DEI

Immediately after winning confirmation as the Secretary of Defense, controversial former Fox News host and National Guard veteran Pete Hegseth went to war…on the military’s diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. The problem, as Republicans define it, is that efforts to promote diversity suppress merit-based promotions and ultimately allows persons who are unfit to serve into the force. Don’t take my word for it- here’s what Pete Hegseth said about then-current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Air Force General C.Q. Brown (and in the interests of fairness, here’s his official statement announcing Brown’s termination in that role). From his 2022 book “The War On Warriors”, Hegseth remarks on Brown: “The military standards, once the hallmark for competency, professionalism, and ‘mission first’ outcomes, have officially been subsumed by woke priorities,” he wrote. “You think CQ Brown will think intuitively about external threats and internal readiness? No chance. He built his generalship dutifully pursuing the radical positions of left-wing politicians, who in turn rewarded him with promotions.” He is also on record as questioning whether Brown’s promotions through the ranks of the Air Force were due to his race or his abilities. Simultaneously, Hegseth also fired the CNO, and had previously sacked the admiral in command of the Coast Guard. Why? Who honestly knows. But there is a definite pattern: Black man, white female, white female. All of them “DEI hires”, in the language Hegseth used repeatedly on his Fox News show. Examples abound.

There are legitimate reasons for the appointed civilian leadership of the DoD to remove officers from command, staff and advisory positions, particularly when they have presided over organizational failures. All of the terminated officers have presided over policy failures that have resulted in lives lost, ships and planes lost and damaged and degradations of the operational, living, recruit/retention and training standards of the various forces. The Biden Administration’s steady dripping litany of catastrophes (ranging from ship collisions to morale problems to spare-parts shortages to training failures) has objectively provided Hegseth with an excuse to fire plenty of senior officers and civilian appointees; it’s hard to defend their performance when sailors under their command are accidentally shooting Super Hornets out of the sky. Plenty of service members have expressed long-time concern over the degradation of the force’s standards as compared to the GWOT, Desert Storm or Cold War generation and identified the realignment of priorities from combat performance to vague “inclusion” as causes. A refocus is needed, particularly as experienced combat leaders age out and institutional knowledge is lost and war changes rapidly. Hegseth’s opinions are pretty clear- he blames liberalized recruitment policies, diversity initiatives and a laxity of enforcement of standards for these problems. I can’t say he’s entirely wrong. For example; 2021’s Biden-era recruitment policies…

“Emily” is a liberal fever dream of a recruiting commercial that crams every wholesome liberal buzzword into an utterly uninspiring piece that is perceptually non-aggressive and uncool. Given that the ad campaign that this defined ran during a period of missed recruitment goals, I think it’s fair to say it was a failure based on outcome. It got replaced by this one, which is kinda meandering and too cerebral, but also utterly inoffensive. Who hasn’t been a random in someone else’s adventure before?

The Hegseth era kicked off with this masterpiece. Quick, simple, brutal, and clear. What effective marketing looks like. If this was his term, that would be great.

But Hegseth and his lackeys go several bridges too far in their quest to restore lethality. In the past few weeks, DoD has tried to purge pages referencing war heroes like Carl Rogers, units like the 442nd RCT, Tuskegee Airmen, Navajo code talkers and WASPS, and even historical artifacts like the Enola Gay. For reference, the Enola Gay was (and remains) an incredibly controversial and impactful artifact that communicates a lot of mixed feelings about war and humanity. It’s a lot of things…but it’s not terribly involved with the LGBTQIA+ movement. If anything, I’d say it’s the opposite of the limp-wristed liberal Two Moms culture.

Some of those deletions have since been undone after public outrage and the blame is being directed at the appointed leadership of the DoD and the President. At least Ens. George Gay’s page remains up as of 3/18/25…but I digress. Hegseth, his lackeys (military and civilian) and the leadership of the Department of Defense are engaging in wholesale revision of the truths of the history of our institutions.

How is that dangerous? Well, let’s look at some examples.

Black people were literally viewed as property by many Americans until the Civil War, and the first Black Americans to serve in the Army were literally subject to massacre should they be captured by the Confederates. Read that link- it was literally Confederate policy that Black prisoners of war would be executed because they were rebellious slaves, not enemy combatants. And still, Black Americans served, voluntarily. As they have, bravely and against stiff institutional resistance, in every war since; despite a vast history of abuses against them. Their tenacity and struggles and esprit de corps didn’t just help them, they inspired their comrades and their units and their descendants to follow. Understanding that context of racism is vital to explaining the stories of heroes like Henry Johnson; communicating the integration of our institutions and the selflessness of men like Alwyn Cashe (whose MoH nomination was also inexplicably delayed due to what looks a lot like racism…)

What is a young person contemplating military service supposed to conclude if they wanted to learn about how the military is addressing the challenge of racial and gender relations and how they may be treated? What story does a sea of broken links tell, particularly in comparison to non-DoD sources that may have different agendas? It’s really hard to argue that an institution is being honest if it hides its own history, and it’s hard to argue that their integrity is adequate if they make up silly excuses to avoid addressing hard truths. And make no mistake, the truths are out there. We’ve heard our grandfathers and great-grandfathers tell us about Vietnam and seen our current leaders vilifying people based on their identities for ten years now. Does the military still muster enough trust and have enough integrity to bridge those gaps?

It’s not just black people, gays and women. People who were specifically, explicitly and blatantly targeted for punishment by the United States based solely on their racial identities are being written out of our histories; reference again the 442nd. Even their restored official unit history page whitewashes their actual history and conveniently omits that their White countrymen literally held them and their families in concentration camps solely due to their ethnicity.

What does all this mean in the aggregate? Well, let’s be frank and honest. The United States, both as a nation and the institutions thereof, have a long and controversial history of racism, bigotry and exclusivity that span our entire history and remain at least somewhat problematic even today. Overcoming the immense obstacles arrayed against them has made our institutions far stronger and better in performance. But whitewashing our history- be it by omission, deletion, concealment or softening- erodes those legacies and the trust in our institutions that has been built. Without that trust, those institutions lose the credibility that gets them recruits, dollars and retains knowledge. I’m a proud veteran myself, as are many members of my family. I can’t help but ask if their service isn’t under just a little more conditionality because of their identity.

What’s arguably worse is that the Hegseth argument that diversity erodes the performance of units is demonstrably flawed. Prior to the 1948 integration of the Armed Forces, minorities who wanted to serve were forced to languish in menial roles, or in specific units primed to be used as cannon fodder or ignored as their (white, male) commanders saw fit. Human talents were ignored. Men like Doris Miller rose to greatness in spite of that racism. How many more were ignored?

When I served in the Army, I had the pleasure of serving with an exemplary man. He came to us a few months before we deployed to Iraq, as an E1, fresh out of OSUT. He was from Baltimore and grew up dealing with some of the unique urban hardships implied by that background (racism was a major contributor to those conditions, but that’s a digression). He was not apologetic about his identity- he liked the Ravens, rap, wore some stereotypically Black clothes, etc. He was also one of the best soldiers and natural leaders I have ever met. As a newly-promoted PV2, he demonstrated mastery of the machine gun crew and weapons system. Months later, he was an acting section leader, selected by our senior leadership because he was demonstrably more capable in that role than the multi-year combat-veteran non-commissioned officers who would normally fill that role. He wasn’t just a garrison soldier either- he exemplified servant leadership. When we went to Iraq, he was a squad leader, as a PFC. He became a sergeant as quickly as was possible, and made the Army a career. Now he has children who are contemplating military service themselves, is a senior noncommissioned officer, and has served in a variety of roles that improved the Army, his nation, his community and himself. But his service was only possible because of Harry Truman’s desegregation, which was the definition of a diversity and inclusion initiative. Another soldier I served with was a lesbian who served quietly for years (while resisting a lot of rather blatant sexual harassment) and whose partner followed her discreetly across the country. She was an exemplary NCO who was more than a little terrifying because she was absolutely merciless if you failed to execute to standard (which she consistently met and exceeded in all respects). It wasn’t until Barack Obama’s lifting of DADT that she could enjoy the same rights as her heterosexual comrades- benefits for her spouse, housing, etc, to say nothing of simple recognition. That was a diversity and inclusion initiative.

Equity initiatives as expressed by the Biden Administration/liberals are a little harder to defend; but that’s primarily because ‘equity’ is a really hard concept. What is equity, as compared to equality? Evaluating people on different scales based on their identities and backgrounds based on perceptual differences for the same role is fraught, and people are diverse and different enough already that only attributing one approach to education, training and performance is a fool’s errand. Liberal equity is to guarantee an outcome by setting some people to succeed based primarily on their identities; that is a fool’s errand (as the LAFD recently discovered) because some people will inevitably use their identities to position themselves ahead of peers and follow the Peter Principle until their ineptitude betrays them and the organization. Worse, equity initiatives betray the very members of the community they purport to help, because the cloud of doubt pervades their service and undermines them. But where do equity, diversity and inclusion meet? I’d argue that LAFD-like targeting of specific people to advance because of their identity is blatantly inappropriate; on a federal level, it gave us Kamala Harris and Lloyd Austin. But equity is not simply choosing winners- it is also the recognition of systemic problems that can be alleviated by special resources to restore the standard. For example, the military has rolled out special conditioning programs for soldiers to make weight; this is an application of equity that harms no one, requires no disproportionate effort and serves to allow someone to add their talents to the service in spite of initial failure. That is a proper implementation of equity. For Hegseth to use the extremes of DEI as a justification for the implementation of what looks suspiciously like a white-supremacist agenda is something we as a society should not tolerate. When he stands before the cameras and announces that “DEI is dead”, remember that his lackeys (appointed civilian leadership and a small cadre of compliant military leaders) are not removing the legacies of White male service members, nor are they the people who have bought into the concept of the military and American society as truly inclusive. They are the sort of people who are so threatened by the recognition of historically-discriminated groups that they cancel Black and Asian History recognition. They are the sorts of people that get weirdly specific tattoos associated with white supremacist movements despite policy directives to not do those things, which raises questions of association with white supremacist movements. And they’re the sorts of people who destroy organizations because they are trying to turn them into warped expressions of their personal wishes, not effective combat commands. We’ve seen them before.

The irony of all of this is that Hegseth himself is the beneficiary of a DEI initiative himself. He is the first SECDEF in the history of the post to have no executive business or senior military experience (which one would expect to be a de facto requirement given that the job entails administration of the DoD), he has a questionable work history and a controversial set of beliefs and actions, to include publishing books that openly call for the destruction of the beliefs and possibly populations of approximately half of the country he purports to serve. Were he not an alcoholic, silver-haired, angry white man on Fox News, he would not be the SECDEF nominated by President Trump and confirmed by the Republican Party. I suppose that’s a pretty slim minority of people; and it wouldn’t be equitable or inclusive to exclude him from those opportunities based on his identity as a white Christian nationalist alcoholic. Maybe the DUI hire will get us home safely.

Memorial information disappearing from Arlington National Cemetary.– just for fun, they’re also deleting history.