The U.S. Marine Corps: A Hobbesian Problem
BY Herschel Smith
3 years, 2 months ago
I really don’t want to rehearse the goings-on surrounding Marine Lt. Col. Scheller any more, but this article caught my eye, where this is said.
Scheller responded with another video on Aug. 29 that appeared even more emotional. His former mentor, retired Col. Thomas Hobbs, had commented on his first video and said that if Scheller was honorable, he would resign his commission.
“You didn’t say, ‘is,’ as if challenging me,” Scheller responded to Hobbs in the video. “You said, ‘was,’ as if I wouldn’t do it.” Scheller then announced that he was resigning, and told viewers that if people followed him, they would bring “the system down.”
Hobbs, in a brief phone interview, said on Tuesday that Scheller served under his command at one point, and was one of his best company commanders. Hobbs said that while Scheller was a top performer, he warned him long ago that his arrogance could be his downfall.
“He hasn’t shown one speck of remorse or admitted he was wrong in any way,” Hobbs said. “I 100 percent believe it’s a ploy for him to run for office.”
Uh huh, and Hobbs himself has no dog in this political fight, does he? But maybe he does. From his commentary at Marine Corps Times (The Marine Corps: Always faithful – to white men), he makes some startling assertions.
The struggle of minority officers I witnessed at TBS has never left my mind. Over time, I have come to understand the cause. TBS is a high-pressure environment where lieutenants are in direct competition with one another. The first three significant tests are swim qualification, rifle/pistol qualification, and land navigation. Many of the minority officers I led grew up in low socio-economic areas, typically poor urban neighborhoods. They did not have access to scouting, neighborhood pools or hunting. Many of my minority officers struggled with swim qualification. Ultimately, every one of those officers passed, but at a cost to their prestige, confidence, and lineal standing. The pattern remained the same for rifle/pistol qualification and land navigation. Furthermore, remediation and re-qualification attempts were time intensive, fostering a vicious cycle as the lieutenants fell behind in other topics. These three major evaluations occurred during the first third of TBS, and by the time those events concluded, reputations were set for the remainder of school and, one can argue, the remainder of their Marine Corps careers.
Another aspect of TBS that favors lieutenants from white middle- and upper-class families is the language we use in the Marine Corps, particularly among officers. We speak “proper” English, that is English deemed proper by those who have power and determine the standards. Even if no one ever said it out loud, those who struggled to write and speak “correctly” were not respected by the officer culture, a culture determined by white men over the past 244 years.
My white lieutenants who excelled at TBS did so because they worked hard. This fact is not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether the institution creates a level playing field for all officers. I believe the institution has not and does not. The institution is biased towards middle- and upper-class white culture. The institution perpetuates the unspoken narrative of white superiority by setting up minority officers for failure. It puts minority officers in occupational specialties they did not want or have not been thoroughly prepared for by the system.
The fact that this should all be embarrassing for him – and isn’t – should cause even more embarrassment. He should be humiliated that he isn’t humiliated by such tripe.
He claims he wants a “level playing field,” and recognizes that hard work results in advancement, but wants equality of outcomes, which is precisely the opposite of all of that.
If a Marine cannot shoot, he should never have graduated from boot camp, much less school of infantry. If an infantry officer cannot shoot, engage in land navigation, speak English, and compete with others, he shouldn’t be a Marine Corps infantry officer. How on earth is someone who cannot excel at those things going to conduct warfare or lead other men?
I don’t care whether they hunted, swam or had been part of the Boy Scouts as a child. That’s irrelevant to their skills, drive, motivation and moral constitution today. If Mr. Hobbs wants better blacks to join the Marine Corps, the problem isn’t the Marine Corps. The problem is rotted out inner cities, fatherless families, gangs, SNAP, TANF and the rest of government handouts. Study in school, learn to speak English, learn calculus, take AP courses, get a part time job, and stop joining gangs.
There is a rejoinder at the Marine Corps Times, but it should never had to have been written. It should be enough to let Mr. Hobbs’ stupid commentary stand on its own, forcing all good Marines to look away in shame at what the Corps has become that a man like Hobbs would ever have been an officer to begin with.
And by the way, the play on words of the post title, is a reminder to readers that Hobbes believed that “state and government are necessary for the realization of acceptable social conduct by its citizens.”
Hobbs also appears to be a lover of the state.
Shameful. The entire thing is shameful. The Marine Corps is just a shell of what it once was.
On October 13, 2021 at 7:36 am, Randolph Scott said:
Someone needs to tell Col. Thomas Hobbs TFB, Too F*ckin Bad. It is what it is and has been in place for almost 200 years.
Pandering to and lowering qualification requirements to one group of officers based on their color is a RACIST action. Call it what it is. The rules are the rules, the requirements are the requirements. You either qualify or you don’t qualify.
In other words Col. Hobbs,,, TFB!
On October 13, 2021 at 7:45 am, Paul J said:
Boo hoo. The Marine Corps has taught millions of men and women to shoot.
Any instructor will tell you the student has to have a cooperative attitude.
Same with swimming. Officers are all college graduates now. Pretty sad if you have a degree and can’t do simple math or read a map.
On October 13, 2021 at 7:50 am, George 1 said:
The Colonel should be ecstatically happy then. The Marines and all of the other armed services are falling all over themselves to recruit and promote unqualified people as long as they are the correct races and genders.
This is why you get ships crashing into huge tankers and probably one reason you get submarines crashing into rock formations. Of course the Connecticut incident will never be blamed on that.
On October 13, 2021 at 8:12 am, JoeFour said:
I suspect Hobbs made Colonel (rather than getting stuck at Lt. Col.) simply because he was (and is) totally on-board with the woke, politically correct (Satanic) movement that is swallowing the country piece by piece.
On October 13, 2021 at 8:25 am, Fred said:
Maybe they could join the African Marines. Here’s a training video.
https://www.military.com/video/guns/rifles/never-give-an-ape-an-ak-47/1042439324001
On October 13, 2021 at 8:42 am, Fred said:
Oh and, getting the good Marines to resign doesn’t “bring down the system” it accelerates the building of the new system tptb want. It’s a feature not a bug as everyone says. But, you might as well resign and plan to retake your republic from the outside. Solving the problem from the inside is very obviously for some time now not working.
The sooner you admit you’ve lost your country and civilization the sooner you can get over it and make plans.
On October 13, 2021 at 9:55 am, cj crane said:
Combat is an equal opertunity killer. Skillz matter.
On October 13, 2021 at 10:39 am, Longbow said:
SFC Steve Barry formerly published a magazine call The Resister. In it he wrote about, and warned us of, the rot of Cultural Marxism within the military. He told us all of this was coming twenty-seven years ago.
It is Rot indeed.
On October 13, 2021 at 12:13 pm, Sisu said:
As the Captain indicates a “level playing field,” does not mean “equality of outcomes”. We’d have to understand from where and with what coaching Col. Hobbs (ret.) traveled from childhood to his current “perch”, in order to understand how he does not understand the basic reality of a life well-lived is the “distance traveled” not the rank of the end point.
Then again, perhaps Col. Hobbs (ret.) is a self-hating, racist with a superiority/inferiority complex, who simply can not know “equal”.
Excerpt from article quoting Col. Hobbs (ret.) wherein he hinting that “separate but equal” depends on one’s tone (pun intended):
“While serving in Afghanistan, one Marine officer recalled being questioned by a white colleague about why he was conversing with fellow Black officers. “My response to him was ‘I don’t ask you why you’re always hanging out with white officers,’” said the Marine, who asked not to be named because he remains on active duty. “Why can’t they just be officers? Why the qualifier?”
[Portrait Here. See article linked below.]
Retired Marine Col. Thomas Hobbs stands … Cliff Owen, The Associated Press
Retired Marine Col. Thomas Hobbs stands for a portrait in his home in Springfield, Va., Friday, April 16, 2021.
Hobbs, who remains on active duty, says whenever a Black enlisted Marine gets in trouble, they will come to you and say, ‘Oh man, what’s wrong with these guys?’ Coming to you like you’re the expert on everything Black.”
Thomas Hobbs, an infantry colonel who retired after 27 years of service in the Marine Corps in 2018, was among the officers interviewed who spoke of the pressures of trying to blend into an overwhelmingly “white male culture,” while also feeling the need to outperform white officers to negate racial stereotypes.”
https://www.denverpost.com/2021/05/27/us-military-racism-discrimination/
On October 14, 2021 at 5:23 am, CHRIS said:
I am a retired MSgt with 23.5 years of service to the Marine Corps, and it has become an embarrassment to me. But, having retired in 2012, I am not at all surprised by what I am seeing now.
Sad…
On October 15, 2021 at 12:17 am, Georgiaboy61 said:
@ Longbow
Re: “SFC Steve Barry formerly published a magazine call The Resister. In it he wrote about, and warned us of, the rot of Cultural Marxism within the military. He told us all of this was coming twenty-seven years ago.”
The Cultural Marxists have been – no pun intended – gunning for the transformation of the U.S. military for decades going to the Clinton years in the 1990s and before. Really since the page was turned on the conscript-based model and the “all-volunteer force” (AVF) was stood up in its place, back in the 1970s.
Like so much else, the military is downstream of culture, and overall, the culture of the U.S. as a nation has been shifting leftwards now since the 1960s… call it a solid half-century, fifty years of transformation. The only reason it has taken so long is that the armed forces were a tough nut to crack, and at least for a time resisted the kind of wholesale transformation sought by the left. The Marxists just adopted incrementalism as their fall-back position, and played the long game, something at which they happen to be pretty adept.
I am an old guy now, old-enough to remember all of the broken promises made by the left as each new change was forced upon the armed forces. When roles outside of their traditional rear-area administrative and medical tasks were opened up by the new force structure, the radicals swore up and down that they just wanted to “expand opportunities for women,” they weren’t trying to put women in combat.
By and by, time went on and they started demanding that women be allowed into combat aviation and aboard ships of the line in the navy. But don’t worry, we’ll never demand that they crew submarines or go into ground combat.
Gulf War I came and went, and then Tailhook, whose fallout cost the Navy and Marine Corps many of their best and most-experienced combat aviators.
By the time of the 21st century, the armed forces had gotten addicted to women in order to fill their recruiting quotas, and the new line in the sand was that women would not be placed in “forward-deployed units,” but would remain behind them. That, too, proved to be a falsehood, as violations of that regulation were widespread. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge…
And now, here in the 21st century, the feminists and their Marxist pals have demanded women aboard submarines, in combat aviation, and in the ground combat arms, including special forces. The Pentagon generals/flag officers who were/are supposed to resist nonsense of this kind, folded like a bunch of cheap lawn furniture. Now, guys like Milley can’t prostrate themselves quickly-enough to their new communist overlords.
I had hoped that the Marine Corps would find a way to resist this madness, but as noted earlier, culture is upstream of the armed forces, including the Marines, and well, as the programmers say “garbage in, garbage out.” Yeah, as Lt. Colonel Scheller proves, there are still real Marines around, but they are outnumbered by perfumed princes like Colonel Hobbs, ring-kissers and players of political games in Soddom-on-the-Potomac and the Five-Sided Puzzle Palace.
If Chesty Puller was alive today and in fighting form, he’d grab those clowns by the scruff of their necks and kick them up-and-down Pennsylvania Avenue, but alas, the great man isn’t available at the moment.