Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will reveal what policies and priorities he will push if elected commander-in-chief of the nation’s armed forces during a midmorning July 18 campaign speech in Colombia, South Carolina.
Right about the same time, the Democrat-led Senate will begin deliberations on the nation’s proposed $886.3 billion Fiscal Year 2024 defense budget.
None are likely to survive conferencing between the chambers if, as it has every year since 1961, Congress is to adopt the must-pass defense budget before the new fiscal year beginning Oct. 1.
If DeSantis gets into office, it won’t matter: He’s said he will immediately undo any and all “woke” policies imposed on the Pentagon by the Biden administration by executive order, the same way President Joe Biden has enacted them.
“The agenda, in a nutshell, Day One, on Jan. 20, 2025, as commander-in-chief, is—I’m ripping all the ‘woke’ out of the military and I’m getting the focus back on mission accomplishment,” Mr. DeSantis said during a July 17 campaign speech before about 500 people at the Philip Glennon Community Center in Tega Cay, South Carolina.
“We need morale to go up,” he said. ”We need recruiting to rebound. We need to make this something that people want to join again. And we will get that done.”
Mr. DeSantis, a former Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps (JAG) officer who earned a Bronze Star (without a ‘V’ for combat valor) serving in Iraq, is the only military veteran among GOP candidates vying to challenge frontrunner former President Donald Trump for the GOP’s 2024 presidential nod.
“The U.S. military should be mission focused. But Biden’s military has gone WOKE,” DeSantis’s War Room said in a Twitter post introducing the video. “@RonDeSantis will rip out the wokeness and put the MISSION FIRST.”
Mr. DeSantis, after calling out for veterans in the audience to identify themselves, said serving the nation after 9/11 is “something that I was proud of. Wearing the uniform, you feel like you’re part of something that’s meaningful. I know a lot of veterans feel that way.”
But something is amiss under the Biden administration, he said.
“One of the things I noticed in the military, one of the questions you'd always get asked is, you know, ‘Did your parents serve?’ Because there is family tradition where generations of Americans from the same families serve and now, we’re in a situation where a lot of these veterans are coming up to me saying, ‘I don’t know that I want my kids or grandkids joining today’s military.’”
“Why?” he asked rhetorically with emphatic pause. “Because they’re taking their eye off the mission and they’re focusing things like focusing on things like social experimentation, ideology, woke agenda, pronouns, drag queens, all these in our own military. Are you kidding me?”
Mr. DeSantis vowed to fill in the blanks in July, promising what is to be a “very, very substantial” component of his presidential plank.
First Military Mission: Secure the Border
But he may have tipped his hand on what a DeSantis-led Pentagon’s first mission would be.“ I look forward to restoring this country’s sovereignty, particularly at our southern border,” Mr. DeSantis said. “And we’ve heard a lot about this over the years. They talk about talk about doing all this and it’s never quite gotten done.
“So, on day one,” he vowed, “we’re going to declare [the southern border] a national emergency. We’re going to mobilize all available resources, including the U.S. military.”
As Mr. DeSantis has routinely vowed when stumping, “we will actually build the border wall” under his administration. “We'll do that,” he said.
One thing Mr. DeSantis said that he’s going to do “that no president has been willing or able to do” is to “hold the Mexican drug cartels accountable for what they are doing to this country” with the full extent of the nation’s resources, including direct engagement with U.S. armed forces.
“And honestly, it’s humiliating as an American to go down to that border, which I’ve done many times, and to find out, or be reminded, that the Mexican drug cartels have more control of what’s going on at our southern border than the United States government does,” Mr. DeSantis said. “It’s pathetic and Biden has let this happen.”
He recalled watching workers repair a border fence Arizona. “I’m like, ‘What are you guys doing?’ They’re like, ‘We’re fixing the holes’[that] the cartels cut through the border wall’” to “bring in product and nobody stops them.”
Under a DeSantis presidency, he said, that would no longer be the case.
“We’re going to have rules of engagement in place,” he said. “We’re going to have Border Patrol out there, the military out there. If cartels are breaking through our wall to smuggle in drugs, that’s going to be the last thing they do because they’re going to end up stone cold dead by trying to do that. I am sick of our country being invaded, and we are going to fight back.”
