At a town hall meeting in the Pentagon last February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said, “I think the single dumbest phrase in military history is ‘our diversity is our strength.'”
Talk about dumb. Many former officers, who are now free to speak out, argue that Hegseth’s Holy War against diversity in the military is profoundly self-destructive. In the name of bolstering our nation’s defenses, he’s making them weaker, not stronger.
Isaiah “Ike” Wilson III, a retired colonel and former West Point professor, told CNN that Hegseth’s crusade “politicizes, in a partisan way, the military. And it does it in a very sinister way.”
At the urging of his boss, President Donald Trump, Hegseth has focused frequent fire on the military academies, where the next generation of leaders are being trained. In response to their demands, academy officials have erased almost any dimension of university life that studies and celebrates diversity, from a club for female cadets to a course on race and ethnicity.
Writing in The New York Times, Graham Parsons, a civilian professor of philosophy at West Point, said, “Many faculty members, including me (I study, among other things, masculinity and war), can no longer publish or promote our scholarship.”
Parsons called the pressures exerted by the Trump administration “brazen demands to indoctrinate, not educate.” The “cancel culture” that Trump often and effectively derided during his campaign for a second term has now become orthodoxy at the service schools.
When the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in college admissions two years ago, the justices specifically exempted the military academies from their ruling, citing their “potentially distinct interests” in promoting a diverse officer corps.
Now Trump has rejected that reasoning. Earlier this month, Hegseth released a memo stating that in the future, there would be “no consideration of race, ethnicity or sex” influencing admission to the academies, which will be based “exclusively on merit.”
As a professor at George Washington University for 34 years, I can testify that the policies of DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion — have sometimes gone overboard. I was once reported to the DEI police by three students who objected to my observation in class that many voters did not support allowing athletes assigned male at birth to compete on female sports teams.
But I can also say, after all those years in a classroom, that diversity provides the vivid vital core of a compelling educational experience. That’s especially true when it comes to training future officers.
As the Supreme Court was considering the affirmative action issue, 35 former top military leaders — including four former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and eight former service academy superintendents — filed a friend-of-the-court brief arguing that diversity was necessary for national security.
“The importance of maintaining a diverse, highly qualified officer corps has been beyond legitimate dispute for decades,” they wrote. “History has shown that placing a diverse Armed Forces under the command of homogenous leadership is a recipe for internal resentment, discord and violence. By contrast, units that are diverse across all levels are more cohesive, collaborative and effective.
“The importance of diverse leadership has risen to new heights in recent years, as international conflicts and humanitarian crises require the military to perform civil functions that call for heightened cultural awareness and sensitivity to ethnic and religious issues,” the former military chiefs argued. “All service members — minority or otherwise — are better equipped to meet these challenges if they are educated in a racially diverse environment and guided by diverse leadership in the field.”
In his guest essay in the Times, Parsons detailed how far the Trump administration has strayed from those ideals: “In a matter of days” after they took office, he wrote, “the United States Military Academy at West Point abandoned its core principles. Once a school that strove to give cadets the broad-based, critical-minded, nonpartisan education they need for careers as Army officers, it was suddenly eliminating courses, modifying syllabuses and censoring arguments to comport with the ideological tastes of the Trump administration.”
The Naval Academy at Annapolis was also intimidated, taking almost 400 books out of circulation. Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee angrily charged that the administration “displays an alarming return to McCarthy-era censorship.”
The blowback seems to have had some positive effect. The Naval Academy recently announced it was restoring most of the books to library shelves. But the White House’s war against diversity has already caused many casualties. The most serious is this: Our military will be less prepared to carry out its essential mission in the modern world.
Steven Roberts teaches politics and journalism at George Washington University. He can be contacted by email at stevecokie@gmail.com.
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