The warriors who defend this country must have their votes counted. That requires two things. The first is access. They need the time, the training, and the assistance to register and cast a ballot from wherever the country sends them. The second is protection. Their votes must not be diluted by overseas civilian ballots cast under rules Congress never wrote.

The Pentagon has failed on both counts. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is correcting that.

Start with access. In 2010 and 2011 I served as an infantry rifle platoon leader in Afghanistan. We operated from a remote combat outpost on the Pakistani border, fighting the Taliban and the Haqqani terror network. Those were the deadliest years of the war.

I also ran the Federal Voting Assistance Program for my unit. My soldiers registered to vote, received their ballots, and cast them from that outpost. Then we went back on patrol. If a rifle platoon can do that under fire, almost any unit can do it anywhere.

No one asked me to increase turnout. I was not permitted to. It was common for Army units to pay more attention to officer and NCO association dues than to whether their troops had ballots in the mail. Leaders treated voting as a political activity rather than a civic duty. No one at the Pentagon decided to disenfranchise servicemembers. It happened anyway, one deployment at a time.

Pete........

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