Today is the 247th birthday of the US Navy–the absolute backbone of US power.

Happy birthday, Navy! We love you guys! And thank all you sailors for your service!

Lots of virtue signalers on Twitter are wishing the Navy a happy birthday, but unfortunately they have no idea what a US Navy ship looks like. The interns in charge of their Twitter feeds were told to produce a nice tweet, so they cruised the stock photo library and came up with this:

A number of affiliated media outlets used this as a template, putting their logo on the tweet and sending it out. Nice gesture, right?

Not quite. A closer look reveals this:

Brilliant. But what would you expect from interns whose experience with military matters is playing Call of Duty, right?

But wait! There’s more!

and this:

The US Navy deserves better than this.

What is striking is not how sloppy the TV stations were. We have come to expect that sort of thing from the news media, whose fact checking skills are legendary.

It’s that US government agencies are just as sloppy. When Customs and Border Protection is wishing the Navy “happy birthday” they should have the intelligence to do so with actual US Navy ships, or even, perhaps, US sailors who form the actual backbone of the Navy.

And how hard is this, really? Take a random photograph of a carrier group and chances are that the ships will be American. You would have to work to find another powers’ ships.

I never served. The closest I came was my focus on security studies as a second field in grad school. But even I know what a Navy ship looks like, and more importantly know that the US would not be a world power and the guarantor of world trade without the Navy. All our armed services are vital components of our overall defense strategy, but without the Navy our tanks would be immobile and the Air Force would be disarmed once they leave our shores. World trade would grind to a halt, and China would eventually be the superpower determining how things are done in commerce.

It really isn’t too much to ask for a little respect and gratitude for the hard work and risk taking.