Pentagon Shadow Government Is Blocking Secretary Mattis’s Efforts

The Pentagon shadow government is blocking Secretary Mattis’s efforts to strengthen the armed forces.

We have overreaching agencies of unelected bureaucrats who have formed their own shadow governments now imperiling the new administration. Former Rep. Dennis Kucinich calls them the deep state. It’s the kind of thing you see in tinpot dictatorships.

NeverTrumper Bill Kristol sneered, “If it comes to it, he prefers the deep state to the Trump state.” The constitution be damned.

Kristol would prefer a coup. Does he understand that Obama’s plants within agencies, especially in our intelligence agencies, are working to undermine and topple the President.

We must right now turn our attention to Secretary of Defense James Mattis who was hoping to have Bob Harward at the White House but still remains alone with Obama’s staff as MacThornberry said this week.

House Armed Services Chairman Mac Thornberry is worried that the Trump administration’s slow pace getting Pentagon jobs filled — and Obama administration holdovers at DoD— may hurt plans to boost defense spending.

In a press conference Thursday, Thornberry said new Defense Secretary James Mattis is “doing a great job, but so far he doesn’t have anybody else in a Senate-confirmed position.” Thornberry fears holdover DoD staff who resisted his alarms over military readiness problems won’t change their stripes.

Thornberry is referring to the Obama shadow government still in place.

Obama administration loyalists in the Pentagon are hampering efforts to fix the military’s major readiness problem, leaving Secretary of Defense James Mattis alone in his efforts to properly equip U.S. forces, according to the chairman of the House Committee on Armed Services.

“I am concerned that … to fix these problems [it] is going to take a lot more money, and yet a lot of the folks who are coming up with the budget to fix them are the same people who have been fighting every step of the way against our efforts to fix these problems,” said Chairman Mac Thornberry during a Capitol Hill press gaggle Thursday.

“The problem is it’s Secretary Mattis alone right now,” said Thornberry, R-Texas. “So you have a number of people, political appointees and others from the Obama administration, and they have been the ones trying to deny there’s a problem. They’re well intentioned people, patriotic Americans, but it’s hard for any of us to turn 180 degrees in the other direction.”

Three weeks into the Trump administration, roughly 75 percent of political appointee jobs inside the Defense Department were vacant, and there were 16 holdovers from the Obama administration, including Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work and the three acting secretaries of the military departments.

Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, a DoD spokesman, said Mattis has given Work his “full trust and confidence” and “the budget submissions that DoD makes to the President will come from Secretary Mattis. They will reflect his thinking, and his priorities, which are to rebuild combat readiness of America’s military, while being faithful stewards of every taxpayer dollar we spend on defense.”

That’s a distraction. Nothing is getting done.

In the least, the Democrats embedded within are delaying all appointments to damage the administration at the expense of the great men and women who are serving our nation.

A report last week by The Vice Joint Chiefs of Staff highlighted our military lack of military readiness.

A lack of military readiness is pervasive across all branches and only three of the Army’s 58 brigade combat teams are ready for combat and less than half of our Air Force’s aging fleet is fight-ready.

Thornberry also said, “I think it is wrong, immoral to ask men and women to go carry out a military mission for which they are not fully equipped, and fully trained, and fully supported. And whether that is a counter-terrorism operation or a freedom of navigation operation in the south China sea, or whatever; if you ask somebody to go out there and risk their lives, you darn well better give them the best and fully support them.”

The intelligence services have already accomplished one goal – destroy Michael Flynn.

Bloomberg’s Eli Lake referred to the deep state in what he calls “The Political Assassination of Michael Flynn.“ Flynn committed no offense when he spoke with the Russian ambassador. Lake wrote, “That’s neither illegal nor improper.”

The media and the Democrats know that’s true.

It stems from the fact that the intelligence services – the deep state – do not appear to want detente with Russia. They are operating like a rogue government. This is what Bill Kristol and the Democrats prefer.

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