Weak, even for the USAF

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh announced a servicewide health and welfare inspection starting today to identify offensive materials in work spaces.

Oh good googly moogly.

Of all the things to say and do in order to try to address sexual assault, this has to be one of the most mindless and useless things that one could do.

All this screams to me is, "We have no clue what to do, or we don't have the moral courage to really go after the issue ... so we'll do this instead."

“In my view, all this stuff is connected. If we’re going to get serious about things like sexual assault, we have to get serious about an environment that could lead to sexual harassment. In some ways this stuff can all be linked,” Welsh said Dec. 4. “I’m not saying every case is linked, but it could be linked, and why would we want to tolerate there even being a chance of that?”

Let's fisk this a bit. 
1. "In my view, all this stuff is connected." - or ... "I am doing this on just a hunch. I don't have any research or facts to justify this. I'm just winging in on what makes me feel that I am doing something, and in any event, some GS-15 harpy with a PhD in gender studies recommended this, and I want her off my back so I can get back to doing things I think I am actually paid to do." 
2. "If we’re going to get serious about things like sexual assault, we have to get serious about an environment that could lead to sexual harassment." - or ... "I refuse to ask my JAGs to do any kind of regression analysis on who is committing sexual crimes in the service so I can, you know, look for common threads. Even if I did, I'm not going to be the one to publish it. Stuff in there I just don't want to know. Must be something else to hand this on ... ahhh ... you see, people don't hold women down, rip their clothes off, beat them up a bit, and then violate them in the most personal way possible - warping their view of men and sexuality for the rest of their lives. No, environments that make unattractive women uncomfortable about their body image do. It is much easier to blame inanimate objects for the actions of humans than to address the evil that people do. I like reading entrails to predict the future. That works too." 
3. "In some ways this stuff can all be linked," - or ... "Have I put enough passive voice qualifiers in here? I don't want anyone to be able to measure progress, I just want credit for doing something. In some ways, everything is related to a butterfly in the Amazon fluttering its wings anyway, right?" 
4. “I’m not saying every case is linked, but it could be linked, and why would we want to tolerate there even being a chance of that?” - or ... "I will now explain to you the importance of the airspeed of unladen swallows when carrying coconuts."

 

As the father of daughters, if this is the man they have to look to in order to minimize their chance of being attacked by a sexual predator ... and I want them working somewhere else.

This is not serious. Start a no holds barred demographics regression analysis of convicted offenders and have a talk based on that, and then I'll know you are serious.

Wait ... those studies have already been done. I've actually had a JAG show me one back in the late '90s. Yes ... its there ...