Angry Planet - COVID, Extremists, and Readiness: How Is the U.S. Military?

Episode Date: March 5, 2021

It’s a weird time for the US military.Endless small-scale wars.Veterans joining the riots at the capital.Right-wing extremism in the ranks.Tens of thousands of troops refusing the COVID-19 vaccine.So, time for a status check. To help us understand what’s going on, we have Meghann Myers who is the Pentagon Bureau Chief for Military Times.Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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people. Freedom has never safe-guarded peacefully. Anyone who is depriving you of freedom isn't deserving of a peaceful approach. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galton. It's a weird

time for the U.S. military, with endless small-scale wars, veterans joining the insurrection at the capital, right-winging extremism in the ranks, and tens of thousands of troops refusing the COVID vaccine. So, time for a status check. To help us understand what's going on, we have Megan Myers, who's the Pentagon

Bureau Chief for Military Times. Thank you so much for joining us. Can we start with the biggest, most basic question? In your view, what's the state of the military's readiness? That's a really good question. So that will all depend on each service. Each service does that in-house. My biggest experience is in writing about the Army. And in the past half decade or so, the Army made a big push to fix its readiness after all of these years of conflict. And the way they measure that is by their brigade combat teams and how many of them are ready to deploy at any given time.

And several years ago, there were only a third of them who were trained up and ready to go and had all their formations filled, had enough people. And that was a problem. So they spent a few years working on that, making sure that everybody was ready to deploy individually as well as a group. And they got that up to about two-thirds, which is a much more comfortable level for them. Of course, if you ask a Pentagon official, if you ask an Army, Air Force, Marine Corps, Navy official, they will say we are ready to go. We can figure it out no matter what needs to get done. If there's a contingency, we can respond. But that kind of robbing, you know,

Peter to pay Paul, moving things around paradigm that they get themselves into often comes on the backs of individual troops who are overworked, overtired, having their own. And I'm a lot of, issues at home. And so the individual readiness of soldiers is different than, or to troops in general, is different than to units and what units are able to do to get up and moving. How large is the active army at this point? So in the past few years, they've gone from, they were at about 470-ish and they are slowly marching to 500,000. And so they're at about 485-ish, I want to say right now and working to add a few thousand more every year. So basically to recruit a few thousand more than they attract every year. The Marine Corps is getting smaller,

however, and that's a strategic decision. Is there any sense of what Lloyd Austin is going to be like? I know it's very early. It is. He is as far as the issues that he has taken on so far. And there's a handful of things that have really confronted him in the beginning. Sexual assault, extremism in the ranks, he's got task forces and things moving on that. Then there's a There's COVID-19, which is, by his account, the Pentagon's number one priority right now. So not only getting troops vaccinated and getting their civilians vaccinated, but helping FEMA get average American civilians vaccinated too so that we can get this off the plate and this will stop affecting readiness.

Because for the military, that really does affect readiness. There's been more than 150,000 troops have been diagnosed with COVID-19. And every time somebody pops for that's two weeks out of work at least. And so they have, that's something that they are also very concerned about. And then the last week we had the strike on Syria. He is very much in step with the Biden administration, which is to do some of these progressive things to help with this public health crisis. And then, of course, to respond to contingencies as they come up.

So they've taken a position on Iran. They are in, there's a review going on of Afghanistan to see how many troops are going to stick around and for how long. As far as anyone can tell, he's being the good soldier, right? This is what this is President Biden's priorities and he is going along with them, which is about as much as you can expect from any secretary's defense. It's an anomaly when they really start getting at longer heads and there's a lot of drama, like in the last administration. Speaking of the progressive priorities Biden has, transgender troops are going to be or are, you tell me, are accepted back into the ranks. And is that going to cause any kind of ripple to you?

think? Honestly, I don't think so. I don't think it really caused much of a ripple in 2016 when the brand was first lifted. The bigger ripple, according to studies that have been done since then, was reinstating the ban and throwing all of these new policies into jeopardy, confusing, not only troops and their commanders, but confusing recruiters at the time who had been recruiting transgender troops, and then were like, we don't even have a policy that says whether we can bring them in and under what circumstances anymore. And technically the Trump policy was not that transgender people couldn't be in the military. It was just that you had to be in the closet, essentially.

But that was confusing. And that's not really a policy at all. And for a lot of people, it's going to just close the loop on what's possible and take some of that confusion away. So that actually, the only relation between these two questions is that we're talking about gender and sex. When you're talking about assault inside the military, I'd love it if you could also just mention I branch if the problem is that is equally widespread. But could you describe the scale of the problem and what's happening now? So we've known for a long time based on, so the RAND Corporation does a workplace study in the military periodically.

And that takes a lot of anecdotal, you know, service members can log on to it, fill it out and talk about the harassment that they've experienced. experienced, whether they've experienced an assault, whether they have reported that assault and how that's handled. And so we know there are at least tens of thousands, you know, of assaults in the military rate every year. That's only the ones that even people disclose anonymously. And we know that harassment, now it's becoming more of a more of the narrative that harassment, toxic command climates, a study just came out yesterday showing that places in the military where there is more reported harassment, also have more reported sexual assaults, which I think anybody logically would have told you for a long time, but they're really starting to get into the research

on this. This is the reason sexual harassment isn't okay. It's because it leads to rape. We can point that line very clearly. And so it is widespread. We know that there's tens of thousands of assault that happen every year. The statistics are about on part of the civilian population and that one in four women. And it's, I think it's one in, I don't know, it's hard with men because there's just not as much reporting. A lot of people say that men are sexually assault in the military, even more often than women are, but it's always couch is hazing and initiation garbage. And so men don't necessarily report it as a sexual assault, if they report it at all, even as a hazing or as a simple assault. So we know that this happens a lot. We know that it's not necessarily going down, even though

reporting is going up. And I think as far as a branch, it's at least in the numbers we have, the Marine Corps, the Marine Corps has a women culture problem to begin. with, it is not shocking that they also have an harassment and assault problem that is on par with that toxic culture told women. Did you see that TikTok video two weeks ago? Yeah. Do you think that trying to think of how I want to phrase this? I feel like I've been hearing this issue discussed a lot lately in a lot more productive in a lot more productive way, but I think the entire time I've been covering the military, it does feel like it gets brought up to command says, yes, we have a terrible culture. And then that always feels like the end of it. Do you see things being different this time

or changing? I want to, but I'm not sure. And I, after covering this for the better part of a decade now, I think the language is getting better. Obviously, years ago, this was about isolated, monstrous incidents and not about a culture that not only breeds this, but then doesn't do anything about it when they see it. And so I think the fact that the Secretary of Defense is doing a little more outreach on this, trying to have a review, is better putting a woman who is an activist for domestic violence and sexual violence in charge of it is good. The problem is that in the military, you do what you can control. And what you can control is the Secretary of Defense coming out and saying, we take this very seriously, which is something they've been saying since time in memorial.

So he can say it. The people at the top can say, this isn't okay. The sergeant major of the army can say not in my squad. But this really comes down to like staff sergeants basically with their small units and policing the culture in those units. And then commanders who decide I have an allegation. I can substantiate it. I don't care how good of an airman or a Marine this person is. we're going to look into this. And I also don't care about my own reputation because that's the other

part of it is that a commander, if something bad happens in your formation, it's your fault. And divorcing the idea of I played a role in this from this makes me look bad and I don't want that because I won't get promoted. I think those are the cultural changes that are going to be the hardest, but the most important to make. You think that's something that could change in in terms of commander being held accountable for help or for actually passing along charges or doing what he needs to do or she needs to do. Yeah, I asked the last Secretary of Defense when he was a secretary of the Army. I asked him very directly.

Do you have any sort of like carrot stick situation going on here for commanders who don't prosecute or who like in the case of the Marine on TikTok, commanders who take a conviction and overturn it because they've decided, no, I want to keep this person. And I don't know that culture is there yet because there's very much like you trust the chain of command, the chain of command knows best. If Congress is able to take this stuff out of the chain of command, I think that would make the biggest and most immediate difference that there could possibly be. But it's hard to know whether you can really punish people for that because first of all, they're not really tracking centrally who is overturning courts martial or who is who is declining to prosecute, who is declining to go to courts martial after an Article 32. do that stuff is hard to track down. So I don't know.

I think it take a lot of wherewithal to be able to get to that point and then to start questioning commanders and their judgment because that's how this whole thing is built on. And if you start undermining commander's judgment, then someone's going to be like, I'll rush a China. They're taking us over basically. Can you, okay, my cat is now. And can you hear her? Because I'll go, I don't know where she.

Yes, but it's mildly. It's not terrible. It doesn't sound like my cat who's an old woman and very angry and just screechy. Let me check on her because she may be trapped in the closet. Hold on. Of course, yeah. Oh, working from home. No. That was a let me out, meow.

Hopefully she can behave. Speaking of Russia and China, there is a sense, I think, right now, again, as someone that covers the military, that it's very much looking inward at the moment, and I think it probably should be. But there are still external threats. Is it due from command for the Pentagon? Do you hear people? I'm starting to see drumbeat is maybe too strong a word. But people talk about China and the way we talk about China is starting to change and feeling like some old Cold War revival coming. That's what I'm sensing. Are you getting the same thing? What do you think? Absolutely. I think what is going to be going on with China. I think the experts would say that it's probably more likely. that we would have an actual kinetic situation with China.

There's not quite the mutually assured destruction situation there was with the Soviet Union. But very much the idea here is, you know, we're working on weapons and systems and stuff like that to counter their technology. But the biggest priority really is going around to the Asia Pacific region and making allies there and trying to get them on our side, you know, of the court rather than China's side of the court. And China comes with lots of money and lots of opportunities. lots of investment for these places. And so our plan is to go over there and be like, we can offer you protection. We can help train your troops so that you can protect yourself. And we hope that is more attractive to them. Interesting because, of course, Trump immediately killed the Trans-Pacific Partnership when he came

into office. It's funny because if you think about it purely as a trade deal, God knows, whether it's a real benefit or a drawback. But the whole idea of bringing everybody on side so that trade partners don't fight with each other and you'd be taking U.S. philosophy to a certain extent if you take our stuff. So do you think that does the military take positions on things like that? Do they care whether there's a trans-Pacific trade partnership? There are people in the Pentagon who would agree with you and would say, yes, that is something that helps us for our purposes. But officially, they're there to serve the pleasure of the president. So if the president wants to can the trade deal, fine, they're going to work around that because unless the president

intervenes and specifically says no, they're going to move along with their, whatever the current national defense strategy is and the current one, and I'm sure the next one that they do, will say it is in our interest to make as many allies in the Indo-Pacific region, that's what they call it, from India, across to China, as they can. And so they will continue to do that, however, they are able to do it. And if there's not this trade deal in place, it already has that line communication open, they will make their own lines of communication. Is there a specific initiative going on right now that you think is worth noting? In terms of trying to build alliances or focusing toward China, the great pivot to Asia.

I think there's a global force posture review, which there is at every outset of an administration, and I'm pretty sure Secretary Esper hadn't even finished all of his combatant command reviews by the time he was canned. So now they're starting over from scratch. But there is a review of every combatant command, everywhere we have troops, everywhere we have interests, and deciding where are our resources best used and how will that work in with the next version of the National Defense strategy, which is going to be very Indo-Pacific focus, for sure. All right.

So one of the first things that Austin did when he came in was order the 60-day stand-down, work in the middle of it or a little bit through the halfway point now. what exactly is a you know I know what he said it is in the memo but how do you think how do you see it playing out what is what and I guess for the audience who may not know what exactly is it for so a stand down usually happens with safety and it often happens in aviation but basically it's a day when everybody stops what they're doing comes together sits down refuse safety reviews the literature basically does work on the topic so with this extremism standings down that is in process right now, there are not a lot of, there's not a lot of prescription about what that has to look like. The Pentagon has put up some training materials that have talking points, discussion, Q&A kind of things, some key items that should be discussed. But there's no, there's no sense of on what level this should happen. Should this happen in platoons? Should it

happen in battalions? Could it be even bigger? It probably shouldn't be bigger because when you have, first of all, I can't have everybody in an auditorium right now. But the idea is that, and you do this for sexual assault awareness sometimes too, is that everybody kind of sits to get comes together and talks about these things. The commander talks about expectations. And this specific thing, you're supposed to talk about your oath of enlistment or office, which is your loyal to the constitution and these American ideals. So it's, it's a little loose that way. It's meant to be that way. It's meant for leaders to be able to tailor it to what will work best in their situation. And my one critique of it really is that there's got to be some sort of

next step. And I can't really, in asking, it's hard to find out whether there's some sort of deliverables that are supposed to come out of this. Are you just supposed to have a training day and then everybody gets on their merry way? Or are commanders short of commanders are required to court up like, hey, I did mine. But they're not required to report up. Here's what I heard. Here's how many people told me that they have seen white supremacist attitudes in their units or that they know someone from their unit who's affiliated with some sort of extremist militia. That stuff isn't really there yet. And so the data and the point of this is to re-educate, get everybody on the same page about what's acceptable and what's not, but also to get a better idea of how prevalent this is, because

everyone, you know, kind of looks at the military and they're like, how can you not know? And it's, oh, let me count the ways that you could not know what's going on in your formation. There doesn't seem to be any sort of framework for how they report up what they heard about it. I don't know if that's going to be something that the service chiefs, that the service secretaries are going to take on individually and they're going to get a hold on their own service and then tell that to the Secretary of Defense, that part's all kind of up in the air. It seems to me nuts in that this sounds like an episode of the office where you have the training day, right? In the British office, I did it better, where you just have everybody

sitting around bored to death, making fun of the trainer behind their back. And that's in less serious circumstances and in more liberal environments, I'm willing to bet. Anybody think this is going to work? There's no intention that this is going to fix things. This is supposed to be the first step in reorienting everybody, reading them the policy, because there's all sorts of confusion about according to DoD policy, okay, you're not allowed to march in a clan parade if you're in a service member. And you're not allowed to build a bomb for the Adam Boffin Division, if you are in the military, but are you allowed to retweet their stuff? Are you allowed to have those same ideals that they have? Are you allowed to, are you allowed to be a member, even if you're not an

active member? And the instruction so far is, yes, you are allowed to say these things. You are allowed to have these beliefs. You are allowed to be affiliated. You just can't do things. And so in these training materials, they're talking about how here's all the things you can't do. You can't recruit. You can't share their materials. You cannot espouse. whatever that means, these ideals. And so they're trying to get a put a finer point on what is allowed. And of course, they run into this First Amendment issue, even in uniform. There are still freedom of speech rights.

So they have to kind of balance. Are you allowed to be racist in the military? Yes. You're just not allowed to say racist things, do racist things, be a member of a overtly racist organization. But you are allowed to be racist and how are they going to be able to police that? That's the kind of thing they're going to have to figure out. So it's don't ask, don't tell fascism division. That's what it ends up being.

And I feel for them in that light that everyone is allowed to have their own beliefs and freedom of speech is still a thing. But they have to be able to very precisely pinpoint at the point where it becomes a good order and discipline thing in the formation. And if you're saying something racist at work, you ought to slap that down. If you have somebody who talks like that, you have to slap that down. And it can't. It could just start out as some sort of written counseling, but I think there may end up being, if not another article of UCMJ, something added into that code that specifically deals with this as its own infraction.

How widespread a problem do you think it is? Okay. So military times has done a survey a couple of times where, you know, up to, it's like up to a third of service members of color have heard racist statements from people that they work with. And that's, that's the baseline, right? We talk, there's all this talk about how do you define extremism and like, why is white supremacy always put into it and why is it always right wing? And unfortunately, a lot of these domestic extremist militias, that white supremacy thing is just kind of part and parcel of how it works. Even if it's not overt, that is part of the understanding is this white Christian nationalist identity. I think, I think they're going to have to, they're going to have to parse out what all of that means.

and then they can start to get a handle on, okay, so how many people believe these things? How many people are affiliated with militias while they're in the military? Probably not many. How many people might retweet something that a militia says? A decent amount. I think the bigger fear becomes, honestly, after you get out, we saw January 6th, there were a lot of veterans who were at the Capitol, not a lot of currently serving service members. And that might be because veterans had these latent feelings when they were in

and now they can go act out on them. But there's also the problem of these militias who like bearing outkeepers, like that is all about your oath of enlistment, your oath of office and keeping that by joining this anti-government militia, whatever that means. But they're specifically looking for people who have military experience, who have military training, not only for the practical,

the practical solution that affords them, but also makes them look legitimate. And so the Pentagon is really concerned about veterans getting out and joining these militias and then trying to go, take up arms against the government. All right, Angry Planet listeners. We're going to pause there for a break. We will be right back. All right, Angry Planet listeners, welcome back. We are talking about the current state of the American military. This might be super paranoid, but I've definitely heard people say that, oh God, I sound like Trump. I just said people say. Some are saying,

all right, so I'm going to take that back and say that I have actually read in, I think, the Washington Post that people may actually join the military. with the idea that they will be trained and learn everything you need to know to actually have an armed insurrection after the fact. Is that just crazy talk? No, that happens. There are only a handful of examples where we know of people who were eventually found out and you can trace back their activity online to see that, oh, I decided to enlist because I knew I was going to get this free training. Yes, that happens as well. Now, the military is trying to work hard in its recruitment program to be able to weed those things out. They already do that with tattoos and talking to family members

and associates and that sort of thing. I'm sure they're going to get more hardcore on the social media part about it. But the problem is that a lot of these conversations happen like on the dark web in anonymous chat rooms where there was a dump, Bellingcat had dump, I think it was like a year and a half ago, the Iron March forum online where there were dozens of people talking about how I'm getting ready to go in the army. Oh, I'm going to enlist in pursuit of this like neo-Nazi, whatever the plan was afterward. Who really knows? But that does happen to. I think, I don't know if that happens on the same scale, but that is also something that they are concerned about. And the lengths that people will be able to go to to hide that stuff for the four years while they're in uniform.

And I'll pair this with another issue the military is facing. How's recruitment going? So I wrote a story actually about recruitment last year. And everybody, despite COVID and despite having to slow things down and go virtual, everybody made their recruiting goals. Now, recruiting goals do shift throughout the year. They can be shifted because the service doesn't think they're going to make them or they can be shifted because retention is really good. And so they're like, there's no need to bring in all these extra people because we're keeping people. They have been doing rather well. There have been a lot of initiatives not only to go online, especially because of the pandemic, but also to start branching out to the people who they are trying to recruit. The army had a

huge effort a couple of years ago. They started where they decided rather than, focusing on the southeast, which is where they get the most bites. They were going to go into Chicago and Los Angeles, New York and the bigger cities in Texas and try to recruit a more diverse people from a more diverse background. And that ended up working. I don't know if there's a breakdown really. There is one summer, a breakdown of how many people they got in those cities versus before, but they were still able to make mission. And that was after a year where they had a really hard time making mission. And so they went to these new places. They had. add new, all this, they had an entirely new recruiting campaign that focused not just on combat

arms, but focused on, oh, if you like computers, there's cyber things. If you want to be an engineer, eventually you can get great engineering training in the military, that sort of thing. So it's a moving target, but for all intents and purposes, the numbers that they are decided they need to make in order to stay ready, they've been able to make, and in some cases succeed a little bit. Okay. So those that pivot that they did after that does. Was it 2019 where everything was, the numbers were pretty bad? It's all 2019, I want to say, yeah. They decided that perhaps Super Bowl ads are not going to be working out for them anymore.

Exactly. The Army has like a CrossFit team now that's supposed to be recruiting tool. They have an e-sports team that is they put a lot of put a lot of effort into. And getting on TikTok, getting on Instagram, although there were some disasters, of course, that didn't go super smoothly. getting on platforms, putting the time into finding out like where, you know, where Gen Z is and how you reach them. They try to do that work. So I bring this up to say that it is not a situation where the military has to accept white supremacists because they are hurting. Because I think that is, it's a narrative I've seen a couple places that I want to debunk.

Oh, yeah. No, absolutely not. And I'm sure if you ask them, I'd be like we'd rather be under strength than, you know, deal with the fallout of this, which is really terrible. I think the thing you can compare it to most is, and obviously there was a need for bodies back then and like did what you had to do. On the early days of Iraq and Afghanistan where there were a lot of waivers for behavioral issues for criminal history. And the Army particularly did studies later on and drew a link to the amount of crime that was committed by people in uniform and tried to link it back to not just combat and off tempo and all of that, but linking it back to we were bringing in a lower quality of recruit. and they had a lower quality behavior while they were in, and they don't want to do that again. I had a question I think is related, which is if you join the military, how likely are you to be

deployed to one of the major zones like Afghanistan or the Iraq area, the Middle East? It sounds like there are so many troops, right, almost 500,000 in the Army and then the other services, and you only hear about a couple thousand in Afghanistan in a given time, in Iraq in a given time. You're not very likely. And a lot of the reason is because our missions in Iraq and Afghanistan for a long time have been mostly trained by assist. So they will send headquarters elements out there to help local forces to help train them, to help guide them if they're going to go out on their own combat patrols. But like our combat troops short of special operations haven't really been going.

And so if you want to, if you want to enlist in the Army right now and go into just your regular enlisted infantry position, you're probably not going to get deployed to combat. And that has been that way for several years now. You might, there are rotations in Korea where an entire brigade will go. And of course, that's a deterrence. That's a training situation. You're not going to be in combat, hopefully, in Korea. Yeah, it's not like it was 10 and especially 15 years ago.

where it was if you enlist in combat arms, you're going to combat. Do you think that has a major impact on morale? Do people who join want to go to war? It absolutely does. There are people who join because they want, you know, to do the public service, they want the education benefits, and they want the job experience. And that's what a lot of people go into support roles for. But if you are enlisting in the infantry, it's because you want to,

it's because you want to fire your weapon and anger, right? That does, you do see that a lot. And I think we start to see some of the misconduct issues in some junior enlisted troops in those areas because when it's a garrison army, everyone can be a little restless. And it's frustrating. It's putting all this time into learning your job and then not really ever getting to go do it. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. A lot of that has to do with the time period too. So if you enlisted in 2015, we were getting like tail end of, it's like Afghanistan was petering out.

then we had taken combat troops out, but then like ISIS was starting to rise. And so maybe there was a possibility that you would get deployed in support of ISIS, which it did happen for some people, but not very many people. But it was really was a timing issue for a lot of people where if you joined after 9-11, like you knew you were going. If you joined up until 2010, you knew you were going and then things got a little more murky. And if you weren't reading all of the national security outlets about what was going on in these places, maybe you missed your chance, but you thought you were going to get into the fight and now you're frustrated that you just hit it at the wrong time. What do you think, Megan, is behind troops not wanting to be vaccinated?

So this statistic that was brought to Capitol Hill a couple weeks ago that a third of service members are refusing the COVID vaccine, the Pentagon has walked that back a little bit and said, we are not centrally tracking who is taking it, who isn't, because it's voluntary, and that the members of the joint staff who went to Capitol Hill and said that were extrapolating based on the general U.S. public. And that has been a statistic in general U.S. residents about a third of them are like, I don't know about this. There are a lot of different reasons for those people and people in uniform about why they don't want to take it. They think it's new, it's untested. And a lot of that obviously is just based on their own understanding of how vaccines work.

because the vaccine is not new. It's not untested. It's literally just the little piece of it that prevents you from getting COVID-19 or from getting too sick. That's the new part. All the goo, the rest of it, that's been around for forever. It's been well tested. Other parts of it, you know, are a lot of conspiracy theory stuff.

There are people out there who think that there's like the bodies of dead babies in the COVID vaccine or they think that it makes you infertile or this anti, we really are at a rough point because the anti-vacciner movement is like at its peak right before COVID hits. And then all the sudden there's a new vaccine that is like a really a life or death situation. And this rhetoric is already out there. You can go read this everywhere. There are people, there are groups of service members online who are saying, like, I'm not taking this because I don't think that the military should be able to tell me to do anything with my body. I'm afraid for my health. I want to see how everybody else reacts to it. But I think the reasons are largely the same for any U.S. civilian

He doesn't have the full picture of how a vaccine is developed and the actual ingredients. But if you have a natural distrust for the government, that's where it first starts. And there are plenty of people who are in the military have a huge distress for the government, despite being a member of it. A follow-on question I have here, though, is it's a cliche that became, like, part of film language that you go into basic and you get in line and you're going to get shut up with stuff and you don't get to refuse. So why with COVID are some people being allowed to refuse when you're in the military?

Oh, this is the question I've been answering for like almost three months at this point. No, I'm so happy because I want ever like far and wide as far as possible. I want people to hear this and understand it. So there is federal law that says that you cannot require an unapproved vaccine. Technically, the COVID-19 vaccine is authorized, has an emergency. authorization from the FDA to be used now for people who want it. So when you go into the military and you get every, you get anthrax, you get, I don't know, I just, you're right, a battery of vaccinations. Those have all long been approved for FDA use and getting them is a condition of your employment

in the Defense Department. So right now, as long as this COVID vaccine is under an emergency use authorization. They can't make service members get it. And in order to protect people's privacy, they're not tracking who said yes and who said no, because that will, that stuff will inevitably get leaked. All right. I've got one more, one more question, and then we'll let you go. And it's a long one, and I apologize. I was struck by, all right, so the Syrian air strike occurs. And I was struck by two things that I thought were very interesting and felt different than the way that we talk and process these kinds of military actions. The first was there was a pretty, I would call a knee-jerk reaction to it on social media, especially from people on the left.

I saw what I think were just a lot of really bad hot takes, a lot of uninformed hot takes, a lot of people commenting about an area of the world they aren't really familiar with. And then over the weekend, we have the 60 Minutes piece, just like this very slickly produced, the military kind of comes in and not explicitly connecting. I would say that they're laying the groundwork for making a case that this was, retaliation to things that happened in January, even though what was said was that it was connected to this rocket attack and repeal where these contractors died. But here we're going to show you these ballistic missile attacks that are on conducted in January 2020. And it's going to be, we're going to link it to this.

Do you think that we are for a long time, and I'm sure you're aware of this kind of covering, having covered the military for a while? For a long time, I feel like the American public has tuned out of military affairs. but at the same time, the military has not really been engaging with the public or giving them much information. And it really feels like that's rapidly changing. Do you get that same sense? I think so, and I certainly hope so. I'm not sure what the Pentagon has the motivation or the wherewithal to do in terms of educating the public about for basically the proxy war we've been fighting with Iran in Iraq for years now. But I think the, what has really changed and what was like frustrating, some reporters, frankly, for the past couple of weeks was the Pentagon not immediately coming out and pointing the finger at Iran and starting threats.

Because that is how it went in the Trump administration. That's how we got to the brink of war in January 2020, which is kind of, it's not the root of this, but it is this. If you want to like this current like phase in the conflict, I think it's safe to say started last January. So I think now they're trying to do a more nuanced approach where they say Iraq has its own investigators, they're on the ground, they're going to look into this, they're going to tell us what they find, and then we will respond appropriately and proportionately rather than getting on Twitter and being like, Iran's got to stop this and the Ayatollah, blah, blah, blah. So I think that messaging will change, although I don't know if there's going to be some sort of, I don't like another 60 Minutes piece or something that kind of explains. you know, what is going on in Iraq with us and Iran and how we handle it and why why it's necessary to respond to them and why like when these random militias shoot a rocket into the green zone, why that's Iran's fault and why we have to, why there's a possibility of retaliating against Iran.

In this last situation, we didn't directly go after Iran, but as we did in January 2020. In this case, it was this is where these militia, these militia, just have Iranian funding, sure, but this is where they work, and we're going to go after them specifically. And what about the public component? Do you think people are getting more engaged in military affairs? I think that's a big meta question. That's hard to answer, but yeah. Unfortunately, I think the way that they're getting involved in it, a lot of the narrative that I saw was like, oh man, they can't pass this COVID relief bill, but they just dropped all these jams in Syria. And it's okay, that's not how the federal budgeting process works. Best I can

explain it, the jams were already paid for, basically. Where is this bill? is not real money right now. I hope that people are able to engage by having discussions on social media and being able to find national security and defense experts on social media that they trust and that they will follow for their own hot takes. But the problem with that is that, of course, the misinformation and the disinformation is really hard to sift through. So I think to your point about the Pentagon trying to make an effort, I think that would be worth doing, even if it is just from the podium during briefings and directly addressing why we do this and hoping that goes viral. Megan Myers, thank you so much for joining us today. I think it really helped us understand

a lot of what's going on. Yeah, thanks for having me. I could talk about this forever. Thank you so much. And you have an adorable cat. I don't even know where she is. She's whining. She was at the door. She was at the door a minute ago trying to get out. Oh, of course. I should have never let her in, but I guess She's going to whine no matter what. At least you guys got to see her. She got to entertain somebody. Yeah, exactly. That's it for this week, Angry Planet listeners.

We do have another episode dropping on our substack feed. That is at Angry PlanetPod.com. For just $9 a month, you get a weekly newsletter, two bonus episodes and commercial-free versions of our mainline broadcasts. Again, that's at Angry Planetpod.com. Thank you for listening. Angry Planet is me, myself, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin Nodell. It was created by myself and Jason Fields, what feels like a lifetime ago, at a WIRE news organization.

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