The Corrupting Influence of DEI on Military Education

By CDR J.A. Cauthen, USN ret, USNA ’02

By now, the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) industry’s capture of academia, business, and government is obvious to most Americans.

From former Harvard president Claudine Gay’s televised equivocations before Congress to the unhinged, violent student and faculty occupations in support of Hamas at some of America’s most elite universities, many are no doubt wondering if DEI is producing something counter to its placid-sounding words.

That this shameful behavior is occurring at civilian institutions of higher learning is probably no surprise to most observers.

Unfortunately, DEI has metastasized beyond the confines of the civilian world and found a willing host in America’s armed forces. Left unchecked, DEI-focused military education and training will lead to the same nihilistic abyss as their civilian counterparts.

If current trends are allowed to persist, the military and its service members risk succumbing to the same divisiveness and politicization that are roiling academia, but with arguably far direr and deadlier consequences.

The growing evidence coming from entrenched civilian DEI bureaucracies, in higher learning in particular, demonstrates both a pernicious trend and DEI’s true nature.

Reviewing how DEI has corrupted civilian institutions offers a useful proxy to examine how it has and will continue to influence the attitudes and behaviors of our nation’s military personnel, especially the officer corps, to the detriment of national security.

Military DEI programs, just as in academia, will likely result in similar outcomes, where identity-based discrimination and forced “equity” are elevated and prioritized over color-blindness and equality of opportunity.

In recent years, prominent authors and organizations have detailed how DEI corrupts institutions and civil society.

John Sailer has convincingly written about how DEI supplants merit with discrimination in faculty-hiring practices.

Chris Rufo has described how DEI co-opts universities, transforming them into institutions of political activism.

The Heritage Foundation has examined how DEI is used by universities to cull “problematic” thinking and behavior among the faculty, with the intent of shaming, isolating, or purging non-conformists.

A Claremont Institute report on the University of Alabama System analyzes how DEI initiatives “undermine the advancement of knowledge, the diversity of ideas, meritocracy, societal and campus unity, and the achievement of the common good.”

The DEI apparatus is comprehensive and seeks to fundamentally transform education and civil society. If these are DEI’s objectives, one wonders why America’s military leadership, and the armed forces’ educational institutions and training programs, have so enthusiastically embraced it.

Arizona State University’s Center for American Institutions (CAI) recently released a report called “Civic Education in the Military.”

This document questions the value of DEI in military education and training, highlighting the pervasiveness of DEI’s infiltration into the armed forces and the service academies, as well as how DEI negatively impacts military readiness. The overall assessment is bleak.

Rather than decreasing as Americans wake up to DEI’s dangers, Department of Defense “spending on DEI programming is increasing. The DOD’s allocation for DEI projects jumped from $68 million in fiscal year 2022 to $86.5 million in fiscal year 2023. The Pentagon is requesting $114.7 million for fiscal year 2024,” according to CAI’s report.

These increasing budgets for DEI programs are designed to bolster and promote DEI in the services to address alleged demographic disparities that do not, in fact, exist.

As CAI’s report notes, the scope of DEI in the Department of Defense stretches from the highest echelons of command down to the unit level through a “vast DEI bureaucracy.”

The report asserts, “DEI carries inherently negative messages about Western civilization generally, and about the United States and its people specifically.” These teachings are at odds with the oath all service members take to support and defend the Constitution.

America’s military should instead be focusing on educating service members in the fundamentals of U.S. history and civics, critical thinking, the art and science of war, strategy, etc.

Yet the U.S. Naval War College organizes an annual “Women, Peace, and Security” symposium that has devolved into an identity-centric confab divorced from military imperatives. It also recently hosted a transgender active-duty Space Force officer who leads the branch’s “LGBTQ+ Initiatives Team” and spoke of how DEI (allegedly) advances retention.

America’s premier military undergraduate institutions have also fully committed to DEI. All have published DEI strategic plans, administered by well-staffed and funded DEI offices, to ensure institutional implementation.

The U.S. Military Academy has a dedicated diversity and inclusion minor, as does the U.S. Air Force Academy. The U.S. Naval Academy offers faculty resources on how to craft a diversity statement and develop an “anti-racist” classroom and pedagogy.

Moreover, CAI’s report highlights how the Naval Academy uses so-called Diversity Search Advocates (DSA) to screen candidates for civilian tenure-track positions based on identity-centric traits such as race and gender.

Each service academy offers various courses, seminars, and programs centered on DEI indoctrination.

West Point, according to CAI’s report, has a mandatory seminar that “covers the structures of white power and [the] extent of white rage” and offers a 15-credit-hour DEI minor.

The Naval Academy’s English department offers a course on interpreting literature through the lens of “1970s-style feminism through current preoccupations with Critical Race Theory and Queer Theory.”

The Air Force Academy also offers courses centered on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality that are designed to “help cadets mature into D&I (Diversity and Inclusion) professionals for the Air Force.”

As CAI’s report notes, these DEI initiatives reflect “the trends in the civilian academy toward a postmodern focus on race and gender, often with inattention to standard history and literature.”

This turn from teaching our military’s future leaders about our nation’s complex history—and instead replacing it with politically motivated content such as the 1619 Project—will necessarily erode the confidence and motivation of the men and women who selflessly serve in a volunteer armed forces.

CAI’s report closes by asserting that a “professionalized military requires imbued shared values of military and service history, national heritage, and service pride. Current DEI training with its emphasis on Critical Race Theory imparts division and subverts a system of advancement based on merit and professional expertise.”

To remain an effective, lethal fighting force tasked with deterring, and if necessary defeating, our nation’s enemies, the military must remain an apolitical and professional institution centered on fealty to the Constitution and not a corrosive ideology at odds with our nation’s founding.

The military’s DEI “bureaucracy exists not to defend the nation or produce the military leaders of the future,” CAI’s report contends. “Instead, it produces training materials that parrot dubious, even dangerous, theories that sow the seeds of division and resentment within the ranks of the military.”

Cohesion, unity of purpose, and duty to a higher cause are foundational to American military superiority. DEI seeks to undermine these crucial traits through the binary of oppressed and oppressor.

If this becomes the underlying organizing principle of the military through DEI-centric education and training, then our enemies will have gained a valuable advantage over our armed forces in a future conflict.

To remedy these ills, Congress, the Pentagon, and the individual services urgently need to purge DEI from the American military.

This will take the force of law, time, and courage. In the interim, by returning to traditional civics education, America’s armed forces will ensure personnel are educated in line with their oaths and duty.

Military education should, therefore, “aim at enhancing servicemembers’ understanding of foundational American philosophy and values, the basics of American politics and government, the Constitution, and their oath to support and defend the Constitution,” as CAI’s report advocates.

Once this occurs, our service members will be better focused on deterring the nation’s foes and, if needed, waging war with overwhelming lethality instead of risking the dysfunction and disunity DEI has created elsewhere.

CAI’s report argues for a return to the fundamentals of civics education, which reinforces the virtues of our republic and our nation’s Constitution.

Military personnel volunteer to serve their nation for a variety of reasons, many of which are inextricably linked to the ideals enshrined in the Constitution.

DEI, at best, distracts from this and, at worst, creates a hostile atmosphere contrary to our nation’s shared history and belief in liberty, individual rights, and equality of opportunity.

J.A. Cauthen, a retired naval officer, graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 2002 and taught in the history department from 2007 to 2010. He is a commission member for the Arizona State University Center for American Institutions’ report on civic education in the military.

First published on The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

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