The U.S. military’s increased push for diversity and inclusion, as reflected in the far-reaching National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) signed by President Joe Biden on Dec. 23, 2022, aims to remake the military’s culture and ethos along the same lines as left-wing policies that have been put to use at elite colleges and other areas of the private sphere, defense experts say.
While efforts to diversify the armed forces along racial and gender lines at the expense of traditional standards, aren’t new, the NDAA signals dramatically increased civilian input on and oversight of a culture once deemed to be the domain of professional soldiers, the experts told The Epoch Times.
Provisions of the NDAA that aim to boost diversity are so similar to policies enforced by private institutions, such as Harvard University, that an organization opposing the “woke” agenda in the armed forces, and supporting traditional standards and requirements, has gone so far as to lend its expertise in a lawsuit over Harvard’s admissions policies, in the form of an amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) filing (pdf), obtained by The Epoch Times. The filing argues that diversity and inclusion policies have harmed the military and aren’t a good idea in either the public or private spheres.The NDAA contains some provisions that those skeptical of civilian oversight of the military have welcomed, such as ending the vaccine requirement for service members that was a source of controversy and incurred lawsuits from those who objected on religious grounds or felt that they weren’t sufficiently at risk to need to undergo such measures.
But among the other provisions of the NDAA is a requirement that Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) programs collect and report data on the racial and gender composition of those who complete the programs or receive scholarships based on their participation. ROTC is a college program that trains students to be commissioned officers. This measure comes on the heels of many changes in recent years that defense experts say have wrecked the military’s traditional culture and undermined combat readiness and effectiveness, notably a new Army Combat Fitness Test (ACFT) with different requirements for men and women.
Quite clearly, [advocates of diversity] make this assertion that it’s a national security imperative that the military be allowed to use racial preferences in order to meet that high bar. Most people being candid with you would say that’s a very far-fetched argument,” McQuarrie said.
“In fact, our military has operated over the last few generations effectively without having to suspend the Constitution. In Bosnia, Panama, the Gulf War, Afghanistan, and Iraq, the military did quite well, and we don’t need to violate the Constitution for the military to execute its mission,” he added.
The data on the military’s performance was useful in crafting the amicus curiae filing in the Harvard lawsuit, McQuarrie noted.
“We felt that the court needed to be educated on that basic argument. We took published data from the service academies. They are using racial preferences. The data showed that the consequences of using such preferences are not good. The bottom line is that the service academies are admitting applicants who are not as well qualified on the basis of race, and in some cases gender, and in doing so are rejecting applicants who have higher qualifications,” he said.
“I’m not just referring to academic scores. The service academies have a very elaborate means of evaluating applications, and there are hundreds of variables that can contribute to the score on an application,” he added.
The service academies have developed a system over the years for determining a candidate’s overall score, but the data in VFM’s filing suggest that they have forgone applying such time-tested criteria and made decisions on the basis of race.
Privileging one race over another in admissions is as harmful to morale and cohesion in civilian contexts as in military ones, McQuarrie believes. One of the studies cited in VFM’s brief is the work of the Center for Equal Opportunity which first came out in 1996, McQuarrie noted. It examined admissions policies and the results of racial preferences at two service institutions, the U.S. Naval Academy and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
“The results of the study showed that it was more difficult for whites to get admitted to those academies than it was for certain minority groups. Asians are discriminated against at West Point in comparison to whites and everyone else,” McQuarrie said.
The push for diversity and the emphasis on race as one of its primary indices directly undermines a military culture where servicemen are supposed to think less, not more, about differentiating features, VFM’s brief contends.
