By Captain Tom Burbage, USN, ret; USNA graduate
President, The Calvert Task Group

In June 1965 I raised my right hand in Tecumseh Court along with about 1400 other soon to be Midshipmen and took an Oath. While we may not have understood every word of the oath, we took it freely and without reservation.

That Oath tied us inextricably to the Constitution of the United States and all it stands for.

Every military officer has taken that same Oath as have all members of our three branches of Government. Our Congress, the Legislative branch responsible for enacting the laws that define us, our White House, the Executive branch charged with executing those laws and the Judicial branch, established to settle points of contention.

That Oath is to “protect and defend” our Constitution, and is taken without exception, every year and with every election. One Oath is different. The Founders were prescient enough to expand the Oath for the elected President with the additional word “preserve”- “preserve, protect and defend”. They felt it was important enough to write that oath into the Constitution.

That Oath is to our Constitution, not to an ideology, not to an Institution and not to any individual.

We are a Constitutional Republic. We elect representatives to protect and defend our individual interests. We are not a pure Democracy based on the collective vote of a population.

Pure Democracies tend to have many parties with different interests and tend to form coalition governments composed of several different perspectives to gain a majority. History has shown that pure Democracies evolve into dictatorships.

In some cases, Democracies eventually lead to dominance of a single individual or party when the Democratic process becomes corrupted because it does not track back to a fundamental charter. Those democracies have historically tended to fail after about 200 years and we hear many references today that “our Democracy” is doomed to the same fate–it’s time for the American ideal to fail.

But the great American experiment to implement a Constitutional Republic is not necessarily subject to the same failure criteria. That may be our fundamental issue today.

Is our Constitutional Republic strong enough to resist the suicidal tendencies of other Democracies? Those same tendencies are clearly hard at work within our current administration.

There are clearly forces at work to fundamentally change America. It is difficult to imagine that the impact of open borders will not fundamentally change our American identity. We are a generous nation, despite the many subcultures that seem to want more.

Overwhelming our welfare system with the huge influx of illegal immigrants seems to be an objective of the current administration. It is only one of many strategies of the Marxist ideology transformation underway. There are many other examples.

The purity of our election processes has clearly been compromised.

It is equally clear that there is a reemergence of racial discord, proving once again that the financial objective of exploiting racial injustice far exceeds the supply of “white supremacy”.

Dividing the country along the lines of the oppressed and the oppressors, most conveniently done along racial lines, is well underway.

None of these are aligned with our Constitution. How does that happen? I thought we all took an Oath.

Why are we tolerating the current path our country seems to be on?

To many, especially those that have sacrificed much to defend that Constitution, there are now many who recited the words of the Oath but viewed it as a non-binding commitment. There does not seem to be an allegiance to defend our nation against all enemies, both Foreign and Domestic. Their true Oath seems to be to an Institution or an Ideology, not to our American Constitution.

Most bureaucracies are very slow to change. When they are infiltrated by non-believers, they are even slower.

American fundamental beliefs are now under threat. Faith, Family and Country, the three fundamentals of our Constitutional Republic, are all under attack.

The unity of the American way is now being surgically divided by Societal and Corporate initiatives incentivized to “Woke up America”.

To anyone with an American pulse, the country is on a path to fundamental change and the nefarious forces at work are evident.

The country has been infected and it has been taking place over many years. Like most diseases, the infection started slowly but it has now become life threatening.

So, what do we do, as a nation of Patriots?

To preserve our Constitutional Republic, fidelity to the American Oath must be renewed. Forces that are trying to fundamentally change our nation to one party rule must be rejected. That would spell the end of America.

We must never forget we are a Constitutional Republic and the Oath is clear and unambiguous. Those that take it need to be held accountable to defend and protect it, and in the case of the top office, to preserve it.

Tom Burbage is a Naval Academy graduate, former Navy Test pilot and industry leader. He is working with a group of like minded individuals concerned with the ongoing movement to fundamentally change the focus of our military and specifically our Service Academies.

First published on Armed Forces Press