MRFF Advisory Board Member Brig. Gen. USAF (Ret.) Marty France Op-Ed Admonishes USAFA’s Slide Toward Partisanship and Authoritarianism
Excerpt from Op-Ed:
“…the Military Religious Freedom Foundation was founded and exists to this day—to remove the specter of religious bias from our military services. We can’t allow the same threat to flourish in the name of partisan politics for any party. […] the Academy’s military leadership MUST reassert the principle of non-partisanship among the cadets, faculty, and staff—just as all senior military leaders must do in the face of unprecedented pressure from the Trump Administration to mold the military into the President’s own praetorian guard.”
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- October 16, 2025 | 1 comment
Fall Semester, 1972. Nixon was headed for a second term. I was a fourth classman (“squat” or “doolie”) at USAFA. (I would be taking a voluntary discharge within a few months because reasons.) We were doolies and the lowest of the low, so we were required to run on a narrow strip bordering the terrazzo, the large parade/review area surrounded by dorms, as we headed to and from Mitchell (dining) Hall while 3rd, 2nd, and 1st classmen walked in a leisurely manner to and from meals at Mitchell. As we ran, since it was Fall, we had to pause and greet each upperclassman we encountered with, “Good morning/afternoon, sir! Beat [whichever school the football team was playing that week]!” After a week or so of that bullshit, the greetings changed, to: “Good morning/afternoon, sir! Beat McGovern!” I don’t know who started it, but like blue-clad sheep, every squat picked it up, and each week’s game against Colorado, Notre Dame, Army, or Navy was forgotten. The nonsense went on for a few weeks, and no one applied any critical thinking to it because, well, blue-clad sheep. One evening as we ran back to the dorms to study and get ready for the next day, an upperclassman turned to stop the parade of blue-clad morons running from Mitchell. He told us to fall out and remain where we were while he waited for a bunch more idiots to cram behind us. Finally, he angrily declared that as members of the American military, we had no right, while wearing the uniform, to publicly declare an electoral preference. He also said if McGovern won the election, we had an absolute duty to respect him as the commander in chief in the same manner we had his predecessor. He ordered us to stop with the bullshit and greet upperclassmen the traditional way. He also ordered us to circulate his order to every squat in our squadrons because he didn’t want to ever hear that shit again. So we stopped because it was the right thing to do. For years I thought that episode would have been an appropriate subject of study in the USAFA Department of Psychology.