In an interview with the Center for Security Policy’s Frank Gaffney yesterday, retired Navy Admiral James “Ace” Lyons, who is a frequent guest on Gaffney’s radio program, linked a recent string of U.S. naval collisions to Obama administration efforts to allow LGBT people to serve openly in the military and to open up more positions in the military to women, suggesting that the person responsible for one collision might have been a member of one of these “social engineering” groups.

Lyons told Gaffney that the recent deadly collisions involving the USS Fitzgerald and the USS John S. McCain were likely the result of “personnel errors” stemming from “training” and “crew makeup.”

“And by that,” he said, “I am referring to part of Obama’s social engineering mandates and the great emphasis where we’ve replaced best and brightest with diversity that rules supreme. And I find it interesting that the Navy will not release the name of the officer of the deck of the Fitzgerald, which leads me to believe it’s one of the anointed social engineering mandates.”

Gaffney asked Lyons to discuss the possibility that the Fitzgerald collision was the result of “a deliberate incident” that was “perhaps contributed to by some of the considerations that you’ve just talked about,” before telling Lyons that he had heard from unnamed military personnel that an Obama-era emphasis on “diversity training” meant that the service members in charge of these ships were unqualified.

“I’ve had more than one senior military officer tell me that they suspected that all of these personnel were highly rated in terms of their diversity training and equal-opportunity sensitivity and all of that, but may not have gotten their chops checked out in terms of navigation and seamanship,” Gaffney said.