By Dr Scott Sturman, MD, USAFA ‘72
STARRS Board of Advisors
How is it possible that in a matter of a few years, the Department of Defense and most military-oriented media outlets and support agencies have been ideologically captured by diversity, equity, and inclusion ( DEI ), a philosophy steeped in racism, based on Marxist principles, and antithetical to the mission of the armed services ?
The answer is simple: DEI activists have used the lessons of military history and strategy to construct informational chokepoints, allowing a few ideologues to control the perceptions and attitudes of masses of individuals, who would otherwise reject DEI as detrimental to the United States armed forces.
Just as the victors of the battles of Thermopylae, Agincourt, and Morgarten used physical impediments that allowed small numbers to overwhelm overly confident and numerically superior forces, DEI advocates use psychological impediments and propaganda to accomplish the same goals by confusing and misinforming detractors.
Through the dissemination of unremitting disinformation, those skeptical of DEI are led to believe that their views are racist and held by a select minority representing the fringe of society.
The biggest disseminators of these lies are the media, including military journalists entrusted to be the mouthpieces of the military community.
Ten million people are registered for Military.com. Its managing editor, Zachary Fryer-Biggs, has worked as an investigative reporter for the Center of Public Integrity (CPI), which has ties to the Huffington Post.
CPI’s donor list includes George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, as well as the Ford, MacArthur, Knight, and Barbra Streisand foundations and the Pew Charitable Trust.
Fryer-Biggs’s work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, and the Washington Post. Marjorie Censer, the editor of Defense News, formerly served as defense editor at Politico and as a staff writer at the Washington Post.
Regent L.P, which owns Sightline Media Group and its subsidiaries, has owned and controlled the Military Times newspaper syndicate since 2016. The publication is one of the most popular sold at the Army and Air Force Exchange Services shops and defense commissaries.
Biggs, Censer, and many others in these publications push DEI unapologetically.
Another culprit is the service academies, which are tasked with educating and training our future military leaders.
Instead, the cadets and midshipmen at the military academies are being inculcated with a sanitized version of DEI during four formative years of intellectual and acculturation development.
In other words, the academies are breeding officers inclined toward ideology rather than patriotism. Every recent superintendent at all the service academies supports, defends, and advances the DEI agenda.
Likewise, the current cohort of generals and admirals leading the United States military are equally responsible for the military’s ideological spiral.
These men and women have presided over a precipitous drop in the public’s confidence in the institution and the willingness to serve under their leadership.
Indeed, those who point out that DEI contributes significantly to the military’s demise have been rebuffed by the top echelons within the Department of Defense, who lay the blame on COVID-19, the lack of healthy recruits, and general ignorance among the American public.
General Mark Milley’s retirement signals an opportunity to redirect the military’s prioritization of DEI policy. Instead, the Biden administration has nominated General Charles Brown, an officer known for his unapologetic support for DEI, quotas, and racially provocative statements.
Since General Brown’s appointment as chief of staff of the Air Force in 2020, the Air Force’s readiness, as judged by the Heritage Foundation, plummeted from “weak” to the lowest possible score of “very weak.”
The foreign threats this nation faces and the values our military has pledged to defend call for leaders to decry racial animus and abide by the motto that I and many other veterans as part of Stand Together Against Racism and Radicalism in the Services (STARRS) have pledged: “Ability not appearance, unity not division, service not self.”
Scott Sturman, MD, is a former Air Force helicopter pilot and graduate of the United States Air Force Academy, where he majored in aeronautical engineering. He graduated from the University of Arizona School of Health Sciences Center and practiced medicine for 35 years until retirement.
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