House Republicans insist that the Biden administration’s emphasis on “woke” policies, such as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training, is politicizing the U.S. military and degrading the Pentagon’s readiness to fight a war.
House Democrats say Republicans are beating a “woke” drum to politicize Army, Navy, and Air Force recruitment shortfalls that the Pentagon, citing statistical surveys, attributes to a strong job market, quality-of-life issues, and a declining “propensity to serve” among American youth.
To engaged observers of committee reviews of President Joe Biden’s $863 million defense budget request, which has included a series of hearings before various panels on armed forces’ “wokeism” over the past month, the only verifiable aspect of these often belabored discussions is they do reflect a split-screen of partisan politicization.
The hearing featured four witnesses—three West Point graduates and a former 26-year career naval officer—and lasted almost 2 1/2 hours, nearly an hour longer than the time another House subcommittee earlier the same day spent reviewing the Pentagon’s proposed $61 billion nuclear weapons budget request.
Recruiting Woes
Only the Marine Corps and the newly created Space Force met their 2022 recruiting goals. The three largest military branches fell short, or marginally attained reconfigured goals in 2022, and they project that slide will continue in 2023.The Army missed its 2022 recruiting goal by 15,000 active-duty soldiers, or 25 percent of its target, leaving the nation’s largest military force 7 percent smaller than it was two years ago.
The Navy fell just shy after lowering its recruiting quota, increasing its oldest enlistment age to 41 from 39, and relaxed other standards, including for those with criminal backgrounds. The Air Force met its 2022 goal, but it anticipates missing its objectives for the first time since 1999, and by as much as 10 percent, in 2023.
The Pentagon maintains it faces the “most challenging recruiting environment in the 50 years of the all-volunteer force” primarily because of a good job market. It also notes that only 23 percent of Americans between the ages of 17 and 24 are eligible to serve, with 77 percent being incapable of doing so due to obesity, low test scores, criminal records, and behavioral health issues.
More subtly, surveys show that only 9 percent of the nation’s military-age population has “a propensity to serve” in public service, including the armed forces, underscoring a growing “civilian and military cultural divide,” with more than 80 percent of those now serving in the military coming from families of military veterans.
But there was little latitude for subtleties in this hearing.
“The military is not the institution for social experiments and political correctness,” said subcommittee Chair Rep. Glenn Grossman (R-Wis.). “The administration seems to be willfully blinded by how its progressive ideals are affecting readiness and recruitment.”
Untrue, countered Rep. Mike Garcia (D-Calif.), a former naval officer, noting that the military has always been the vanguard of social change in the United States.
“Was President Truman ‘woke’ when he desegregated the military in 1947?” Garcia asked, pointing to initiatives and programs imposed by the Pentagon in the 1960s and 1970s that, as Republicans often say, made the U.S. armed forces “the greatest civil rights organization in the history of the planet.”
“This hearing today is not really focused on how we can do better” in recruiting and readiness, Garcia said. “It is important that we do not focus on partisan issues—the issues brought up today by my Republican colleagues—but instead we should focus on ... the actual issues related to recruitment and retention, which the data actually say are causing issues.”
Three of the four witnesses refuted Garcia’s claim that there is no difference between the equal opportunity initiatives that have shaped the military for a half century and the progressive “politicization” imposed by the Biden administration since January 2021.
DEI: Ugly, Bad, Good
The Pentagon’s DEI program “subjects some service members to 11-week resident DEI training classes—despite the military’s history of leading the fight against discrimination,” he said.Hunt, a West Point graduate and former Army officer who is black, said his alma mater now “lectures cadets about ‘addressing whiteness,’ while the Air Force Academy has started the bizarre practice of appointing cadet DEI officials.”
He said the army spent $114 million on DEI in 2022, and “in some cases we are paying these ‘DEI bureaucrats’ $200,000 a year” despite there being “no data to determine if it actually works, which we know it doesn’t.”
He said the Department of Defense’s “weeping embrace” of DEI has infused the military with “central organizing principles ... to view all matters through the lens of DEI, which is inessential if not actively harmful to war-fighting capabilities.”
“The U.S. military today is more diverse than it has ever been—and that is one of its great strengths,” he said, noting more than 17 percent of the military is female and nearly one-third identify as a minority.
“One of my earliest recollections of my own time in uniform was a session on race relations in my first weeks at West Point in the summer of 1972. The U.S. military at the time was a deeply broken force at the end of the Vietnam War, with widespread drug abuse and indiscipline in the ranks. Race relations were tense, with violent riots between whites and blacks erupting in the barracks and aboard warships at sea.”
Then-President Richard Nixon and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird—neither of whom “can be described as liberal progressives”—imposed the earliest iterations of DEI training in the military, he said.
It made him a better officer and combat leader in three wars, Barno said. “My long military career convinced me that the effectiveness and success of our strikingly diverse and talented force strongly rely upon it. Our potential adversaries can only marvel at that success. Abandoning this uniquely American advantage will only make our military less cohesive and less capable in the face of our future foes,” he said.
No Pride, No Service
In the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol breach, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered a 60-day stand down “to address extremism in the ranks” and create a Department of Defense (DOD) working group to address the issue.“Extremism” was not an issue in the military, witnesses said. Between 2018 and 2021, the DOD reported 27 incidents of “extremist activity” across a 2.1 million-person force.
“Nevertheless, the DOD spent 5.359 million manhours on ‘extremism prevention’ and over $500,000 on the stand down, not including the cost of compiling the report,” Sadler said, noting the Pentagon is seeking $34.2 million for “countering extremist activities” in its fiscal year 2024 budget—the same it received in fiscal year 2023—“for a problem that may not even exist.”
In December 2022, in its first annual DOD “extremism” report, there were 211 allegations of prohibited activity, of which 48 led to discipline or a court-martial. Over the span of the two years, fewer than 100 in the military have been disciplined for “extremist activity,” which constitutes “about 0.005 percent” of the nation’s armed forces, he said.
Sadler said the DOD’s anti-extremism training materials are portrayed “as benign and reasonable,” but “evidence has shown that training proceeded to reflect leftist ideology” and that it’s dissuading Americans—especially white youth—from joining the military.
“Such a precipitous drop in such a short period of time is alarming,” she said, attributing that decline to DEI and “wokeism.” “That number is likely to rapidly decrease, as I am not alone in my hesitation to recommend military service to the next generation. Unfortunately, it will be many years before the full effect of such a decrease will be known, and it will take at least a generation to fix.”
Mobbs said that Republicans, whose “pride in being American has consistently outpaced Democrats’ and independents’ since 2001, and continues to do so today” are, nevertheless, not as proud as they once were and that national pride is a prime motivator in enlisting in the military.
“Republicans’ extreme national pride—58 percent—is now at its lowest point,” she said. “Likewise, independents’ extreme pride, at 34 percent, is the lowest on record. After hitting a 22 percent low point in 2019, Democrats’ extreme pride rose to 31 percent in 2021 at the start of Biden’s presidency, but it is down this year to 26 percent. All three major party groups show double-digit declines in pride compared with 2013, with Democrats’ 30-point decline the largest.”
Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) said southern states have always been lucrative recruiting grounds for the military, but many who may have considered joining are now turned off by the wokeism permeating the Pentagon.
“Southern families, conservative families, we are not going to encourage our young men and women to join the military and endure this stuff,” he said. “In society, woke is a social discussion, but in the military, woke is weak—and that is the problem.”
Yet the Pentagon doesn’t seem to see this “problem,” Higgins said. He waved printouts of two recent articles in The Epoch Times, one discussing recruiting issues related to nearly 80 percent of young Americans’ being unfit for service with an array of challenges facing the nation’s military, and another documenting how, according to the Navy and Marine Corps, three of its biggest challenges are “climate instability, COVID’s ongoing impact, [and] strengthening a naval culture of inclusiveness and respect.”
“Nothing on readiness and lethality,” Higgins said. “What’s happening now is families are holding our youngsters back. Families are saying don’t join.”
The nation’s military leadership is a “laughingstock,” Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Texas) said. “The administration’s intent in clear: cleanse the military of conservatives. And the consequences are devastating.”
