The Air Force's Faltering Effort to Get More Diversity Among Officers May Be Out of Time

Good, time’s up! Get rid of race and gender quotas and focus on merit.

By Thomas Novelly | Military.com

An Air Force effort to get more diversity among its officer candidates over the past two years fell short in most cases and now faces an uncertain future under the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump.

The diversity targets set in 2022 marked the first time in nearly a decade that the service had amended the benchmarks for commissioning officers from a variety of backgrounds.

The Air Force was unable to reach many of those goals in the 2023 and 2024 school years for the Air Force Academy and Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, or ROTC, according to data provided by the service.

Some Republicans have criticized the Air Force diversity targets — and the wider long-term military effort at creating a force that better reflects American demographics — as counterproductive or part of a left-wing political agenda.

Trump and his pick for defense secretary, if confirmed, are widely expected to gut initiatives to bring more women and people of color into the military and government.

The Department of the Air Force aimed to have officer applicants be 67.5% white, 13% Black, 10% Asian, 1.5% Native American and Native Alaskan, and 1% Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander, according to the memo — the remaining 7% was targeted for multi-racial demographics. It also aimed for 15% Hispanic and Latino applicants, as well as 64% men and 36% women.

The August 2022 memo signed by Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall; then-Air Force Under Secretary Gina Ortiz Jones; former Air Force chief of staff and current Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown Jr.; and then-Space Force Chief of Space Operations Gen. Jay Raymond declared it was “imperative that the composition of our military services better reflect our nation’s highly talented, diverse and eligible population.”

For the Air Force Academy’s 2023-2024 school year, the applicant pool met the diversity goals for white, male and Hispanic candidates.

But the applicant pool fell short in all the other categories — with 8% of the applicant pool being Black, 9% Asian, 0.8% Native American and Native Alaskan, and 0.9% Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander.

Female applicants made up 31.4% of the pool, falling short of the 36% the Air Force was seeking, according to the service data.

The 2022-2023 school year had a similar result, with the service academy hitting its goal of male applicants, and barely surpassing its target for white applicants by 0.2% and its goal for Hispanic and Latino applicants by 0.8%.

Air Force ROTC for the 2023-2024 school year similarly made its diversity target for men as well as Hispanic and Latino applicants, but it missed the other demographic goals, including among white applicants. Nearly the same trend was true for the 2022-2023 school year with the exception of white applicants, which it hit at 68%.

Numbers for Officer Training School and the direct commissioning program under the Space Force, which is part of the Department of the Air Force, were not immediately provided by the service department. Multi-racial demographics were also not included in the data provided.

While the memo and diversity goals are almost two years old, the initiative has still sparked outrage from some Republican lawmakers.

Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., said in a news release in late September that “it is difficult to understand how the Air Force could aim to cut recruiting of Americans who don’t check the right demographic boxes during the worst recruiting crisis in the history of the all-volunteer force.”

Most of the services have struggled to meet recruiting goals in recent years, trying a raft of new programs and incentives to attract young Americans to serve. The 2022 Air Force memo outlining the diversity benchmarks said that “these goals are aspirational, aligning resources to invest in our long-term objectives, and will not be used in any manner that undermines our merit-based processes.”

Republican criticisms of the Air Force’s initiative come as Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Defense, Pete Hegseth — a former co-host on the weekend edition of “Fox and Friends” and a National Guard veteran — has railed against Pentagon diversity efforts. He also, specifically, has criticized Brown, one of the signees of the 2022 memo.

Brown, who was the first Black Air Force chief and is now Joint Chiefs chairman, has been a central target for Trump Republicans because he made an emotional video statement in 2020 about his experience with racism in the military after the police killing of George Floyd triggered nationwide outrage, protests and violence. He has also been an advocate of having more Black and female airmen in the service.

“First of all, you’ve got to fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs,” Hegseth said on a podcast last month, Military.com reported. “Any general that was involved, any general, admiral, whatever, that was involved in any of the [diversity, equity and inclusion] woke sh– has got to go.”

When asked about the future of the Department of the Air Force’s diversity targets or other similar initiatives in light of Hegseth’s comments, a spokesperson declined to comment.

Lauren Spaziano, a Joint Chiefs spokesperson for Brown, referred questions to the Air Force when asked about the chairman’s response to the service missing many of those demographic goals.

The Air Force’s initiative fell short of many of its lofty objectives, and it may soon face opposition from the new administration, but retired officers, military scholars and former Department of Defense leaders all told Military.com that the service’s push to create a diverse officer corps is an important mission.

Retired Col. Samantha Weeks, the first female solo demonstration pilot for the Air Force’s Thunderbirds and now a public speaker on leadership, told Military.com in an emailed statement that she understood the 2022 memo as the Air Force “shooting for the moon” and said that it’s important for the service to set the bar high.

Weeks also said that growing diversity of thought, experience and perspective within the ranks helps make a more capable force.

“I believe diversity is a strategic imperative for our military. In a time of decreasing resources, increasing mission complexity, we simply can’t afford to limit readiness by minimizing the value every person brings to the fight,” Weeks said in an emailed statement. “Any reversals on the progress the military has made over the last 5 to 75 years would truly hinder, limit and reduce our military capability, readiness and performance.”

An Uncertain Future

Morten Ender, a professor of sociology at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and author of “Inclusion in the American Military: A Force for Diversity,” told Military.com in an interview that getting a more diverse cohort in the ranks is more difficult in the more than 50 years since the services became an all-volunteer force.

(STARRS NOTE–See more about Ender: West Point Cadet Projects: Deconstructing Patriotism and Cross-Dressing in the Military)

He added that creating better representation has become more difficult among the officer corps as universities also compete for more diverse populations. He explained that it’s important to have a more diverse representation among the higher ranks to balance with the enlisted demographics.

“To certainly have goals for representation is terrific and then putting processes in place to go after folks in those demographic categories is a good thing,” Ender said.

“You don’t want certain groups, especially with the officer corps, too far overrepresented and then leading the enlisted ranks, which we know are overrepresented by people of color and increasingly large numbers of women. So, that’s why it’s problematic.”

The Air Force’s officer applicant initiative was one of the more high-profile diversity efforts the service has taken on, but it has numerous other initiatives that started in recent years.

Barrier Analysis Working Groups are teams of volunteers and service members who are tasked with identifying “potential barriers to equal opportunity, diversity and inclusion, and devising plans to eliminate them,” according to an informational service document.

The teams represent a wide range of demographics: the Black and African American Employment Strategy Team, Indigenous Nations Equality Team and Women’s Initiative Team, among others.

Those teams have led to notable changes in policy in the ranks, such as establishing lactation rooms for female service members, examining beard policies for Black airmen who may experience more painful skin conditions under shaving requirements, and fighting for better-fitting body armor for women.

Gil Cisneros is the former under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness and the Pentagon’s former chief diversity and inclusion officer under President Joe Biden’s administration. He told Military.com in an interview that those Air Force diversity efforts have been impressive.

Cisneros enlisted in the Navy after graduating from high school and later became an officer after completing the Broadened Opportunity for Officer Selection and Training program. He said such programs are instrumental in bringing more diverse people into uniform who may have found an opportunity somewhere else.

“There’s no quotas,” Cisneros said. “It’s about how do we find the opportunity, and making sure that everybody has an equal chance to succeed and leveling the playing field. To me, that’s what diversity is about, and that’s what the Air Force is trying to do.”

Last month, Cisneros, a California Democrat who is Hispanic, was reelected to the House and will be joining Congress in 2025, after previously serving from 2019 to 2021. He’s aware of the political fights over diversity and experienced the arguments firsthand in his prior role.

“Many of those individuals who are now going to become my colleagues wanted to blame the recruiting problem on diversity and inclusion issues, and … nothing could be further from the truth,” Cisneros said, adding that he knows many of the Pentagon and service’s initiatives are helping, not harming, the military.

“I wish they would put them under a microscope and look at them and look and see how beneficial the programs are, but what they’re really going to do is just stop them and end them,” Cisneros said. “That’s what’s more likely to happen.”

First published on Military.com

Cisneros should read this: