The New Scared-Of-Science “Tattooed Warrior Ethos”
We really, genuinely, truly want to be priestly-kind.
We so want to be priestly-kind that we struggled for hours with how to write:
An “inked” crusader cross and quasi-christian images, teamed with an American flag adorned by an AR-15 assault rifle and “patriotic” proclamation tattoos do not make the man. Nor do they give him the personal integrity to face honest news reporting and real science.
And they do not give him courage!
There. We’ve said it. As priestly-kindly as we could manage.
The Stars and Strips was first produced in 1861 by a team of Union soldiers using a captured Bloomfield, Missouri newspaper plant; it was only one page and appeared four times.
An all-military staff of the American Expeditionary Force under General of the Armies John J. “Black Jack” Pershing resurrected Stars and Strips in Paris on February 8, 1918, during World War I – the “war to end all wars.” (“The” was dropped from the World War I banner.) Among the members of the team were Pvt. Harold Ross, who founded The New Yorker, and Lt. Grantland Rice, who became the nation’s first celebrated sportswriter. Publication ended after the war.
Stars and Strips made its third appearance on April 18, 1942 as a four-page weekly published in a London print shop, featuring an interview with Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall and selling for about five cents. It quickly expanded to an eight-page daily following American GIs to the battlefront. Before the war ended, Stars and Strips was publishing as many as 32 separate editions with up to 24 pages per issue and printing locations in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and the Pacific.
In that first WWII edition, General Marshall cited Pershing, the American Expeditionary Force commander:
“We have his (Pershing’s) authority for the statement that no official control was ever exercised over the matter which went into Stars and Stripes.”
It was a statement that held true until the current Secretary of Defense gave the lie to Pershing’s assurances.
While many non-military Americans have paid little or no attention to the present administration’s attack on Stars and Stripes, it is critical to understand the importance of the newspaper and its Web site - www.stripes.com - to members of the military and their families. Here’s a quick summary with all quotes and statistics from the Web site; statistics represent the period from August 2025 to July 2026:
42 million story views on the Stripes.com site
23 million active users on the main Web site.
5.8 million US weekly editions distributed in newspapers nationwide
More than one million social media users follow Stars and Stripes
228,000 digital edition views of daily print newspaper delivered to troops oversees
More than 202. million video views on Facebook Reels and Instagram
“Stars and Stripes is editorially independent of interference from outside its own editorial chain-of-command. It provides commercially available U.S. and world news and objective staff-produced stories relevant to the military community in a balanced, fair, and accurate manner. By keeping its audience informed, Stars and Stripes enhances military readiness and better enables U.S. military personnel and their families stationed overseas to exercise their responsibilities of citizenship.”
“On any given day, readers and visitors number about 1.4 million”
“The newspapers for deployed personnel are provided at no charge to servicemembers serving in harm’s way.”
It seems (and we are keeping this as clean and objective as possible) that in mid-August the outlet’s publisher Max Lederer, editor-in-chief Erik Slavin, and Middle East reporter Lara Korte were sacked by the macho-tattooed defense secretary. On Thursday, August 27, they filed a federal lawsuit alleging the Department of Defense and Secretary Pete Hegseth ““are attempting to fire Plaintiffs for speaking up as private citizens in support of the press’s freedom to cover military operations, its need to reach all servicepersons, and in retaliation for their publication of a news report on deteriorating conditions aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln during its extended tour of duty in the Mid-East” (At this writing, August 30, the firings are on hold while the federal lawsuit works its way through the courts.)
Slavin and Korte claim they were dismissed for “insubordination” allegedly committed during a CBS News interview that aired on July 5 in which they objected to potential censorship by the U.S. military.
Calendars can be messy. They list days in order. In fact, calendars list more than thirty days between the “insubordination” and the firings. How dare they!
The journalists allege that “the spark that moved [the Pentagon] to act” was an August 11 Stars and Stripes report on the conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln – then operating in the Middle East for nearly nine months.
{EDITORS’ NOTE: We won’t go into the USS Abraham Lincoln saga. If you – perhaps mercifully - don’t know about it, tell us how you got to the planet you’re on.]
The suit contends that, the day after the Lincoln article appeared, publisher Lederer was ordered to fire Slavin and Korte for their “insubordination” in the CBS interview - five and a half weeks earlier. Lederer refused and retired/resigned “because he did not want to be part of Defendants’ scheme to illegally punish Mr. Slavin and Ms. Korte for exercising their First Amendment rights,” according to the suit. Lederer was dismissed shortly after announcing his impeding retirement, effective at the end of September.
"Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom…the press."
Hmmm?!?!?
Can you hear the protests, all those voices shouting “It wasn’t Congress that fired them; it was the Defense Department!”?
Now let’s take a slight detour on our way to the United States Military Academy at West Point.
On August 30, 2023, as Category 3 Hurricane Idalia slammed ashore in Florida, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks addressed the Sustainable Infrastructure, Resilience and Climate Consortium (“Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks’ Keynote Remarks for the U.S. Military Academy (USMA) Sustainable Infrastructure Resilience, and Climate Consortium (SIRCC),” Department of Defense.):
“A question I hear often is ‘Why does the Department of Defense care about climate change?’… Climate change is a national security issue, and for the national security community, that declaration is not controversial – it’s fact… “
The American national security community first listed climate change as a threat in 2008 and, until the current presidential administration, continued working to understand that threat and what the department must do to combat it while operating in the today’s climate-changing environment.
Hicks cautioned
"You can't train for combined operations with allies and partners if the training facilities are flooded. You can't run an installation without water because you're in a drought, and you can't adequately prepare for future threats if you're occupied with urgent crises.
"The number of personnel days the National Guard spent on firefighting increased from 14,000 in fiscal year 2016 to 176,000 days in fiscal 2021. That's more than twelve-fold in just five years, and it is a major redirection of time, attention and resources.
"Those of you from or who have visited states like Arizona, Texas and Florida, you might've experienced firsthand the record-breaking temperature streaks this summer in the air and surrounding water — ripe conditions for a climate catastrophe.
“Around the world, we're also seeing how climate change is altering the global landscape, and with it, our mission.
"You understand and are concerned about how dire environmental conditions can create humanitarian crises, how these circumstances can make nations vulnerable to instability, competition and conflict, and how advancing related innovation and collaboration can ensure our national security.” (“Hicks defines need to focus DOD on climate change threats,” The Flagship/Military Newspapers of Virginia, Jim Garamone//DOD News, September 7, 2023)
Hicks was sworn in as the 35th deputy secretary of defense in February 2021 and was the first Senate-confirmed woman to serve in the role until she left the Pentagon at the end of the Biden administration in January 2025.
In his introduction to the 2024 “Department of Defense Climate Adaptation Plan, 2024-27,” Secretary of Defense (2021-2025) Lloyd Austin wrote that climate change posed strategic risks:
“Climate change fundamentally alters the conditions that shape military operations at home and around the world. At the same time, climate change is reshaping our strategic interests. As changes in the physical environment create the opportunity for well-prepared forces to secure a competitive advantage, deter aggression, and protect the United States and its interests, the Department of Defense (DOD) must both understand and adapt to the ways in which extreme weather and climate change affect our readiness and capabilities.
In the same report, the Defense Department, asserted as fact its assumption that climate change “continues to increase the demand … for military operations at home and around the world.” The report warned:
“…missions and operations are adversely impacted by climate change through amplifying operational demands on the force, degrading installations, infrastructure, and systems, and increasing health risks to Service members.” (“The US military’s fatal stance on climate change,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, August 27, 2026, Neta Crawford.)
Intellectually honest concern about climate change in the American armed forces is not new. A 1990 Naval War College study - “Global Climate Change Implications for the United States Navy” - was created in May 1990 but only publicly released on September 26, 2013 as a result of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by John Greenwald, Jr., founder of The Black Vault, a digital archive of United States government documents. Under the heading “Implications for the United States Navy,” the second through fifth sentences read:
“Two of the principle effects of climate change - - sea level rise and thermal heating on the oceans and atmosphere - - present the possibility of significant effects on the facilities, infrastructures and operations of the Navy. Although no conclusive evidence exists to prove global warning as fact, a large body of circumstantial evidence and expert opinion does exist supporting the existence of this phenomena. The impacts posed by these changes in environment are significant enough to warrant serious examination by the Navy. Nearly all areas of operational effectiveness are threatened by these environmental changes should they occur.”
[EDITORS’ NOTE” This document was internally released in the Naval War College in 1990 and is available at https://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/weather/climatechange/globalclimatechange-navy.pdf
The academies of the Armed Forces of the United States have recognized the dangers of climate change since well before any of today’s cadets and midshipman were born. It’s a good bet that many families of those midshipmen and cadets have been directly impacted by flashfloods and ravishing wildfires intensified by the effects of man-made global warming.
And the kindly priests wondered “What was the response of West Point leadership acting under the direction of the tattooed crusader and his manly team of practitioners of the ‘warrior ethos’?”.
The Guardian (“West Point’s only climate scientist fired after continuing to teach human causes of climate change,” August 27, 2026, Richard Luscombe) explains:
“The only climate scientist teaching at West Point, the US army’s military academy, was fired after he resisted an order to stop teaching about the human causes of the climate emergency, a lawsuit claims.
“Dr Adam Kalkstein, a civilian professor of geography at the New York institution, was terminated after the spring semester this year, six months after a testy meeting with Brig Gen Shane Reeves, then dean of West Point’s academic board, the court filing said.
“According to Kalkstein, who taught army cadets there for 17 years, he told the dean at a November 2025 meeting that an order to cut from the curriculum content about the human causes of climate change was immoral and potentially illegal.
“It ‘would be like trying to teach the law without being able to even mention the constitution’, he said.
“Reeves responded by ‘storming out’ of the meeting after telling Kalkstein that Donald Trump was commander in chief, and set the agenda for West Point, the lawsuit alleged…
.“…Kalkstein’s attorney, Michael Sussman, [described his client as] a conservative Republican who believes military students need to know the truth about the causes of the climate crisis as a matter of national security.
“‘He is loyal to the cadets and the academy,’ he said. ‘And to his perspective, edicts that he can’t say what’s true in a classroom is beyond his tolerance and totally counterproductive.’
“In further comments… Sussman said Kalkstein’s position was not ideological. ‘There are certainly people who, anything Donald Trump does, they want to complain about it and scream and yell about it. He’s not that guy,’ Sussman said.
“The lawsuit alleges that Kalkstein first became aware his position was under threat in May 2025, when West Point leaders announced plans to reduce civilian staffing levels, while at the same time opening a new humanities center requiring new geography teachers.
“Kalkstein’s lawsuit, filed in US district court for the southern district of New York, accuses West Point of breaching his first amendment rights to free speech.
“They offered to let him stay as a ‘term employee,’ Stars and Stripes said, and Kalkstein, fearful that colleagues would have to pick up his classes if he quit, accepted a loss of tenure and entitlement to a large severance package to stay.
“The order to ban teaching about human contributions to climate change came in September, the lawsuit said, followed by the angry meeting with Reeves a month later. Reeves retired in April after a 30-year military career…
“… Trump has flipped between calling the climate emergency ‘a hoax’ or ‘a scam,’ to admitting it exists but insisting that climate scientists are politically motivated and that the climate ‘will change back.’
“Since taking office for a second time last year he has also attempted to impose numerous cultural changes on US military institutions..
“In April last year, Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, ordered the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, to purge books found to promote diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), resulting in almost 400 being removed after review. The books were returned a month later after the Pentagon reversed course…”
We’re left with priestly wondering: Why is the tattooed Secretary of Defense so afraid of geography teachers?