(The Epoch Times)—The Department of Defense (DOD) is looking to restructure current promotion systems to ensure that personnel directly engaged in military and combat operations get top positions, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said in an announcement posted to X on July 20.
“America’s sons and daughters who serve in our military deserve the best leaders commanding them, which is why we need to reform the promotion system at DOD, how we get those leaders,” Hegseth said.
Stuart Scheller, senior adviser to the DOD undersecretary in personnel and readiness, who joined Hegseth in the announcement, has been tasked with “looking at the entirety of the selection and retention process for our military’s officer corps,” Hegseth said.
This includes training recruits in professional military education, evaluation of officers, promotions, and command selections, the defense secretary said.
“We need to have officers who understand where their compass is. They’re not risk-averse. They’re not playing the game. They’re not simply checking the box to get to the next level, which creates all the wrong incentives. We’re reviewing the whole thing, because we’re here to make institutional change that brings warfighters to the top,” he said.
“And this is a historic opportunity under President Trump, who gives us the shield to do these kinds of things in the department, so that we preserve it for generations to come.”
After President Donald Trump was sworn into office in January, the DOD began moving on three key initiatives—reestablishing deterrence, rebuilding the military, and restoring warrior ethos, Hegseth said.
“The results so far? Distractions like DEI, CRT, social justice, politically correct stuff—gone. Focus on standards that are high, gender neutral, equal, and unwavering. We’ve got unprecedented recruitment numbers, and bad actors like Iran and the Houthis understand that when President Trump talks, he means what he says,” Hegseth said.
Hegseth said this was only a “small part” of the changes in the U.S. military under the Trump administration and that the reforms have “only just begun.”
On Jan. 20, the first day of his second term in office, Trump issued a presidential action titled “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.”
The order blamed the Biden administration for forcing “illegal and immoral discrimination programs, going by the name ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI), into virtually all aspects of the Federal Government, in areas ranging from airline safety to the military.” Trump ordered an end to such practices.
Trump then signed another presidential action on Jan. 27 titled “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness.”
The order stated that people who express a false “gender identity” cannot “satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service.”
“For the sake of our Nation and the patriotic Americans who volunteer to serve it, military service must be reserved for those mentally and physically fit for duty,” it said.
Following the order, Hegseth issued a policy on Feb. 26 clarifying that applicants for service in the military with gender dysphoria are incompatible for rendering such services.
And in March, a Pentagon spokesperson said the DOD had identified more than $80 million in savings through the Department of Government Efficiency initiative, with some of the funding having been dedicated to DEI and climate action projects.
Meanwhile, in a July 20 X post, Scheller uploaded a memorandum issued by the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness on June 20.
The memo, issued to secretaries of the military departments, was about evaluating procedures related to the selection and promotion of military officers.
The office would assess current programs and policies related to the matter, said the memo, adding that “objective standards and measures should be at the forefront of the promotion and selection process.”
Four areas are being covered in the assessment: Current performance evaluations across military service and the objective markers associated with these evaluations, current processes at promotion selection boards, officer development processes, and the impact of professional military education on assessing officers.
“Talent management of the U.S. military officer corps is a top priority, and this review will provide valuable feedback to the Services and to my office concerning how to enhance the lethality of the force. We must ensure that our promotion and selection process identify and select the best talent in our ranks,” the memo said.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.