Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is a Moral Sickness Infecting Our Military

By Patrick “Kit” Bobko, USAFA ’91, USAF veteran

The political vigilantism taking place under the banner of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) must be immediately and completely excised from our military.

DEI corrodes the moral foundations upon which our armed services were built and provides both the kindling and spark for igniting tribalism among our service members.

Officers of all ranks who promulgate these destructive ideas must be immediately relieved of command because they actively endanger our nation’s security.

The war in Gaza has been instructive because the response to it in the streets of Western cities and on college campuses has pulled back the rhetorical stage curtain and laid bare the moral rot at DEI’s core.

It is impossible to turn on the TV or scroll through social media without seeing throngs of people waiving green, red, and white Palestinian flags and chanting about the horrors of Israeli “colonial occupation” and advocating for eradication of the Jewish state.

We’ve recently seen that Presidents of once prestigious American universities cannot publicly denounce their students who applaud medieval barbarity against innocent civilians for fear of offending the barbarians.

To the benighted looking down from their moral high ground, the savagery Israelis have endured is merely the historical bill coming due for their oppression of Palestinians.

Beheading people, killing children in their beds, and incinerating infants in ovens might be distasteful, but when members of an “oppressed” group do it to their “oppressors” it is justifiable given the history of the oppression they have endured.

At a minimum, they say, the spasm of violence is a response that must be “contextualized.”

Although quantitatively different, the moral reasoning used to rationalize the slaughter and rape of innocent Israelis is qualitatively the same as the moral calculus inherent to DEI.

Morality is no longer measured against objective and immutable ideas of good and evil but is instead determined by where actions or ideas fall on a politically approved taxonomy of grievances.

By design, DEI erases the bright line between right and wrong and makes everything a contextual shade of ideological gray. But history teaches those moral lines are important, especially in the military.

For example, German soldiers didn’t herd Jews onto railcars to Treblinka because the Wehrmacht, as an institution, emphasized the value of human life. (The Germans in WWII had a name for these people who were deemed racially or socially inferior — Untermensch. Literally, the “sub-human” races.)

Serbian troops didn’t slaughter Bosnians and Croats and bulldoze them into mass graves because they respected people as individuals regardless of their ethnicity or religion.

These, like the horrors recently committed against Israeli civilians, occurred because, and only because, one group ceased thinking about another group as sharing in their humanity.

Quantitatively, there’s still some distance between murdering people who are ethnically or culturally different and the precepts underlying DEI, but qualitatively, there isn’t.

It’s the same idea of dividing people into classes based on inherent characteristics beyond their control and then acting on those differences. It is only a matter of time before the qualitative and quantitative points meet.

It took about a decade in Germany.

The horrors on display in Gaza also show it is the slipperiest of slippery slopes to teach young men with guns that some people simply aren’t as valuable as other people, or to suggest that it might, just maybe, be justifiable to behead someone because they are a member of a group that is deemed an “oppressor.”

Within the military context, this is the same type of moral relativism that will inevitably justify rounding-up and shooting “partisans,” torturing POWs, and razing “enemy” villages.

Shamefully, this is exactly what the American military is doing.

Through DEI, the U.S. military promulgates, teaches, and ultimately enforces the idea people should be treated differently based on who their parents were or the color of their skin.

The Department of Defense — as an official policy — implicitly recognizes the idea of guilt by blood.

It is arrogant folly to believe these ideas can be contained within the services themselves and will not eventually seep into decisions and actions made by American forces in the field.

Napoleon famously opined that “the moral is to the physical as three is to one” and maybe an American military focused on “diversity” and led by officers who lack moral clarity will be an exception to this maxim.

Perhaps American troops taught to segregate themselves based on ethnicity and relative victimhood will be able to put these ideas aside when they meet the enemy.

But this is dangerous speculation without any evidence to support it.

The American military has been the world’s standard for better part of a century, and yet none of the forces put into the field were constructed or led according to DEI’s principles.

Why do the current political and military leaders believe a military organized around DEI’s ideology will be better than the military we have?

Or, more cynically, do our current political and military leaders believe that having an ideologically conformist military is more important than fielding an effective, lethal, and patriotic one that can defend our nation?

On the available evidence, it appears that they do.

First published on American Thinker