb we dropped. That didn’t matter to him. He dropped her on the ground with a stone cold face and demanded we pay him. She was f*****g NOTHING to him. He left the body with us and walked away counting his money.

4. Some of them have sex with animals. Ask me if I saw a man from COP 763 in east Baghdad mount a donkey in the middle of the night through a RAID FLIR camera. Because the answer will be yes.

5. They did heinous things in battle. Suicide bombings. Using their own wives as human shields. Using children as shields. Shooting from mosques. Spitting at our working dogs… or worse.

This all sounds crazy right? And I bet my comment section will flow with similar horror stories. It almost sounds like I’m making it up huh? I wish I was. I really do.

I know good Muslims in America. One of them is among my closest friends. But he’s passed through the American filter…HEAVILY. I can safely say he is literally one of us.

My question for you is, how are you not “Islamophobic”? My assessment comes from 4 total years immersed in multiple Islamic nations.

I wish I could say I’m sorry that I’m an inconvenient truth teller against your agenda.

But I’m not sorry at all. You must open your eyes. You MUST see this is a problem. Don’t you? How can you not? I’m barely interested in this “Zohran” person, that’s for NY to figure out. I do however take issue with being labeled “Islamophobic” lazily and without context.

And I just gave you the context. It is informed with experience.

You know what I find interesting?

During the GWOT surge, I had violent criminals in my formation I couldn’t get rid of. One failed five urinalyses with different substances. Took moving mountains to chapter him.

Fast forward to 2025: We have non-criminals begging to stay. Just asking for a clean record to keep serving.

And yet, I don’t know a single troop personally who’s been granted relief by @DoD_IG or BCMR.

Not one. Do you? I'm sure they exist, I just don't know any.

Am I just surrounded by an evil gang of undeserving service members? Possible. But not probable.

@DoD_USD_PR , listen: This position is untenable. And it will get worse. What happens when the suicide stories come out publicly? The ones where legitimately innocent people just....end it? Leaving behind families in the process.

Troops desperate to restore their honor, provide for their families, and they see no path forward except the business end of a rifle?

You already have the path to fix it. I’ve laid it out. Again, you didn't start this, but you can finish it.

But right now? The BCMR is trivializing the momentous, complicating the obvious, and torching warfighter trust in the process. I'm really not trying to wear a tinfoil hat here. But if I didn't know any better, I'd think the BCMR is sabotaging the agenda of the Secretary of Defense.

⚔️We Used to Own the Last 100 Yards🧵

I recently dug into how we train our Infantry officers today. What I found shocked me.

Like many, my first instinct was to blame the schoolhouse. To point a finger at Fort Benning and the Infantry commandants of years past. My mind went to the Infantry Museum and its proud centerpiece, the exhibit that says we “Own the Last 100 Yards.”

But in that moment of frustration, I found myself wanting to change it. Maybe it should say:

“We once owned the last 100 yards.” Or: “We mostly own the last 100 yards under specific conditions.”

Because here's the truth: There is virtually no hand to hand training in the Infantry Basic Officer Leader Course today.

No bayonet assault course. No combatives. No night live fire. No platoon live fire. More classroom instruction. No grit building exercises. The very tools and mindset that once defined our close combat dominance are gone.

That hit me hard. Especially because I personally fought to bring the bayonet back in 2018. I saw what it did for morale, mindset, and confidence. And now, it's gone again. Quietly rescinded.

So yes, technically, we own the last 100 yards. As long as our weapons work. As long as they don’t jam. As long as we have ammo. But take any of that away? And what then?

Do you see the problem?

But then I paused, and looked deeper. I put myself in the shoes of the schoolhouse. I remembered something far bigger than any one policy or doctrine.
Manning. That’s the issue.

We’re not training warriors with no hand-to-hand because we don’t believe in it. We’re doing it because we don’t have the people to teach it. We are not manned to build the kind of Soldiers we say we want.
And that’s when everything clicked.

🧠 The Warrior Mindset: More Than Metrics

I’ve always believed that the warrior mindset is more important than any single task. You can teach tasks to someone who wants to win. You cannot teach grit to someone trained only to pass a slide deck evaluation.

The problem? Warrior spirit can’t be measured in classroom instruction.

But here’s what I argue now: Yes, you can measure it, just not immediately. You have to take the leap of faith first. Build the mindset first. Then measure outcomes:

Rifle qualification improves.
Stress shoot performance improves.
Confidence surges.
Retention rises.
Units begin to feel like units again.

We’ve forgotten that in today’s Army. In our obsession with clean metrics, we’ve lost our edge.

🪖 The Marine Corps Didn’t Forget. Take one look at the those grunts.

They still teach combatives.
They still train bayonets.
They still treat close combat as sacred.

And their Infantry Officer Course is by many accounts the finest in the world.

So what’s happening to the Army? My theory is simple:

We stopped believing in the fight. We started optimizing for safety, throughput, and bureaucratic convenience. We stopped investing in the human weapon, and started riding our best people into the ground, then wondering why quality slipped.

But this can be fixed. And it starts with manning from the @USArmy and equipping @TRADOC properly.

This post is designed to inform leaders who can make change at the highest levels: @SecDef @SecArmy @stuartscheller 👇 1/
We’re scaling back deployments.

We’re not sending brigade after brigade to fight endless wars anymore.

That means training is now our main effort.

There’s no excuse for sending unprepared Soldiers to the line. If we fail in TRADOC, we fail in combat.

Every gap in training becomes a weakness in the fight.

.@SecDef @PeteHegseth You and I are Infantrymen. We were trained for one thing only: to close with and destroy the enemy. Every mission we ever cared about started the same way: looking outside the wire, scanning for threats beyond the perimeter, rifles up, boots tight.

But what if the enemy is already inside the perimeter? What about our most vulnerable dead space? Not low ground in front of us on a range card, the dead space BEHIND us.

There is rot inside the Department of Defense health apparatus. Not theoretical. Not symbolic. Real rot. The systems you are relying on to assess force medical readiness are compromised. The data is either intentionally manipulated or catastrophically mishandled. Either way, it is failing you. It is failing commanders. It is failing the warfighter.

If we keep deploying troops based on false metrics and corrupted data, we are potentially sending the force into battles they are not medically ready to fight. Some will die. Some already have.

This demands a violent break from convention.

Promote Lieutenant Colonel Theresa Long to Lieutenant General. Assign her as Director of the Defense Health Agency. Not next year. Not after a study. Now.

Yes, O5 to O9. And yes, it can be done. Under national emergency powers, you can promote her under Title 10 emergency authority to a critical billet in a time of national crisis. The same way Roosevelt bypassed normal channels and made civilian (William Knudsen) a three-star general overnight in 1940 to run war production. Roosevelt did it to cut through the red tape and win a war.

You are fighting a war inside the building. A knife fight in a phone booth.

You need to arm people who will not flinch. LTC Long is that warrior. Her voice has been unrelenting. Her documentation, public. Her sacrifice, unmatched. She fought for the health of the force when it was politically toxic to do so. She never wavered. Not once.

Her health is not perfect, but her mind is sharp. She’s threadbare in the same way warriors get threadbare. In the words of Johnny Cash: she is in good shape for the shape she is in. And she has already walked through fire before, and she can take a whole lot more.

She is thirty days from retirement. Without your intervention, she will be gone. And that will make the right people very happy. The same people who silenced her. The same people who buried the data.
I implore you: Do not let that happen.

Even if you cannot promote her immediately, task her out of her current command. Assign her to the Army Combat Readiness Center or the Aeromedical Research Lab at Fort Novosel. Give her the space to do what she was born to do: protect the force.

You already know the rot at the top. What you need now is what I call a "Reform Roomba". A relentless agent that moves through the halls and corners of the system, vacuuming up the mess no one else wants to touch. LTC Long will be that.

I have wrestled with this for weeks. I cannot think of another officer in the entire force with clarity, guts, and moral gravity to shake the system the way it needs to be shaken.

This will send shockwaves across the ranks. The right kind. It is the most outlandish and sensational recommendation I have ever come up with. But in these unprecedented times, I pray you take it seriously.

I humbly request you get her in the fight. Details on how to do this are below. And prepared for legal scrutiny.👇
You can still move LTC Theresa Long into the fight and promote her to LTG, but her command won’t endorse her retirement withdrawal. You’ll need to override it.

Here’s how:

Step One – Override retirement block
Her chain of command wants her gone. You need SECARMY or a 4-star to intervene. Under 10 USC § 7013, the Secretary of the Army can halt her retirement and reassign her directly. This is a national mission. Use “needs of the Army” authority to keep her in uniform.

Step Two – Reassign her immediately
Assign her to Fort Novosel’s CRC or Aeromedical Research Lab. Task her under OSD or DHA to audit and reform medical surveillance systems. Authority: 10 USC § 7013(g)(1).

Step Three – Give her operational authority
Assign her to a billet normally held by a general officer. Give her acting authority to lead reforms in DMED, DMSS, and force health integrity.

Step Four – Promote her
Initiate a Presidential nomination for LTG under 10 USC § 601. For temporary appointment, use 10 USC § 603 during a declared emergency. COVID emergency powers and 50 USC § 1631 still provide legal justification.

Step Five – Use Roosevelt’s precedent
FDR gave civilian William Knudsen 3-star rank overnight to fix war production.

🚨 SAMS: Has it Helped or Hurt the Army? 🚨

SAMS graduates returning to battalion level are like master chess players dropped into a street fight. They’re so busy calculating fifteen moves ahead that they forget to throw a punch when it matters.

We have to ask the questions👇 1/ What is SAMS?

SAMS (School of Advanced Military Studies) is an elite, year-long Army program that creates highly trained planners. It was founded in 1983 to improve operational-level thinking, especially after failures in Vietnam.

How to Remove the Generals: A 2025 "Louisiana Maneuvers" 🧵

If @SecDef is having trouble getting public support for removing generals, I'll give him a technique even his opponents can't argue with.

Do you want to silence all of the critics? Let's see if they can win or lose.👇
1/ The U.S. military is led by risk-averse careerists who can’t win wars. They rose through a broken system that rewards politics over warfighting.

We don’t need a political purge—we need a combat effectiveness purge.

Here’s how we do it. ⬇️

1/ I’m choosing violence against the ridiculous lawfare in the military. There will be no quarter here. This is the story of how CW3 Brandon Budge was railroaded by his chain of command over COVID—and I have his permission to tell it.

CW3 Budge is a Black Hawk pilot with years of experience. He was so good at his job that he was selected for and put on the 2021 CW4 promotion list, that’s when all of this went down—a promotion that was pretty important for a guy with, you know, a wife and SEVEN KIDS. Too bad they yanked the promotion from him over this.

Initially, CW3 Budge was hesitant and vocalized his hesitancy to get the jab. His chain of command threatened him. One commander even went so far as to say he would make sure Brandon never flew again, in or out of uniform. He was also told he would not be allowed to be present for the birth of he and his wife’s youngest son.

Because of the threats he ultimately chose to get the shot—but still received a permanent reprimand from a general.

His crime? Get ready for this: HE GOT THE JAB AT A WALGREENS. MEANWHILE, AN ARMY MEDICAL PROFESSIONAL (MEDIC) INCORRECTLY RECORDED A SHOT IN HIS MEDICAL RECORDS. That same “professional” was caught falsifying data for multiple Soldiers and was kicked out of the Army. The general didn’t care, though—he still wanted Budge punished.

Once the chain of command discovered the discrepancy, they threw the book at him. Why? Because they could. He was an outspoken critic and labeled a “bad apple” in the unit. Generals have near-total power to issue administrative punishments—no court-martial, murky due process, just career-ending paperwork.

And here’s the kicker: his reprimand literally stated, “While you did not direct or ask for the falsification, you were complicit with the falsification by not correcting the data and allowing the Soldier to input false information into your medical record.” (Picture of the reprimand language below.)

It would be hilarious if it weren’t so tragic. CW3 Budge is now fighting for his career, trying to remove this unjust reprimand so that he can regain his promotion and his dignity. Even a member of the Chief of Staff of the Army’s front office thinks this is ridiculous.

HE GOT THE JAB AND STILL GOT PUNISHED. Cool military justice system we have, huh?

Share this so the @ArmyChiefStaff can see this and just use his power to yank this nonsense out of his file so he can keep serving. There are so many people like him in the same boat. Victims of lawfare for all kinds of reasons that make no sense.

Insiders: go ahead and pull his record. You'll quickly confirm the story.

@DOGE_DOD @DoD_USD_PR @USArmy @SecArmy @DODResponse @GenFlynn /2 Reprimand language👇

🚨The Military is Losing Its Discipline—And It’s Killing Lethality 🧵

Discipline translates into everything we do. Nothing matters without it.

With the new assessment programs for promotion and command weighing subordinate feedback heavily, it will only get worse.👇 1/ I grew up in the Army before 9/11, back when we wore BDUs.

Every day, I had to shine my boots and starch my uniform. If I didn’t, my leaders found ways to "correct" me the next morning.

My team leader inspected our uniform and appearance daily—the best and worst were called out in front of everyone. That attention to detail and competition bled into everything we did.

🚨 THREAD: The DoD’s bloated civilian and contractor workforce is crippling our military. Time for a 40% cut minimum. 🚨

This would save up to $116.9 BILLION annually, restore leadership accountability, and improve warfighting readiness.

Here’s why it must happen now. 🧵👇 1️⃣ The DoD’s civilian & contractor workforce is the largest in history.

For every 1 uniformed service member, there are 0.8 civilians or contractors.
🔹 1.325M Active Duty
🔹 700K DoD Civilians
🔹 972K DoD Contractors
TOTAL: 1.67M non-uniformed personnel supporting 2.125M uniformed troops.

1/ I'm choosing violence on the way we select leaders for command. Meet COL (retired) John Bender, and I have permission to tell his story.

He was found unfit for command because during a behavioral screening at the new Commander's Assessment Program (CAP), he was told by a behavioral health "expert" that he "Has a very high tolerance for stress, and that could be a negative thing because your (his) subordinates wouldn't be able to handle stress to the same degree and pace."

Did you read that? A PERSON BEING SCREENED TO COMMAND A BRIGADE IN WAR APPARENTLY HANDLES STRESS TOO WELL. Is this real life?

So who gets selected? Those who are buddy buddy with their subordinates and fold like a wet towel under pressure? I get the intention of CAP to screen for toxic leaders, but this is a wild over correction.

He was one of the highest qualified armor leaders in the Army. So highly qualified that he was selected to serve as the G3 of the First Cavalry Division and was among the first officers to be brevet promoted to full Colonel. (those on the inside know how big a deal this is).

COL Bender actually wanted to learn from his CAP performance and asked for his own file to study. When he tried to get his own records, he was told to FOIA them. He left that assessment with only stories of what happened to him. He was so rightfully angry, he retired in protest and is luckily thriving on the outside.

CAP is relatively new (5 years old) and the process for which they select officers is COMPROMISED. We now have objective proof of this: taskandpurpose.com/news/army-gene…

In the article, a bottom 1% officer was moved into the top 1/8th of all selected commanders because of the shady practices of multiple 4 star generals. She failed CAP multiple times and was still selected for command over those who passed. Even our own Chief of Staff of the Army was involved.

The CAP system has lost all trust and confidence and must be revisited. Amazing warfighters are getting left out of command for nebulous purposes because nobody can see what goes on behind the curtain.

I pray you have someone brief you on cases like COL Bender's. There are dozens more like him who are getting sidelined every day.@PeteHegseth @SecDef @stuartscheller

America, we are apparently denying leaders command because they handle stress too well. How does that make you feel? 2/ I fought with this man in Baghdad in 2008. I also served as his S3 some years later (I'm in the pic with him). I consider this man to be family at this point. He doesn't want to come back in and loves it on the outside.

However, good warriors on the inside are still being cast aside. Suspend CAP now.

🧵I know @stuartscheller is probably in DC right now working tirelessly in a room with no windows to figure out how to reform talent in DoD.

I aim to give him some food for thought here.

Start promoting clever and lazy commanders. Yes, you heard me correct.

Thread below.👇 Make Lazy Commanders Great Again – The Von Hammerstein-Equord Model 🧵

1/ The modern military promotes the wrong officers.

We reward hard work over effectiveness and diligence over common sense.

That’s why everything is so bureaucratic, bloated, and inefficient.

Time to rethink how we identify talent. ⬇️

🚨People are clamoring that "cancel culture is dead" on X today. Not in the military. It's still alive and well here.

This is one of the most important things I will ever talk about on this platform and I appreciate the widest possible dissemination so our leaders can see this. 1/ The Smears That Kill Us: The Hidden Crisis in the Military 🧵

Today, a kid from @DOGE got reinstated after being smeared and cleared. @POTUS and @PeteHegseth know the pain of being dragged unfairly. But let’s be real—most in the military don’t have the court of public opinion to save them.

For us, a baseless accusation is enough to end everything. The mandatory investigation culture over the last 5 years has exploded. We spend 1,000s of hours hunting our own, for mostly nothing. 1,000s of hours we could be using toward lethality.