House Armed Services Subcommittee for Military Personnel Chair Jim Banks (R-IN) in a recent exclusive interview with Breitbart News harshly criticized the Biden Pentagon for focusing on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) — or efforts to make the military more racially and gender-diverse — instead of focusing on making it more lethal.
“They’re focusing on DEI instead of on the future of our armed forces and protecting America, which is the explicit purpose of our military to begin with,” said Banks, who is also a Navy reservist.
Banks held a hearing this week to grill top Biden Pentagon officials from Department of Defense (DOD) and each military service on the six million man-hours troops were forced to spend on DEI training in the first year of the Biden administration.
Banks said the big takeaway from the hearing was that none of the Biden administration officials could justify spending that much time on DEI with any evidence or data.
“What’s the statistical or empirical evidence that they have at the Pentagon that shows that any of this is worthwhile? Six million man-hours that could be spent on training our troops to defeat China or positioning us to strengthen our military in other ways, but are instead being focused on DEI political training pushed on our troops,” he said.
“There wasn’t a single example,” he said. “[Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness Gil Cisneros] who oversees all of the DEI programs at the Pentagon had nothing substantive at all to say in the hearing, especially justifying any of these efforts.”
“At the end of the day, as I said, the hearing this week provided no evidence that DEI programs are effective at all,” he said. . . . .
. . . .Banks said House Republicans are unified against this “politicized left-wing woke DEI training,” and will look to use the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to end it.
“We’re going to do everything that we can to strip it and defund DEI from the military,” he said. “We’re just getting started.”
. . . . (read more at Breitbart News)
Watch video on Breitbart:
Also see: Rep. Jim Banks Blasts Army for Hiding Recruitment Survey Data (Breitbart News)
. . . “The Army is hiding behind some report that they won’t even release the methodology behind that report, that says that wokeness isn’t affecting recruitment in the military, but they can’t prove it,” he said.
“They don’t want to release it because they know the methodology is faulty,” he said.
Banks said if the Army does not release that data, Republicans would use the yearly defense bill that authorizes the Pentagon’s budget, known as the National Defense Authorization Act, to force the service to do so. . . . .
Leave a Comment