By Elaine Donnelly
President, Center for Military Readiness
The Center for Military Readiness (CMR) has submitted a formal statement to the Defense Advisory Committee on Diversity & Inclusion (DACODAI), one of several Pentagon committees that advocate for race-conscious “diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) mandates.
The 21-page CMR statement tracks the history of progressive and extreme social policies in the military. The statement also challenges members of the DACODAI to conduct an objective reassessment of questionable premises that underlie divisive DEI policies.
These include the use of arbitrary bureaucratic categories for purposes of racial discrimination to meet DEI quotas, and the wisdom of relying on civilian business consultants whose recommendations are not consistent with the U.S. Constitution or sound principles of military culture.
CMR’s statement also draws connections between deeply flawed social policies that are contributing to the ongoing recruiting crisis, weakening America’s armed forces, undermining morale, and degrading public support for the All-Volunteer Force:
The full CMR Statement and its supporting documents, summarized in this article, sets forth abundant historic and current information about DEI-induced problems that Congress and the American people cannot ignore.
In the Pentagon, color-consciousness has replaced color-blindness. This is happening at a time when compelling evidence suggests that meritocracy, non-discrimination, and the needs of the military must be restored as paramount values.
CMR’s Statement to the DACODAI explains why current DEI mandates, which take progressive policies to “woke” extremes, should be reviewed and changed at the highest levels to restore sound priorities.
1. 2011 MLDC Report Presaged Radical, Woke Change
Gen. Lester Lyles, USAF (Ret.), who chaired the 2011 Military Leadership Diversity Commission (MLDC) is now chairing the current Defense Advisory Committee on Diversity and Inclusion. The MLDC Report and a collection of Issue Papers appear on the website of the DACODAI, which appears to be picking up where Gen. Lyles’ previous diversity advisory committee left off. Even the logo design of the two advisory committees is the same, except for the name.
The 1992 Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces, on which CMR President Elaine Donnelly served, represented a wide variety of views. Early in the year-long process, the Commission adopted a resolution setting forth a clear standard of review that was applied when considering issues affecting women in all branches and communities of the military:
“Equal opportunity (EO) in the military is important, but if there is a conflict between equal opportunity and the needs of the military, the needs of the military must come first.”
In contrast, the 2011 MLDC Final Report shifted priorities away from meritocracy, non-discrimination, and military necessity, adopting a mission statement that endorsed diversity, equity, and inclusion as paramount goals.
Attempts to create a military “reflective of the Nation we serve,” followed by a series of Obama and Biden Administration Executive Orders, have given rise to a powerful Diversity Industrial Complex in the Pentagon, directed by a small army of DoD and service branch DEI commissions, working groups, task forces, and advisory committees, including the DACODAI.
MLDC recommendations established a new paradigm that, in essence, turned priorities upside down – a concept that could be summarized as follows:
“Military readiness and mission accomplishment are important, but if there is a conflict between military readiness and percentage-based “diversity,’ diversity must come first.”
Inverted priorities quickly morphed into the DEI slogan that is constantly repeated in Defense Department documents and reports: “Diversity is a strategic (or operational) imperative.”
With or without the “E” for Equity or “A” for Accessibility, it is long past time to examine the premises underlying both the MLDC and DACODAI Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) agendas.
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The MLDC Repudiated Color-Blindness in Personnel Decisions
Members of the MLDC approved several controversial recommendations that their Final Report admitted would redefine “fair treatment” and be difficult to understand. For example:
“In particular, although good diversity management rests on a foundation of fair treatment, it is not about treating everyone the same. This can be a difficult concept to grasp, especially for leaders who grew up with the EO-inspired mandate to be both color and gender blind.” (emphasis added throughout)
When the Department of Defense abandoned a colorblind equal opportunity paradigm focusing on merit, competence, and qualifications, it traded that concept for one of unequal treatment based on color consciousness.
This MLDC recommendation was not consistent with every military officer and enlisted person’s oath to “support and defend the Constitution.” Several Supreme Court decisions have made it clear that the Constitution guarantees equal protection of the law and incorporates a colorblind approach to race.
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Chief Diversity Officers Determine Careers
The MLDC also called for the appointment of a high-level “Chief Diversity Officer” (CDO) empowered “to ensure a sustained focus on diversity and diversity imperatives.” Over time, CDOs and other enforcement mechanisms have been extended to all branches of the service.
This infrastructure of DEI power bases conveys the message to all personnel that at every step of their careers – from recruitment, command assignments, to promotions, particularly to 3- and 4-star rank and service chief levels – “reporting tools” would be used to achieve “diversity metrics” (another name for quotas).
2. The Military Cannot be Run Like Civilian Businesses
The 2011 MLDC Report stated several times that the committee had relied on corporate business consultants for guidance on diversity. This may explain the MLDC Report’s astonishing call for the scrapping of “cultural assimilation” (treating everyone the same) in basic training, in order to replace “warfighting standards of the past” with “inclusion” as the “norm.”
This proposal was simply absurd. Winning on the battlefield requires trained, cohesive, and lethal combat units, unified in support of comrades in arms to accomplish assigned missions.
The MLDC Report cited no credible evidence in support of this radical idea, other than a 1996 Harvard Business Review article by David A. Thomas and Robin J. Ely. The article, which had nothing to do with the military, analyzed various experiences of insurance and consulting companies, banks, and law firms and offered eight “preconditions” for achieving diversity.
The MLDC should have recognized that that the military already excelled in six of the eight recommendations for complying with diversity mandates, but two of the authors’ eight “preconditions” were unworkable in the unique context of military operations.
The military, for example, cannot be run as the “relatively egalitarian” organization that the Harvard Business Review authors recommended. Uniformed personnel must clearly understand the chain of command, the need for obedience to lawful orders, and the subordination of self-interests to the mission.
Second, the authors’ recommended culture of “openness,” “debate,” and “constructive conflict on work-related matters” is inappropriate in an institution that must foster cohesion, which is properly defined as mutual trust for survival in battle. Cohesion is critically important in preparing and motivating soldiers to overcome personal survival instincts in executing orders to close with and destroy an enemy force in combat.
Abandoning merit and equal treatment for unequal treatment based on superficial stereotypes may produce racial “diversity,” but only at the expense of unit cohesion and the unity of purpose needed to accomplish dangerous missions. Indeed, such practices have already eviscerated principles that underlie unit cohesion and morale.
The MLDC nevertheless pressed for race-based discrimination to achieve “diversity metrics” and “equity focused goals” (quotas), while acknowledging that “not treating everyone the same” would heighten “new tensions” in the ranks. This prediction, unfortunately, has proven correct.
Now we are seeing intense debates about “wokeism in the military,” defined as progressive policies taken to extremes and imposed with coercion, even if it hurts the institution.
3.National Security Does Not Depend Upon Incoherent and Irrational Stereotypes
The Diversity Industrial Complex that has grown within the Pentagon is pointedly ignoring principles of non-discrimination that the Supreme Court upheld last year in the context of higher education. (Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) vs. Harvard & University of N. Carolina)
The military was not a party in that 2023 case, but the Department of Justice represented the Defense Department in supporting racial discrimination in higher education, including ROTC programs. Echoing an unsupported slogan that Pentagon officials use all the time – “Diversity is our strength” – the Solicitor General claimed that practices that separate people into racial categories are critical to our nation’s ability to survive on the battlefield of the future.
The Supreme Court, however, did not hesitate to apply its landmark ruling to ROTC programs at Harvard and UNC. The Court also found that superficial categories such as Black, White, Native American, etc. are “imprecise. . . overbroad . . . arbitrary . . . undefined . . . underinclusive . . . incoherent . . . [and] irrational stereotypes.
The Justices noted that the six categories in question (recently increased to seven) were devised by federal bureaucrats, writing in the Federal Register back in 1978. The same bureaucrats cautioned others that their racial and ethnic categories “should not be interpreted as being scientific or anthropological in nature, nor should they be viewed as determinants of eligibility for participation in any Federal program.”
Despite this clear and unequivocal warning, the DoD’s senior military leadership – people with stars on their shoulders, medals on their chests, and braid on the bill of their caps – and who, in many instances graduated from our nation’s elite military academies, keep telling us that these unscientific, incoherent, and irrational stereotypes are critical to our national security!
Skin color or ethnicity should be no more relevant in evaluating performance than hair color. DEI ideology remains unproven and illogical, but its harmful effects are becoming increasingly apparent every day.
4. DEI Programs Are Weakening Our Military
The following examples demonstrate how trust and support for the All-Volunteer Force, and elements of operational readiness, have eroded in the DEI obsessed military of today.
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The Recruiting Crisis
A detailed analysis of recruiting data indicates that discriminatory policies are hurting the military as an institution. For several years, the Army, Navy and Air Force have struggled to meet recruiting goals.
Examining the data closely, Military.com and the Daily Caller reported that minority recruitment has remained steady or increased, but a steep decline in white recruits is almost entirely responsible for the recruiting crisis.
In the Army, for example, 44,042 new white recruits in FY 2018 accounted for 56.4% of the total. In FY 2023, that number plummeted to 25,070, or 44.0% of the total. Over the same period, Black and Hispanic Army recruits increased from 19.6% and 17.2%, respectively, to 23.5%.
Similar patterns of white recruit losses developed across all branches of the armed services. In the Navy, for example, the number of white recruits fell from 24,343 in FY 2018 to 18,205 in FY 2023, accounting for an overall drop of about 9,000 new recruits.
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Pilot Shortages
DEI equity goals to increase non-white pilots may have been a factor pushing mid-career pilots with families to leave the Air Force and to take jobs flying for commercial airlines instead.
On August 9, 2022, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall and then-Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown, Jr. co-signed a memorandum confirming the Air Force’s intent to reduce the percentage of white male officers from 64% to 43%.
In effect, the Air Force told a large cohort of officers, most of them white males, that they were no longer wanted. Not surprisingly, in 2022 the Air Force found itself with a critical shortage of pilots. The situation increases stress on everyone else and leaves the Air Force with elevated risks of problems and mishaps involving less skilled pilots.
The Pentagon’s Diversity Industrial Complex offers no help because “including” persons who are “white” does not “improve diversity.”
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Anti-Extremism Standdowns Alienating Troops
Early in the Biden Administration, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin called for worldwide one-day standdown programs to raise consciousness of extremist behavior in the ranks. Despite weeks of hype, Austin’s Counter-Extremism Activity Working Group (CEAWG) reported less than one hundred such incidents. When asked, the Pentagon’s spokesman did not provide information on the political leanings of the extremists involved.
The Institute of Defense Analyses (IDA) conducted another study of military extremism in 2022, which found “no evidence that the number of violent extremists in the military is disproportionate to the number of violent extremists in the United States as a whole…”
Furthermore, the IDA study “found reason to believe that the risk to the military from widespread polarization and division in the ranks may be a greater risk than the radicalization of a few service members.”
Politically skewed Pentagon surveys that concentrate on unacceptable extremists of the right, while not identifying or removing jihadi extremists and others involved in violence on the left, may be heightening resistance to such programs and divisive critical race theory (CRT) instructions.
Viewing the problem with one eye closed, military investigators have failed to identify or stop several jihadist extremists – the most recent being Air Force Airman Aaron Bushnell, who videotaped himself in uniform self-immolating in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. while shouting “Free Palestine.”
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Trust and Confidence
The All-Volunteer Force has been a success, but there are signs that the AVF is losing public trust. For example, the annual defense survey by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, released in November 2023, found that only a slim majority of Americans, 51%, would recommend that family and friends join the military. This was a steep decline from the 2018 survey, when 70% said they would recommend joining the military.
In July 2023, a Gallup Poll found that confidence in the military is at its lowest point in over two decades. Even among Republicans, the rate of confidence in the military has declined over twenty points, from 91% to 68%.
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If Diversity is a Strength, Why is Our Military Rated “Weak?”
The Heritage Foundation’s 2024 Index of U.S. Military Strength presented a dismal report card on many aspects of military readiness. The Index found the Air Force to be the weakest of all branches of the U.S. military, downgraded from its previous 2023 score of “weak” to “very weak.”
The Army and Space Force ratings are “marginal,” and the Navy is “weak.” Only the Marine Corps was rated as “strong.” These and many more signs of declining readiness indicate that our military is in trouble. For the sake of national security, something has got to change.
5. DoD Should Drop Discredited DEI “Studies”
The Department of Defense could strengthen our military by reconsidering and rejecting the flawed research and advice that mostly civilian business “experts” keep selling to the Pentagon to advance “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in the military.
The Pentagon’s vast array of DEI Strategic Plans, reports, and training materials cannot disguise the lack of solid data related to military readiness and morale. A prime example is the 141-page Task Force One Navy (TF1N) Final Report, issued in response to nationwide racial protests in the spring and early summer of 2020.
The TF1N Report cited two civilian DEI “expert” sources but misrepresented statements that those sources had made about DEI in civilian business relationships, not the military.
Studies and advice from the DEI industry leader, McKinsey & Company, require even more objective scrutiny.
In 2023, the Heritage Foundation quoted Anthropology Now in reporting that hundreds of studies dating back to the 1930s suggest that anti-bias training doesn’t reduce bias. Even former McKinsey & Co. consultants reported that they “did not find a single study that found that diversity training in fact leads to more diversity.” Heritage added, “Evidence on DEI programs’ effectiveness is not missing. The research demonstrates failure.”
Now comes a detailed article in Econ Journal Watch by scholars Jeremiah Green and John R. M. Hand suggesting, “[D]espite the imprimatur given to McKinsey’s studies, they should not be relied on to support the view that U.S. publicly traded firms can expect to deliver improved financial performance if they increase the racial/ethnic diversity of their executives.”
Despite this questionable record, the Department of Defense has obligated nearly $400 million to McKinsey & Company since 2009. According to the Daily Caller, company officials are refusing to respond to inquiries about new research casting doubt on the value of DEI programs.
Throwing good money after bad will not address real problems in our military. The Pentagon asked for $114 million for more DEI programs for FY 2024 and $162 million for FY 2025 — this on top of previous subsidies of $86.5 million in FY 2023 and $68 million in FY 2022. Rep. James Banks (R-IN) recently sent a letter pressing the Biden Administration for proof that DEI expenditures improve military readiness.
In contrast, many major companies have reduced or disbanded their DEI departments because they add no corporate value, and their activities are inconsistent with the spirit of the Supreme Court ruling against racial discrimination.
The Pentagon has diverted untold millions and manhours for programs benefiting only the consultants and contractors who provide DEI instructions. This time- and money-wasting DEI establishment has been exposed as a shaky House of Cards that is ready to collapse.
6. The Pentagon Should Follow the Constitution and Stop Discriminating
Today’s civilian and military leaders and DoD committees, such as the Office for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (ODEI), seem stuck in a time warp where DEI business is being conducted as usual.
Under Diversity & Inclusion policies taken to extremes, standards have been “re-defined” to meet diversity goals, constitutional rights of equal protection and opportunity have been denied, more qualified candidates have faced discrimination because of their race, and high-performing minorities have faced doubts about their capabilities.
The CMR Statement to the DACODAI provides abundant information about Defense Department-imposed problems that are weakening our military, not strengthening it.
The Pentagon, unfortunately, has shown no sign of a candid reassessment of whether race-conscious DEI mandates, devised under the influence of civilian business consultants, are worsening the recruiting crisis, contributing to weakness in our armed forces, and undermining morale and public support for the All-Volunteer Force.
New SFFA lawsuits have been filed to challenge racial discrimination at the U.S. Military Academy and the U.S. Naval Academy. In response, The Department of Justice is still ignoring current realities and advocating for the use of racial and ethnic categories that the Supreme Court has described as “imprecise, overbroad, arbitrary, undefined, irrational stereotypes and incoherent.”
Meanwhile, the DACODAI and other DEI offices are still asking for reports tracking percentage-based diversity metrics. Instead of traveling the same DEI rocky road, the DACODAI would better serve America by changing direction.
Among other things, the DACODAI should consider recommending that the Department of Defense and all branches of the service abandon programs and policies focusing on skin color and comparative ratios of minorities in officer and enlisted ranks.
Instead of CDO-approved DEI devotees, our military needs principled leaders who support and will fight for proven policies that recognize meritocracy and non-discrimination as true strategic imperatives. In the next defense bill, Congress should defund and dismantle all DEI offices and power bases in the Pentagon.
Success on the battlefield requires leaders who are proficient, experienced, and worthy of trust, regardless of their skin color or ethnicity. Because missions and the lives of subordinate war fighters may depend on those qualities, meritocracy and non-discrimination should be recognized and affirmed as true strategic imperatives. Because they are.
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The Center for Military Readiness (CMR) is an independent public policy organization, founded in 1993, which reports on and analyzes military/social issues. More information is available on the CMR website, www.cmrlink.org. To make a tax-deductible contribution to help continue CMR’s work please click here.
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