Proclaiming Diversity is Our {Military} Strength
Recently leaders of our Department of Defense (DoD) and some military brass have embraced the woke ideology. The title of this piece has been repeated too often the last few years by people – some running our military – who should know better.
the DoD has conducted numerous DEI conferences for officers and DEI classes for enlisted personnel and have attempted to ingrain the woke dogma in our armed forces.
What those efforts have done is what the woke stuff does for everyone, it divides them into groups. It doesn’t take a modern general or admiral to know that historically armed forces need cohesiveness and unity to prevail. When the shooting starts soldiers fight for each other as much as for their country winning the battle and the war.
So where has DEI and CRT taken our military?
For starters, it has resulted in recruitment shortfalls and declining reenlistments.
The Army is down 40,000 soldiers, the Navy down 10,000 sailors and the Air Force is down 13,000+ over the past three years.
DEI is certainly not the only reason recruitment and retention is suffering, but it’s a major factor. The reasons put out by the Pentagon are that there a fewer Gen Z people than there are millennials, an economy that provides other options, fewer relatives that served in the military, and that Gen Z has a lower level of trust in US institutions. Current defense leaders do not mention the new, woke military. They just report that the military is more representative of the country now with special accommodations for past transgressions.
Faced with the recruitment and reenlistment problems, the current administration has now declared the decline in numbers and the missing of previously announced recruitment goals is in fact a deliberate restructuring of personnel.
Think of that scenario. If you were responsible for the US Army and set the goals for recruitment, only to miss those goals by significant numbers, then to try to cover your shortcomings by stating you really didn’t mean to set those goals, do you think your boss would buy into your claim of intentional failure? Further, wouldn’t you need to do some ‘restructuring’ just facing the reality of not having nearly as many personnel as you started with.
Believe it or not, the answer to both questions is ‘Yes.’
You can get away with failure on some important fronts if you understand that your job evaluation is currently not based on numbers, capacity or capability. It’s based on whether you embrace the woke ideology and have trained your troops under that banner.
If certain prospective personnel are turned off by wokeness, that’s their problem, not the leaders.
Lots of young people are turned off with what the military represents on many fronts these days.
They are aware they will be exposed, trained, indoctrinated and expected to act and behave like a woke person. They know Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) can result in unqualified promotions. They know they could be serving in specialty areas and working for and under a higher ranked person for which the ranking person is not qualified or ready.
They also know that after finding that women were not scoring as highly as men the military has thrown out altogether the fitness requirements for combat specialties. They know the system now allows members of the military to take extra time off from their duties to obtain tax funded sex-change surgeries, hormones, and drugs. That personnel with HIV can now serve in combat zones where the prospect of shared blood increases, ergo contamination.
Another example of how the military became woke, recently the Navy released a training video to help sailors understand the proper way of using personal pronouns—a skill Americans have traditionally mastered in grade school. The video instructs servicemembers that they need to create a “safe space for everybody” by using “inclusive language”—for instance, saying “hey everybody” instead of “hey guys.”
Long-time, seasoned, top military personnel know that diversity is not a strength in the military. That woke ideology undermines cohesiveness by emphasizing differences based on race, ethnicity, and sex.
Woke undermines leadership authority by introducing questions about whether promotion is based on merit or quota requirements
Certainly, our military has to change to keep up with a new kind of war using technology to counter the potential hacking of communications, electrical grids and weapons. Drones are becoming more and more a factor as well.
Is a woke military operating on DEI principles in the country’s best interest?
Is “diversity” more important than combat defense readiness?
I don’t think so.
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Have a great and prosperous week.
Hug somebody.
References:
https://www.wearethemighty.com/military-news/the-2024-us-military-recruiting-crisis/
https://apnews.com/article/army-cuts-soldiers-recruiting-shortfall-9f2f41cbe512f6330ce6008709e3435b
https://americanmilitarynews.com/2023/12/us-military-41000-troops-short-of-recruitment-goal/
SPIDER Bytes
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