The Silent Betrayal: How a Bad System—and Blind Leaders—Drove Us Astray

Previously published on The Whirl of ReOrientation By Brian "Ponch" Rivera

I’m a first-generation college graduate, the first military officer in my family, and a proud Mexican American of Indigenous Native American descent—someone who defied odds to serve a nation I swore to defend. Four years ago, as a U.S. Navy Reserve Captain, I stood three years from a critical milestone: eligibility to retire as an O-6 under the three-year rule, requiring officers to serve at least three years in a grade above O-4 for full benefits. That clock, ticking toward a March 2024 retirement, locked me into silence through a storm of systemic constraints.

We don’t have a broken military because of bad leaders—we have a bad system. But we do need to purge those who don’t get it: leaders blind to complexity theory, devoid of professional development, and who “worked” the system to be somebody. From 2020 to 2024, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), mandatory COVID-19 vaccines, extremism training, and retirement rules twisted behaviors, straying us from our oath to the Constitution. By examining constraints through the lens of complexity theory, I’ll reveal how this system—and the clueless leaders it props up—stifled truth and trust, pushing me and countless others into complicity, and why both demand a radical overhaul.

According to G?del’s Incompleteness Theorems, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics one cannot determine the character or nature of a system within itself. Moreover, attempts to do so lead to confusion and disorder.

Boyd’s Fork: My Breaking Point

John Boyd, the OODA loop mastermind and the most famous Pentagon “Maverick”, warned we can’t see a system’s nature from within. To those he mentored, he also posed a choice: be somebody or do something. I chose the former, and it cuts deep. My family had no college degrees or officers before me—my Mexican American and Indigenous roots fueled my rise to Captain on sheer grit. But in late 2018, 15 months before COVID, the system faltered me. Up for a command role, a boss botched the Command Selection Board paperwork. My name wasn’t on the list. I confronted them; they lied, saying it wasn’t needed. In time, that same boss—managerially inept—topped a promotion list over me. Merit didn’t win; DEI’s identity push, a growing constraint, did. As a Mexican American who climbed without handouts, it burned.

Boyd’s fork loomed: speak out, risking my O-6 retirement, or stay quiet to be somebody. Complexity theory reveals how constraints—rules, norms, incentives—shape behaviors by designing the conditions and context that raise or lower barriers to the currencies—information, value, trust—flowing through the system. The 20-year retirement system, coupled with the three-year rule I was chasing in 2021, tethered me to silence, choking my voice to preserve my stake. Three years from eligibility, I bent under that weight.

The System Tightens: 2020–2021

Then 2021 slammed us. The illegal COVID vaccine mandate crashed down. I’d been here before—22 years earlier, I endured the illegal Anthrax vaccine mandate in the U.S. military, a shitshow that taught me top-down edicts can’t be trusted. I dug into mRNA vaccines, and my research screamed red flags: risks like myocarditis, a flimsy Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) with no long-term data, and mandates from military brass that mirrored the Anthrax overreach—illegal without a real emergency or informed consent. To meet the mandate, I opted for Johnson & Johnson, figuring it was a safer dodge to stay compliant. But at home, within my span of control, I drew the line—my two girls weren’t touching the mRNA shots. Friends called me a conspiracy nut, my kids got flak at school, and now? Today, I look like a leader who shielded his team—my family—from a system hell-bent on jabbing them. Challenge the mandate in the U.S. Navy, though? No way. Thirty months from meeting the three-year rule for O-6 retirement, I zipped it. As a reservist with the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), I pulled stints in the Pentagon during the height of the plandemic. We kept six feet apart, masked up, and refrained from challenging the status quo. After hours, we’d meet up at a restaurant across the street—no masks, shoulder-to-shoulder. Inside the Pentagon, we played the game, exchanging looks above our masks that screamed, “This is fucking stupid,” but stayed silent, pretending to ingest the Pentagon’s woke mind virus propaganda. Mostly O-5s and O-6s, we were hooked on the three-year rule, careerists towing the line. The mandate crushed dissent; 8,000 got the boot, exemptions shot down flat. The system didn’t reward mavericks—it punished them.

Extremism training hit post-January 6, a vague heuristic tagging dissent as suspect amid a witch-hunt atmosphere. Five million man-hours swapped tactics for ideology, stifling talk—sailors self-censored politics, vaccine gripes, even leadership woes, fearing “extremist” labels that could tank careers. Meanwhile, people like my former boss, with clear surface diversity, thrived under this fog; stellar leaders I knew—commanding officers of aircraft carriers, proven in combat—got sidelined, their competence overshadowed by DEI’s obsession with optics over results. As a first-gen Mexican American officer who earned every step, it felt like a betrayal of my own path.

These constraints—DEI’s norms, vaccines’ rules, extremism’s policing, and retirement’s dual leash (20 years and three-year rule)—wove a suffocating web. Information flow died. Strong leaders clammed up, fearing reprisal; I was one of them. I chose pension over principle, three years from the finish line in 2021, straying from the Constitution I’d sworn to defend.

Emergence of Silence: A System’s Rigging

Complexity theory reveals how constraints interplay, driving emergent behaviors. These four—DEI, vaccines, extremism, and retirement rules—fused into a bad system—not bad leaders—silencing us. DEI skewed rewards, vaccines enforced obedience, extremism cast suspicion, and retirement rules locked us in. In 2022, I passed word to a senior Reserve leader: veterans and active-duty locally didn’t want their kids serving. His reply—“One-sided… the sky isn’t falling”—brushed me off, followed by, “Military service is hard… and it isn’t for everyone, nor do we want it to be.” I knew then he was compromised, he’d guzzled the “woke” Kool-Aid, dismissing real dissent to parrot the system’s diversity-over-duty line—and I saw the institution I’d served rotting under that haze. I had to get out. Recruitment tanked 41,000 in 2023, proving my point, but he, too, was bound, clinging to rank over truth.

Boyd’s trinity (G?del, Heisenberg, Second Law of Thermodynamics) rang true: from within, leaders cannot see the rot. The system turned me—a first-gen, Mexican American, Native officer who’d beaten odds—into a muted cog. Psychological safety, the freedom to speak without ruin, collapsed. DEI bred identity distrust, vaccines punished nonconformity, extremism chilled candor, and the three-year rule, ticking toward 2024, dangled survival for compliance. My boss’ 2018 rise, my 2021 silence, that senior leader’s denial—we weren’t weak; the system was rigged.

The Blind Leading the Blind

The system’s bad enough, but some leaders make it worse—those who don’t grasp complexity theory, skip professional development, and game the rules to be somebody. In 2018, I got a leading complex adaptive system thinker to brief a large group of Navy flag officers. His post-meeting verdict to me: “50% of those people are fucking idiots. The ones who got it came from the aviation, submarine, and medical communities.” The rest? Clueless—promoted not for understanding systems but for working them. That was 2018. Fast forward to today, and it’s worse: people like my former boss, who flubbed my paperwork and topped the O-6 list, may now be wearing stars on their collars. These are the leaders who nod through extremism training, enforce vaccine mandates without question, and let retirement rules gag dissent—because they don’t see the web they’re caught in, and never will.

Straying from the Oath

This bad system—and its blind stewards—drifted us from our oath. As a Mexican American with Indigenous roots, I know oaths—my ancestors honored them through genocide and hardship. Yet I failed mine, choosing retirement over resistance in 2021, retiring in 2024 with my O-6 retirement intact but my duty compromised. The system didn’t just silence me; it silenced a generation of officers—good leaders trapped by bad design, led by some who don’t even try to understand it. We stopped defending liberty for all, bowing to a machine prioritizing identity, compliance, and optics over merit and mission.

Purge the Blind, Fix the System

This isn’t just about a bad system—it’s about leaders too blind to fix it. Complexity theory warns over-constraint kills adaptability; we’re less ready now, not more. Recruitment craters, trust frays, the Constitution fades as our guide. We don’t have bad leaders across the board but we must purge those who don’t get complexity, who shirk professional growth, who “worked” the system to be somebody. My vaccine silence three years from the rule, that senior leader’s denial—we’re symptoms of a rigged game they perpetuate. Dismantle constraints that reward being over doing, and boot the clueless who coasted to the top. I sued pronouns in jest, but the real fight is remaking a system easier to join than fix. My Mexican American and Native grit got me here; they demand I call this out. The military’s soul, and the Constitution it serves, depend on it.

Stay tuned to No Way Out and here on The Whirl as we gear up to explore what’s really inside theConstitution. Do our military leaders even grasp what they’re swearing to defend—or are they too lost in the system’s muck to care?