Call it subtraction by addition.

The woke senior leaders of the U.S. Navy, faced with a stubborn recruiting shortfall and apparently having embraced their inner Village People, are now giving new life to that perverse homoerotic stereotype. How? By enlisting the help of a drag queen “influencer” to help inspire new recruits to join up.

Yep, the branch whose storied history includes battles such as Lake Erie, Midway, Okinawa, and Samar, and whose heroes include the likes of John Paul Jones, Oliver Hazard Perry, Butch O'Hare, Ernest E. Evans, Tom Norris, and every last member of Torpedo Squadron 8, thinks there’s a large and untapped pool of RuPaul wannabes just waiting to swear an oath and fight for their country. As the Daily Caller reports:

The Navy brought on an active-duty drag queen to participate in a pilot program aimed at reaching a wider audience through popular social media platforms as the military faces severe recruiting woes, a Navy spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Yeoman 2nd Class Joshua Kelley, stage name Harpy Daniels, announced the Navy invited him to become the first “Navy Digital Ambassador” in a November 2022 social media post, highlighting his journey from performing on deck in 2018 to becoming a “leader” and “advocate” of people who “were oppressed for years in the service.”

Who on earth thinks even our woefully woke military will attract more fighters than it repulses with idiotic stunts like this? For every Harpy Daniels maven who raises his right hand to enlist, we’ll guarantee there are a hundredfold would-be warriors who are thinking, I’d rather change bedpans.

Does the Navy ever keelhaul folks? Asking for a retired Corpsman friend.

As the Daily Caller continues: “[Kelley] first started performing on ships after a sanctioned MWR (Morale, Welfare and Recreation) lip syncing competition in 2017 while deployed on the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier, Herzog wrote. Kelley ‘continues to slay in performances that boost morale and show support for LGBTQ+ service members.’”

What must The Gipper be thinking?

On the other hand, we can practically hear Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin now: B-b-but, but, Harpy has more than 1,300,000 likes on TikTok!

Or perhaps that’s Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley.

Sadly, this isn’t the Navy’s first such dalliance with wokeness. As The Federalist reports: “In May 2021, then-Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Harker released a memo outlining an action plan to promote DEI in the Navy. The document instructed the Navy’s assistant secretary and chief diversity officer to ‘lead and oversee all DEI efforts across the Department to synchronize key policies and initiatives … and to develop a strategy to advance DEI across the enterprise.’”

Heavens to Betsy, let’s be sure we have enough safe spaces. Let’s be sure to use inclusive language and proper pronouns. Let’s be sure to acknowledge the scientific falsehood that men can menstruate. And by all means, let’s not deadname anyone.

As a retired Marine, we take no satisfaction in calling out a fellow service branch — especially the one that dutifully drops us off at every battlefront, the one that softens up the enemy with naval gunfire, and the one that trains, equips, and supplies us with our beloved Corpsmen — or corpse men, as Barack Obama would say.

Nope, no satisfaction whatsoever, not when we see what’s become of our fighting forces and the innate urge of our young men to beat a path to the nearest recruiter’s office.

We’ve repeatedly reported on these issues of readiness and recruitment since the earliest days of the Biden administration and its disgraceful military-wide “white supremacy” stand-down. And with only 23% of the age-group demographic being qualified for military service — because the remaining 77% are ineligible due to obesity and criminality and assorted other physical-fitness and mental-health limitations — the U.S. military can ill afford this continuing self-inflicted assault on its brand and its reputation.

As the Real Marketing Geniuses at Anheuser-Busch might ask: What could go wrong?

Indeed, what could go wrong?