Race and Deconstruction

Culture War Comes for the American Military

While soldiers can withdraw their consent to be commanded, a second path to the withdrawal of that consent is easier: don’t start. And that appears to be happening. As the military news website Defense One has recently noted, American interest in military service is declining sharply, and recruiters are facing a distinctly hostile environment. It’s weird, ‘cause you’d think the Afghanistan debacle and the inflexible vaccine mandate and the operational stand-down for an ideological purge would bring ‘em flooding into the recruiting offices. But here’s the most interesting part:

The percentage of Black respondents who reported an interest in military service dropped from 20 percent in summer 2019 to 11 percent in summer 2020, according to the data. By fall 2020, the percentage of Black respondents interested in military service had dropped to 8 percent. 

The percentage of Hispanics reporting an interest in military service dropped from 18 percent to 14 percent over the same time. Interest from recruitment-eligible whites remained steady, from 8 percent in summer 2019 to 9 percent in summer 2020. 

So the withdrawal of military participation is plainly racialized, with a disproportionate collapse of African-American willingness to provide service to the armed forces. Predictably, Defense One pivots to Orange Man Bad, arguing that black potential recruits are pulling away from the military in 2021 because of someone who isn’t the president anymore: “Last June, after Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer, then-president Donald Trump pitted the military against those protesting his death…Some Guardsmen, as well as police forces dressed in military fashion, subsequently used force to disperse peaceful protestors and subdue rioters and looters.”

See, young black men don’t want to be in the military anymore because of “police forces dressed in military fashion.” Case closed!

Offering no proof of this claim at all, the report also doesn’t examine, for example, the racial trends in military recruitment after the Ferguson riots in 2014, or after active duty troops patrolled the streets of South Central Los Angeles during the Rodney King riots in 1992.

Unexplored alternative explanations include the widely publicized vaccine mandate for servicemembers, a significant barrier to black recruitment in a country with racialized vaccine hesitancy, and significantly higher rates of distaste among potential black recruits for the possibility of serving alongside gay and transgendered military colleagues in the wake of policy changes that make that possibility more likely.

But the truth is that no one knows why African-American interest in military service is collapsing, because no one has dared to ask.

The strange and unfortunate thing about young black men and women pulling away from military service is that the armed forces have been America’s most powerful engine of racial equality. The military was desegregated in 1948, six years before Brown v. Board of Education; the Double V campaign substantially preceded the march on Selma and the Birmingham bus boycott. Anyone who has served in the military in at least the last forty years has routinely answered to black commanders and NCOs. At one point in my own service in the army, I served at the same moment under the leadership of a black company commander, a black first sergeant, a black platoon sergeant, and a black squad leader. The military is one of the first institutions in America in which black men and women have exercised uncontested formal authority on equal terms with whites – early, fully, consistently. (The other institutions where this happened were the Reconstruction Congress and the post-Civil War Republican Party.)

The culture war battlefield is everywhere, and the unintended consequences spool out endlessly. Remarkably, the Woke destruction of a high-trust society threatens to make the American military whiter. Maybe that’s something Mark Milley will want to understand, at some point.