Leftist agenda hindering military readiness
Recent studies and reporting have highlighted the military's recruiting challenges for fiscal year 2022 with dire projections of future shortfalls in coming years. The reasons for recruiting deficits are many and complex, but one major factor is regressing civilian trust and confidence in the military. Since 2018, from record highs at the end of last century and into the post-9/11 era, positive civilian impressions of the military plummeted. This decreased trust is, in no small measure, due to bipartisan public perceptions of a politicized military from both the left and right.
A 2022 Ronald Reagan Institute survey noted that half of respondents attributed military politicization to a "woke" agenda. It is a sentiment certainly shared by some in civilian leadership and many current military members and veterans.
The Reagan Institute polling does not define "woke." Ipsos polling, however, suggests that the meaning of "woke" can be fluid. Although "woke" may have different definitions, for many, it is associated prominently with Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DIE).
These DIE initiatives have penetrated most major American institutions and are now openly and aggressively being implemented across the military services, from the highest echelons down to the unit level. The introduction of DIE into the military is a significant factor in the public's perception of an increasingly politicized armed forces. Interestingly, DIE is now being unmasked as inherently intolerant despite nostrums of diversity and inclusion, most notably when someone's speech and ideas conflict with what those in the DIE apparatus deem appropriate thinking and behavior.
DIE's proliferation in and increasing hostility to academia serve as a useful proxy to understand the public's concerns about a "woke" military. Stanford faculty members recently voiced concern about the stifling of speech and academic freedom via an anonymous bias-reporting system. And a student mob at Stanford University's law school, enabled by a DIE administrator, recently shouted down an invited guest speaker, a federal judge, hurling invectives inappropriate for any setting, let alone an elite law school. Because of DIE's threat, Harvard faculty felt compelled to create a Council for Academic Freedom "devoted to free inquiry, intellectual diversity, and civil discourse." As Harvard's Professors Steven Pinker and Bertha Madras explained, there is "an exploding bureaucracy for policing harassment and discrimination [that] has professional interests that are not necessarily aligned with the production and transmission of knowledge."
It is no surprise that the public is skeptical of DIE in general and specifically its appropriateness for the military. DIE in the military will likely produce similar outcomes. The most effective way to counter this is to ensure our military members, especially the officer corps, are being educated and trained to maintain and sustain professionalism consistent with historical civil-military norms.
The restoration of public trust requires the military to "examine how we educate servicemembers in the professional norms related to military service in a democracy[.]" At the Air Force Academy, thirteen cadets recently pressed for greater education in civics and civil-military relations to ensure they could "comprehend the professional norms required to support the constitutional principles inherent in their military oaths." This is crucial for developing and maintaining a professional and apolitical officer corps, a prerequisite for healthy civil-military relations. A focus on DIE detracts from this and corrupts professionalism through an overtly progressive political agenda.
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DIE is a raced based selection process that downgrades merit-based selection. Would you ever use this system to decide who wins a foot race?
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