PrintDEI: A cancer on the Armed Forces
Today our military services face growing threats around the world while their ability to maintain a quality, well-trained, and capable force is at risk. Our focus should be on readiness, warfighting, and especially selecting the best qualified leaders possible, not on recruiting Drag Queens to perform for service members and their families or promoting sex-reassignment surgeries. Historically, our personnel systems have been built on merit, individual performance, and equal opportunity, aimed at selecting the best qualified.
Over the past several years that focus on merit has been replaced by a system built on a Marxist ideology we know as Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) and Critical Race Theory (CRT). The embrace of this divisive ideology by both our civilian and military leadership has had a significant negative impact on the Armed Forces. It has served to destroy unit cohesion, lower standards, and use race and gender to define outcomes. Even the West Points motto: Duty, Honor, Country, has been jettisoned from the school’s mission statement, all in the name of DEI. The personnel and readiness problems we face today, especially in recruiting and retention can be traced to the introduction of this ideology. A recent WSJ article highlighted a 30-year study done with over 800 companies that embraced DEI. They found it had no positive impact on the workplace. Not a surprise.
The public’s trust and confidence in the military is at an all-time low, while retention and recruiting rates have plummeted, with a shortage at one point of over 40k recruits -- an unheard-of number. Parents and family members no longer encourage their children to serve. For the first time this includes military family members serving on active duty. The impact is to discourage young men and women from joining, especially middle-class males who traditionally have been the largest source of recruitment. I continually hear this expressed to me by the public. This places our ability to successfully fight and win a major conflict at serious risk.
Young Americans join the Armed Forces to serve the country and accept the challenges that military service presents. They join to be part of a team and embrace our enduring value of selfless service over self. The DEI ideology is against everything our military values taught us. A report from the Center for Renewing America tells us that over 40 percent of Flag Officers serving today advocate for DEI as military policy. This is a troubling statistic.
Many former senior officers like myself, along with veterans and concerned civilians, can no longer sit on the sidelines and watch our individual services be subjected to this debilitating ideology and have organized in an effort to educate the public. Our organization, STARRS.US (Stand Together Against Racism & Radicalism in the Services) serves as a resource platform to inform the public and congress and to eliminate DEI/CRT from the Armed Forces. Our goal is a return to performance based on merit and equal opportunity.
In the end, the mission of the Armed Forces is to fight and win our nation's wars. To do that requires that we instill a warrior ethos, not a woke ideology, into the young men and women who volunteer to join, who want to make a difference and are looking for a challenge. After all, it’s only the security and survival of our nation that’s at stake.
