By James Rogan, former US Foreign Service Officer
Members of the military are a brotherhood, bands of brothers and sisters, comrades in arms.
In the warrior culture necessary to defend the United States, there is no place for diversity, equity, and inclusion , or DEI, programs. The concepts central to critical race theory are the antithesis of what motivates young men and women to go into the shadows of death.
Today, the U.S. military faces an internal threat to the unit cohesion necessary to deter, to fight, and to win wars.
The fundamental concept of the brotherhood of arms necessary to wage war successfully is being eroded by the liberal insistence that the warrior ethos and the inherent meritocratic nature of the military be replaced by the “woke” concepts of DEI.
In battle, when the man or woman next to you is there because of quotas and ill-defined concepts of equity and inclusion and not because he or she is a brother or sister under arms, small-unit cohesion will disintegrate.
Trust will be replaced by distrust and worry that diversity officers are watching, much like the political commissars of the former army of the Soviet Union.
The focus on DEI will undermine the U.S. military just as Stalin’s purge of politically suspect generals and senior officers almost destroyed the military of the Soviet Union on the eve of World War II.
In the military, as in society, every person is an individual with inherent rights devolved from nature and guaranteed by the Constitution.
Members of the military are not members of the commune of the “woke.” Nor should they be.
On the contrary, men and women in basic training are rebuilt as warriors and inducted into a band of brothers, as made famous by Shakespeare’s Henry V.
These people subsume their personal identities in order to become warriors who will fight and die for their comrades in arms.
The military’s excessive focus on “woke” concepts diminishes the war-making capabilities of the armed forces.
Men and women in foxholes will wonder whether their leaders are warriors or part of the DEI quota.
Equally disturbing, just as Stalin’s paranoia undermined the Soviet military in the late 1930s, when officers are promoted to positions of command not on the basis of merit but to meet quotas and to appease far-left politicians, the security of the nation-state is put in jeopardy.
The U.S. needs warriors, not “woke” commissars.
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