The U.S. military is facing a world that turns more dangerous every day, along with the worst recruiting stretch in its history. So, what is the top brass doing? Doubling down on woke by focusing on race, sex, and climate , of course.

Here are just a few examples.

Just this month, a high-ranking officer in the U.S. Space Force used her speech at a “pride” event at the Pentagon to rail against legislation being passed in different states that ban teaching sexualized materials to young children and the mutilation or castration of minors. Lt. Gen. DeAnna Burt referred to these laws as “anti-LGBTQ+” and criticized them as the denial of “critical healthcare” to families. These commonsense laws worry Burt so much that she said she bases personnel decisions partly on them. She suffered no adverse impact for this clear foray into the nation’s political debate.

In May, President Joe Biden replaced one of the most woke heads of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ever, Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, with an Air Force general, Charles Q. Brown, that makes Milley look sedate. Milley is still famous for claiming at a 2021 hearing that he wanted to understand “white rage,” as he defended assigning readings from Ibram X. Kendi to Navy cadets. (The Navy later quietly dropped the readings.) When he was chief of staff of the Air Force, Brown signed a document calling for “aspirational” racial quotas that would cap the number of white officers at 67%. In the middle of 2020, Brown released a video about the racial violence then shaking the country that made clear he had taken the Marxist-inspired uprising as proof of racial despair in America.

The Navy, desperate to recruit more sailors, used an active-duty drag queen (transgender personnel have been allowed to serve openly in the military since Biden’s first year in office) to boost recruitment among transgender people. Joshua Kelley, who performs as “Harpy Daniels,” identifies as “nonbinary” and demands that he be addressed as “they,” participated in the Navy’s Digital Ambassador Program until three months ago.

At a March 23 hearing of the House Armed Services Committee’s Military Personnel Subcommittee, Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) repeatedly asked Gil Cisneros, Jr., undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, if he could commit to not using race as a factor when hiring or promoting. “Will you personally commit to opposing any effort to promote or recruit service members based on their race or gender? Can you commit to that, at least commit to that personally today?” Banks asked.

Cisneros refused. “To solely — to not recruit?” he responded, surprised the question was even asked. “I believe we need a diverse pool. It’s important for us to recruit members that are — that are diverse.”

The Army last year released its first climate strategy paper ever, which promises to cut greenhouse gases in half by 2030 (that is, in less than seven years) and be net-neutral by 2050. “Climate change threatens America’s security and is altering the geostrategic landscape as we know it,” Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth wrote in the report. “The time to address climate change is now.”

All this head-scratching behavior is happening in one of the greatest periods of military peril in many decades.

A shooting war between Russia and democratic Ukraine is well into its second year, with no sign of abatement and, if anything, constantly upping a dangerous geostrategic ante. Meanwhile, at the other end of the planet, China is flexing its muscle over the democratic, free island of Taiwan, which Beijing cannot abide any more than Russia can abide Ukraine.

In May, a Chinese fighter jet buzzed a U.S. Air Force jet in international waters in the South China Sea. A few days later, a Chinese warship almost collided with a U.S. Navy destroyer.

And all this is happening as the military continues to miss recruitment deadlines — fewer and fewer are enlisting, whether nonbinary, transgender, or heterosexual. One of my colleagues recently noted that the Army missed its 2022 recruitment goal by 25% in 2022 and will do so again this year. “Ditto the Air Force and Navy,” wrote Gen. Tom Spoehr.

All of this together suggests that the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines, and the Space Force have bigger problems than racial proportionalism, sexual exploration, or the search for carbon neutrality. None of these are problems that more TikTok videos by Harpy Daniels will address.

Republicans in Congress are right to be concerned . Why aren’t others?

Mike Gonzalez is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and the author of BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution .