(The Epoch Times)—Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s August 2021 military vaccine mandate weakened the U.S. military, and the repercussions still haven’t peaked, according to a senior U.S. Navy officer.
Navy Commander Rob Green said that while the military vaccine mandate was officially rescinded in January, it may have caused irreparable harm and a “looming” readiness crisis, he told The Epoch Times. Cmdr. Green, who is on active service and risks retaliation for his views, emphasized that his views don’t necessarily reflect those of the Pentagon or the Department of the Navy.
In his book “Defending the Constitution Behind Enemy Lines,” Cmdr. Green shared a number of compelling human stories from those who fought back against the military mandate and analyzed those actions in light of similar actions taken by America’s Founding Fathers.
From the very beginning, he argued that the mandate was “a blatantly unconstitutional order,” largely because service members were offered vaccines that were labeled as authorized for emergency use only, rather than having full Food and Drug Administration approval.
“The amount of coercion that took place to encourage service members to take the vaccine destroyed what little credibility our military leaders had left after the embarrassing Afghanistan withdrawal,” he said.
“There has been a deep betrayal of trust starting with the Global War on Terror (GWOT) to the Afghanistan withdrawal and now finally to the military vaccine mandate with the subsequent targeted removal of conscientious service members,” he said. “Senior military leaders are refusing to even acknowledge these mistakes, let alone attempt to correct them.”
“Service members who were kicked out or made the decision to leave [the military] because of the mandate are still reeling,” Cmdr. Green said. “But most people, including the media, have only focused on the tens of thousands [of service members] who either voluntarily or involuntarily separated.”
Meanwhile, “no one is focusing on the betrayal of trust for the hundreds of thousands of people who did not want to go along, but ended up with a shot in their arm anyway.”
“The initial push for an ineffective, unlawful vaccine followed by it being rescinded has resulted in a betrayal of trust beyond what words can describe,” Cmdr. Green said. “There is no doubt in my mind that recruitment and retention will suffer much more than it is now.
“Unless our leaders take radical actions to hold themselves and their peers accountable, the lack of trust in our military will result in a massive readiness crash,” he said. “It is a looming, unspoken mass exodus, and will likely come to fruition in the next three to five years, as those who felt betrayed come to the end of their enlistments or reach retirement eligibility.
“They’ve realized no one cares about the physical injuries caused [by the vaccine], or the harm to their individual rights,” Cmdr. Green said, referring to their right to refusal. In addition, he said that “as vaccine injuries become more prevalent, we are seeing the VA [Department of Veterans Affairs] refuse to acknowledge any connection to the COVID-19 vaccine mandate.”
For Cmdr. Green, “This should be no different than how we take care of service members forced to live in asbestos-infested buildings or forcibly exposed to Agent Orange.”
In a recently published op-ed on LifeSiteNews, Cmdr. Green argued that by not holding anyone accountable for those failures, military leadership can no longer be trusted.
He wrote that no one was held accountable for the 7,000 lives lost in a Global War on Terror with “no clear strategic objectives or victory criteria.” He also pointed out that no one was held accountable for the botched Afghanistan withdrawal or the 8,400 service members separated over the COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
In an effort to change Department of Defense policy, he said, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) recently slowed the process of flag and general officer promotions, holding up promotions of over 300 admirals and generals. Cmdr. Green’s op-ed noted the dichotomy in how senior military leaders handled this promotion hold, as compared to the Afghanistan and COVID-19 vaccine mandate failures.
“Instead of correcting these critical betrayals [GWOT, Afghanistan, and COVID-19 Mandate],” Cmdr. Green wrote in his op-ed, “the three service secretaries have engineered a media blitz focused exclusively on the highest-level brass and their next promotions.”
According to Cmdr. Green, until there is accountability at the highest levels, “a significant number of service members will no longer trust our uniformed and civilian leaders to have the moral courage to do the right thing, to follow the law, or to stand up for service members’ constitutional rights.”
He said, “There is so much money at stake that ‘We the People’ are going to have to force [military leadership] to admit their mistakes and do the right thing. If we fail to do this and fail to hold our leaders accountable, the recruiting crisis will just be the tip of the iceberg, and the resulting readiness crash will leave us weaker and more vulnerable than we have been since the War of 1812.
“Personnel gaps across all ships in the U.S. Fleet ballooned from 7,000 to more than 18,000 in just under two years, and the crisis is deepening as the Navy and the other services are continuing to miss recruiting targets by wide margins,” he said. “The readiness bubble is about to burst. We’re going to see a shortage [of service members] like we’ve never seen before.”
Loss of Individual Liberty
Apart from the recruiting decline and the precipitous drop in public trust, Cmdr. Green said there’s another contributing factor that’s going to be detrimental to military readiness and the security of the nation.
“Senior military leaders have become enemies of the Constitution,” he said. “They swore an oath to defend the Constitution against foreign and domestic threats.”
“[Because] the Constitution enshrines individual liberty as paramount,” he said, “the entire point of the Constitution is not to defend the government from the people but to defend the rights of individuals in the face of some future tyrannical government.”
He says, “That future is now, and those in the military who sought to trample individual rights have made themselves domestic enemies to the Constitution.” For this reason, he said, “These leaders must be resisted, and God willing, eventually held accountable.”
Leaders Prioritize Political Agendas
Senior military leadership remains focused on pushing political agendas and not on supporting and enabling individuals to be the best citizens they can be in defending the constitutional republic, he said. For example, he noted that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training is running rampant at places such as the Air Force Academy and is weakening the U.S. armed forces.
“These [DEI] programs are placing institutional problems on groups of people rather than judging each individual on their own words and actions,” Cmdr. Green said. “Ultimately, this is the destruction of the individual and individual rights in favor of grand political programs designed to coral groups of people into bins that make it easier for the government to control them.”
For the military specifically, “the current crop [of military leaders] want service members who are compliant and malleable. They want service members who are not willing to stand up for their own rights,” he said. “If they are successful in purging the military of patriots, the majority of those who remain [in service to the country] will likely be exactly what they want.”
Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Davis Younts, a military defense attorney, shares Cmdr. Green’s concerns.
“Military service in our nation is and must always be based on an Oath to support and defend the Constitution,” he stated. “Unfortunately, much of the Department of Defense has become staffed by bureaucrats and politicians rather than leaders or true warriors.
“These bureaucrats treat their uniform as a costume to be worn in front of the cameras rather than a symbol of their commitment to stand for freedom.”
He says “The trampling of religious freedom and the decision to ignore basic fundamental and inalienable rights during the pandemic caused a crisis of trust not only among active service members but among the American public as a whole.
“This crisis will only continue to worsen unless there is a renewed commitment among military leaders to stand by their oath and place a higher value and the rule of law and integrity than their pension.”
Call for Accountability
The newly confirmed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. C.Q. Brown, recently issued his first Message to the Joint Force, in which he discussed the foundation of trust required for the profession of arms.
“Trust across the force, that we will do right by each other,” he stated. “The trust of our families, that we will care for them through trial and triumph, [and that] as Chairman, I will strive every day to strengthen these bonds.”
Bradley Miller, a former U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who previously served as a battalion commander in the 101st Airborne Division, was relieved of his command in October 2021 for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine.
Like Cmdr. Green, and in contrast to Gen. Brown’s comments, Mr. Miller says he’s witnessed a betrayal of trust in senior military leadership decisions in recent years.
“Commander Rob Green has called the senior military leadership to account for their unlawful actions and they have failed to answer that call,” Mr. Miller said. “As Green has steadfastly pointed out, the Pentagon leadership has repeatedly sided against the Constitution, against the law, and against the rights of its service members.”
“Military readiness is currently in a state of freefall,” he said. “This is not in spite of the actions by DoD leaders to prevent this crash, but precisely because of the actions they have taken that have directly led to it.”
In response to an inquiry from The Epoch Times, a Pentagon official said in an email, “Our research shows that the top barriers to service are concerns about death or injury, PTSD, emotional issues, and leaving friends and family—not political issues.”
“Concerns about vaccines and ‘wokeness’ are among the least likely to be raised as reasons not to join the military.”
This article was updated to add a comment from the Pentagon.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
The USMC id being restructured for destruction, idiot CQ Brown wants to FURTHER Introduce equity over merit (equity being the latest buzzword for communist practices) and the USS Bonhomme Richard Horror and USS Connecticut Avoidable Crash and Chicom surveillance balloon overflight of North America and the presence/arrest of the Deputy CIO at the Office of the Secretary of Defense after TWENTY–ONE years of operating a dogfighting ring (and electrocuting dogs, a classic serial killer profile) is a DefCon Two alert to the end of national security!!!
No offense, but Cmdr. Green reads like a simpleton —— well intentioned, but definitely simple minded!
Sure, the high command should all be drawn–and–quartered (never thought I would embrace such barbaric responses, but they are deserved today)!
The “Afghanistan withdrawal” – sure, enacted in a most dishonorable fashion, with American military sacrificed for NO REASON, but as Cmdr. Green may have noticed, there was zero appearance of the Phantom Army of Afghanistan – were they mixed in with those al Qaeda and ISIS terrorists flown out on the first six jets to leave Kabul?!?!
DEI are communist political minder systems: why is Green parsing their definition and status?! What the bloody hell is wrong with Green?! DEI is part of the restructuring of the Pentagon and military INTO A COMMUNIST organization — how can Green not recognize this?! As I stated, a simpleton!!!
Two presidents and ONLY two presidents, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, built up, expanded, evolved and advanced national security by the further development of the US military – the others sought to destroy it, especially Bush #1, the Clintons, Bush #2, Obama, and Biden — and it was under THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION when globalist SecDef MARK ESPER implemented DEI at the Pentagon and military – this cannot be ignored!!!
TPTB seek to destroy the military from with, and they have been doing a fine job of it!