WASHINGTON – Today, U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) questioned Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth and Chief of Staff of the Army Randy George during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. Senator Tuberville asked about the effects the military’s vaccine policy has had on its recruiting.
Read excerpts of Senator Tuberville’s remarks below, or on YouTube or Rumble.
ON VACCINE POLICY EFFECTS
TUBERVILLE: “Thanks Mr. Chairman. Thanks both of you for your service.
I’m worried more about our people. You know, I came from a team-oriented background – and we’re gonna have the weapons. We’re borrowing $80,000 a second right now to pay for all those weapons.
So, I don’t know what our kids are gonna have to do in the future, but we need to protect us, our country, and our allies.
But I’m very concerned about the people that are within our military. I have had a chance to go to bases all over in country and out of country all over the world. And I try to ask for kind of a group session with officers and non-commissioned officers and talk to him. Lot of good things. [And] a lot of things that are not so good. A lot of them are concerned in the last few years about some of their fellow service members that didn’t make the cut because they didn’t take the vaccine.
Secretary Wormuth, we lost 1,861 [Army] service members and 200 [Army personnel] that were mechanics in the military.
Did we have a backup plan for that, especially for the mechanics that we’d lost, […] that were very desperately need in times like this?”
WORMOTH: “Senator, I think, you know, again, one way we try to deal with shortfalls in any particular MOS is to increase our recruiting in that area. Obviously, none of us anticipated the pandemic. None of us anticipated many of the different effects. But the percentage of soldiers who were released from the army because they didn’t take the COVID vaccine was very, very small out of our formations.”
ON DEI IN THE MILITARY
TUBERVILLE: “[I] also talk to a lot of our service members that are out of the military, as we speak, a lot of special-ops, a lot of rangers, a lot of them are very disgruntled about the things that they were being taught at the end of their service, DEI.
If I had to use DEI when I was coaching, I’d have been fired a long time ago. I don’t think you can run a military off of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. I think you do it with the best, the meanest, the people […] that we need to train, to fight, to defend this country.
What’s your thoughts on that, Gen. George?”
GEORGE: “Um, Senator, I would…”
TUBERVILLE: “Be honest about this now. We’re in trouble.”
GEORGE: “Yeah. I will tell you, and you can ask any of the formations, [when] we go out and I’m talking to them we’re focused on building war fighting[machines], increasing lethality in our units, and building cohesive teams.
So, as you know from being a coach, when you’re bringing everybody together […] we [have] got people coming from all over the country. So, I’ve been talking about building cohesive teams since I was a brand new Private when I was instructed on that coming right out, all the way to being a leader. So, I think that those are the two things that we’re focused on. It’s obviously different in every form, [and] in different formations that I’ve been in different levels, but that’s what we need to be focused on.”
TUBERVILLE: “Yeah. And you’re finding out that it’s hard to bring people from backgrounds to put them together – to make them measure the unit as a team. And their lives are at stake, it’s not a football player playing to win and lose a game. It’s, you know, their loss in the military is losing their life.
And I just wanna make sure, […] we live in a dangerous world as we all know.”
Senator Tommy Tuberville represents Alabama in the United States Senate and is a member of the Senate Armed Services, Agriculture, Veterans’ Affairs, and HELP Committees.
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