It was last year, on June 24, when a man named Doug Stitt unwittingly tipped the Army’s losing hand.

Stitt, an otherwise obscure major general and the military personnel management director of the U.S. Army, was trying to spin his employer’s decision to allow “transgender” and gender-dysphoric individuals to “serve openly in their self-identified gender,” according to a then-new policy approved by the Army secretary. “People are the strength of our Army,” Stitt said, invoking the most mindless of clichés in defense of the policy. “Our ability to assess and retain qualified personnel provides a more diverse and stronger Army, enhancing readiness.”

Uh-huh.

What Stitt said was a load of bunk, and he knows it. Ours is still the world’s best fighting force, and it’s always been overwhelmingly young, male, and heterosexual. Given this, we’d like Stitt — or anyone else — to explain how the morale, the esprit de corps, and the warfighting capability of the U.S. Army is improved by the addition of a soldier who’s had a sex-change operation — or, to use Stitt’s words, “an effective transition.”

How, exactly, does a warrior with such a serious sexual affliction make the Army “stronger”? How does such a grievously conflicted individual improve the warfighting “readiness” and lethality of the force?

We’ll wait.

Perhaps, in this sorry age of military wokeness, the Army fears it can no longer field a suitably sized force without tapping into our nation’s rich talent pool of “transgender” warriors. But we wonder: How many young heterosexual men will be more inclined to join an Army that’s become something of a laughingstock? How many will be less inclined? We ask because we ran into an Army recruiter recently. After thanking him for his service, we asked him how recruiting was going. “It’s tough,” he said. “Really tough.”

Thus, as the world burns, the U.S. Army fiddles with a grand leftist social experiment. And it’s not just the decision to welcome and coddle “transgenders.” It’s also the decision to dedicate time, resources, and energy to train the entire Army toward a better understanding of these exceedingly rare and gifted fighters. As The Washington Free Beacon reports:

While Russia wages a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. Army is putting its soldiers through training on gender pronouns and coaching officers on when to offer soldiers gender transition surgery, according to an official military presentation on the subject.

The mandatory presentation, “Policy on the Military Service of Transgender Persons and Persons with Gender Dysphoria,” was given to officers earlier this month along with instructions for them to train their subordinates on the material. Portions of the presentation were provided to the Free Beacon by a whistleblower who was ordered to undergo the training as a high-ranking officer in the Army Special Forces.

An Army spokesman confirmed to the Free Beacon that the slides in question are part of “mandatory training” and come from an official program “used to train Army personnel on the recent changes to the DoD and Army transgender service policy.” All Army personnel, from soldiers to commanders and supervisors, are required to participate in the training by Sept. 30, 2022, according to the spokesman.

God bless that whistleblower. And here’s an idea: Perhaps he and his fellow special operators, rather than wasting precious time on a PowerPoint deck about proper pronouns and transgenderism, would be better off training for war.

But that’s just one dumb ol’ jarhead’s perspective. What do we know?