By Scott McQuarrie III, USMA ’72
President, Veterans for Fairness and Merit

Here is an American Thinker article by a USAF officer (writing under a pseudonym) briefly explaining DEI’s roots and how the current administration (including uniformed DOD leaders) are implementing it in the USAF.

It’s a DoD-wide problem.

At DoD’s methodology’s core is a forced cultural transformation that is antithetical to colorblindness, selflessness, equal opportunity, merit and unity.

Those basic values are now under frontal assault, best exemplified by DoD’s legal argument that our military academies must be excused from adherence to constitutional equal protection of the law so that they may use racial preferences in their admissions practices.

DoD justifies that position by disingenuously asserting that officer- enlisted racial demographic parity is essential to national security, thus warranting an exception to constitutional compliance.

But DoD’s claim (p. 10 in their brief) that “West Point considers race and ethnicity narrowly as one factor” (which the Supreme Court has ruled, for all other colleges and universities, violates constitutional equal protection) falsely and deceptively ignores the sweeping impact their race-based admissions practices (different admissions standards for different races) have on admissions decisions.

In truth, large numbers of applicants having significantly higher Whole Candidate Scores (WCS) (using West Point’s own applicant scoring system) are rejected annually solely because of skin color to facilitate admission of lower scoring applicants.

Higher WCS has been independently shown to correlate with graduation rates, GPA, and success as an officer.  Real world data confirm such. 

Racial preferences in West Point admissions are unarguably lowering quality of a significant portion of each entering class, to the detriment of the Army.

Colorblindness, selflessness, merit, et al, have been cultural norms for a majority of Americans for generations.

They have also proven essential to our military’s success in times of war, a fact well known by most Americans.

The dissonance between those norms and the DEI cultural transformation being pressed by DOD (which in practice includes racial preferences) continues to choke recruiting and hinder retention.

Most informed Americans want no part of neo-Marxism dressed up as DEI. 

They insist, instead, on colorblindness, selflessness, equal opportunity, merit and unity.

They also know that our military’s adherence to those values is a national security imperative, despite DoD’s ideologically-inspired claims to the contrary.

The inevitable consequences of this transformation have included erosion of military leader quality, loss of trust, and compromise of our combat readiness (which are surely noticed by our potential adversaries and made part of their strategic calculus).

Congress must act to stop this destructive transformation. 

It should include in the next NDAA a provision that would expressly prohibit DoD from considering race and ethnicity in military personnel administration, including officer accessions, assignments and promotions.

Our military’s battle-tested culture – and our combat readiness – are at stake.