The military has suffered another COVID casualty, thanks to the manic authoritarianism of the Biden regime.
According to reports on Friday, the U.S. Navy has relieved an executive officer from duty after he refused to comply with the service’s vaccine mandate, meaning that our country just lost another experienced naval officer even as we face a potential conflict with another rising naval power in the near future, China.
Military.com reports:
A Navy commander has been fired from his job as the executive officer of a warship because he refused to get a COVID-19 vaccine as required and refused to be tested for the virus, Navy officials said Friday.
Cmdr. Lucian Kins was relieved of his duties Friday as second in command of the USS Winston Churchill, a destroyer, by Navy Capt. Ken Anderson, commander of Naval Surface Squadron 14. Officials said Kins was the first naval officer to be fired as a result of a vaccine refusal.
Navy spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Jason Fischer declined to give the precise reason why Kins was relieved of command, citing privacy concerns. Fischer, who is spokesman for the Naval Surface Force Atlantic, said the reason for the firing was that Anderson lost confidence in Kins’ ability to perform his duties after he failed to obey a lawful order.
Other officials, however, said it was because Kins refused the order to get the vaccine, and refused testing to ensure he did not have the virus.
“On December 10, 2021, Commander, Naval Surface Squadron 14, Capt. Ken Anderson, relieved Cmdr. Lucian Kins as executive officer of USS Winston S. Churchill (DDG 81) due to loss of confidence in Kins’ ability to perform his duties,” Fischer said, according to USNI News.
Mind you, it costs taxpayers a lot of money to not only educate and train a naval surface warfare officer, but more than that, it’s the loss of experience that is simply irreplaceable. Not everyone can qualify to literally captain a modern warship, so these individuals are about as rare as someone who can successfully run a Fortune 500 company (that’s right — before you complain about how much a CEO makes, try imagining whether you could run a multibillion dollar corporation).
“The Pentagon has made the vaccine mandatory for all service members, and Navy personnel had until late November to get their shots or request exemptions. Thousands of service members have asked for religious exemptions, but so far none of the military services have approved one,” The Associated Press reported.
“Fischer said Kins has been reassigned to the staff of Naval Surface Squadron 14,” the AP added.
“More than 5,500 active-duty sailors are still unvaccinated, according to a Friday update from the Navy about COVID-19 vaccinations. The 5,731 sailors who are considered unvaccinated include those who are currently in the process of becoming fully vaccinated, those who already received exemptions and those who have still refused the vaccine,” USNI News added.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters on Friday that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has left it up to each service branch to determine how it will enforce the vaccine mandate.
“Those sorts of actions are not being handled centrally by the department at this level, at the secretary’s level,” Kirby told the press. “The service secretaries and the service chiefs are in charge of the way they are implementing the mandatory vaccine requirements.
“And each of them have to do that in accordance with their own manpower, their own resources, their own operational requirements, and they’re doing that,” he added.
Even if just a fraction of the entire military force of just over 2 million men and women refuse the vaccine, Americans stand to lose tens of thousands of members, most of whom are very experienced and not easily replaced.
So, we have to ask the Biden regime: At a time when we face a rising Russia and belligerent China, is this mandate and resultant loss of personnel really worth it?
