Military’s Push for Diversity Harms Warfighting Ability, Defense Analysts Say

A US military vehicle on a patrol in the countryside near the town of Qamishli, Syria, on Dec. 4, 2022. Baderkhan Ahmad/AP Photo

News Analysis

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.

A cadet fires an M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW) during Army ROTC Cadet Summer Training in Fort Knox, Ky., on July 1, 2021. Jon Cherry/Getty Images

A New Vision for the Military

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.

Setting reporting requirements and recruitment goals on the basis of race isn’t only irrelevant to combat training and preparedness, and harmful to morale, but is also blatantly illegal, according to Scott McQuarrie, president of Veterans for Fairness and Merit (VFM), a veterans’ organization whose membership currently stands at 644 former officers from various branches of the armed services.

“Warfighters don’t care what the skin color of their leaders is. They respond for a lot of reasons, and of course their training, without regard for skin color,” McQuarrie told The Epoch Times.

From a legal point of view, the race of those seeking admission to or participating in ROTC programs is irrelevant, and to put pressure on ROTC programs to alter their composition according to some arbitrarily defined metric violates the spirit and letter of the Constitution and more recent legislation, he argued.