Woke Military Nonsense: Injecting Equity Into an Equality-Focused Institution
Thoughts about the Air Force colonel who delivers sanctimonious lectures about institutional racism to his fellow “white colonels.”
In you’re an infantry soldier in the US Army, you can distinguish yourself by earning an Expert Infantry Badge. To do that, you have to qualify as an expert with the rifle, then complete a series of skills tests like “set headspace and timing on a caliber .50 machine gun” and “operate as a station in a radio net with SINCGARS radio single channel.” Then, finally, you have to complete a 12-mile road march. You can read the standards for that event here: carry a rifle and magazines, wear a helmet at all times, carry a rucksack weighing at least 35 pounds, and so on. When the person with the stopwatch says that three hours have elapsed, you’re either standing behind the finish line or in front of it; you either earn the EIB or you don’t.
The test isn’t subjective — the judges don’t award you style points. If you crawl across the finish line in a pool of blood and urine, sobbing for mommy, but you do it in less than three hours, and you still have your rucksack and your rifle and everything else at the end, you get the EIB.
Nor is it weighted. If you’re a fourth-generation VMI graduate with a fine old family name that can be found on the rolls of the Mayflower Society, you get the EIB if you cross the finish line on time. If you’re an E-2 who grew up in a trailer park and barely made it out of high school and doesn’t remember the names of all your so-called stepdads, you get the EIB if you cross the finish line on time. Officers and enlisted work to exactly the same standard. The credential comes from the task, full stop. This fact is the core of every credential you can earn in the military: If you’re authorized to wear the Parachutist Badge, you went to Fort Benning, or whatever they call it now, and jumped out of the plane five times without missing the ground. You did the thing. Doing the thing is who you are, in a growing list of things.
As a set of organizations built on task competence, for plainly measurable tasks that can’t be faked or fudged, the armed forces have been America’s first meritocracy. The first black West Point graduate was commissioned in 1877; the first black Medal of Honor recipient was born into slavery. Even in the segregated military, credentials obtained through task competence bore weight, as the court-martial of Jackie Robinson suggests with its outcome: In 1944, in Texas, a black officer was correct to harshly demand respect from a white enlisted soldier.
If you’ve served in the military, you’ve seen this. In my first posting as an infantryman, my company commander, first sergeant, platoon sergeant, and squad leader were black, a fact that I never heard anyone even mention. Rank, profession, and authority come from doing, without socioeconomic or racial chutes or ladders: If you can fly the plane, you’re a pilot. Up to the boundaries of the flag ranks, politics and identity don’t matter. (Regarding those flag ranks, see the late David Hackworth’s discussion of “perfumed princes.”)
And so the descent of the American military into the performative politics of DEI and equity and Robin DiAngelo books just blindly shits on the core value of the American military, which is that you get the rank and the status for what you do, full stop.
The American military was a racial meritocracy far ahead of academia, far ahead of corporations, far ahead of other government institutions, and far ahead of most cultural institutions. Maybe Oberlin has an earlier claim, but I can’t think of any other institution that can enter the competition.
“Dear white colonel,” Col. Ben Jonsson wrote in the Air Force Times, “you and I set the culture, drive the calendar, and create the policies at most of our installations around the Air Force. If we do not take the time to learn, to show humility, to address our blind spots around race, and to agree that we are not as objective as we think and our system is not as fair as we think, then our Air Force will not rise above George Floyd’s murder.”
If you didn’t know that the United States Air Force needed to rise above “George Floyd’s murder,” you may have too much sense to ascend to the highest ranks of the DEI-centered armed forces. Col. Ben Jonsson currently awaits Senate confirmation of his promotion to brigadier general.
On a related topic, see this piece I wrote at The Blaze for today.
Yup. Obama drove out all the warriors with this shit. But, in the long run, it’s ok. We don’t go to war anymore to win; haven’t done so since August, 1945, so competency is not required. Not only did we take 15 years and a few trillion dollars to not defeat a buncha illiterates with only small arms and black pajamas, we did a repeat for 20 years when the next team wore white pajamas, then we gifted them $85B in modern equipment and now are paying them $160,000,000 per month for the privilege of having been defeated & chased outta the country by them. Just need men to quit enlisting & we’ll be fine. We’ll still pay about a trillion a year for nuthin, but ... FWIW, I’m USAFA ‘76.
Meritocracy is how everything should work. Now, in reality, almost nothing is a pure meritocracy. The military is no exception, but perfect isn't on the table. We strive for perfection. We rarely get there. When we get close, we're doing pretty damned good. There's always an angle or a hook that some people can work. It's not right, but politics happens. I was never in the military. But I've seen jocks at elite prep schools and universities who were dumber than a box of rocks, and the children of prominent power brokers, who were degenerates. I've seen doctors with big credentials who I wouldn't let take care of my cat. Those of us in the rank and file of smart enough and lucky enough to get into those institutions at the time, couldn't get away with being stupid or degenerate. Today those same institutions are a sad husk of what they used to be. They've beclowned themselves with trite, temporarily gratifying collectivist half-baked ideas which fall apart on even cursory inspection. Why? You tell me. Greed, stupidity, conformity, inertia, baby boomer cosplay radicals trying to relive the 1960's, more factors abound no doubt. Sure, there are still some superstar students and faculty, but there is a lot of fluff in there. And it's not benign fluff. It's fluff coated in the corrosive acid of DEI and other assorted trendy yet harmful ideas that have captured the imaginations of the dilettantes in the power class. The institutions suffer, and good, constructive people who could take advantage of opportunities are left out so that some ridiculous, destructive nonsense can be indulged.
We can't afford this. We can't afford institutionalized stupidity and incompetence, particularly in critical technical professions. The military constitutes a profession with an expansive knowledge repository and stringent requirements for excellence in order to successfully complete complex tasks and missions. Yes, they break stuff and kill people, but it's not nearly that simple. Same idea with Medicine, Aviation, Engineering, Law, many other professions. Putting incompetent, ideologically driven people who can't do the basic thing in there is an instant recipe for failure and degradation of the professional system. And we are well into it throughout the West. Our external opponents not so much. They are not stupid or tired. They are not lazy. They are coming for us.
This is going to get solved, one way or another. If we don't arrest the decline into idiocy, then idiocy will suicide itself and take us with it at some point. It's not if, it's when. I don't know that an inflection point is going to be produced by one signal event. So far it appears not to be the case. Maybe it's not bad enough yet. But the evidence that bad ideas lead to really bad outcomes is all over the place, everywhere.
The Air Force didn't kill George Floyd, obviously. The cop who was mostly guilty of being dumb and being in the wrong place at the wrong time didn't kill him either. George Floyd OD'd on narcotics. His autopsy shows this clearly. Had the police never arrested him, there is a good chance he would have just collapsed and died by himself. The EMT's had a hard time getting through the crowd of angry racialist wokesters hassling/threatening the panicked police. This didn't help the unfortunate Mr. Floyd get some Narcan in a timely fashion, which probably would have pulled him out of his death spiral.
DEI won't save future George FLoyds. But it will kill the Air Force and every other institution that allows it to metastasize. It's already happening. The best and the brightest will figure out how to succeed without the traditional elite pathways, which have been outed as corrupt, mediocre, and hostile to productive individuals. Eventually, the elites will either reassert and champion the idea of individual excellence, or they will pass into irrelevancy. The market decides, whether its the market of ideas or money or any other dimension of human interaction. Where you sell a product or a service, competition never stops. No government can overcome this without rendering itself instantly into obsolescence. Because somebody else is going to attract your citizens, your capital, your future. It's merely a question of how much farther we allow ourselves to fall.