By William Thibeau  |  Claremont Institute

The American military is widely seen as the last bastion of institutional integrity—and even conservatism—in the federal government.

Although public faith in the military has dipped by a third in recent years, over 60% of Americans still have confidence in our fighting force. Only small business benefits from a higher degree of trust from the public.

In Congress, the military still enjoys vast bipartisan deference when it comes to promotions and budget votes.

Even though General Charles Q. Brown, as Air Force chief of staff, signed into policy a blatant system of race- and sex-based quotas, only eleven senators opposed his promotion last year to succeed Mark Milley as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The annual National Defense Authorization Act passes both houses of Congress without meaningful opposition, no matter its wasteful pork or misguided priorities. Conservatives are told to trust the institution—after all, we need troops and weapons.

But now comes Unfit to Fight by Amber Smith, a former Army helicopter pilot and senior Trump Pentagon official, to shake Americans and their elected representatives out of their complacency by exposing, as her subtitle has it, How Woke Policies Are Destroying Our Military.

The case Smith presents is so complete and disturbing, one wonders how the decline of such a critical institution took place without more accountability or outcry.

In 2015 for example, the RAND Corporation published a comprehensive study of the Marine Corps’ trial effort to integrate women into combat units, which concluded that integrated units performed worse than all-male combat units in nearly every metric of combat readiness based on simulated training exercises and more typical fitness assessments.

The Pentagon under President Obama pushed forward, nonetheless, and ordered that every job and unit in the military be open to women.

But don’t worry, infantry officers were told, Army standards would preserve the integrity of the selection process that determines who serves in combat units.

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In pursuit of a supposedly higher, more objective physical assessment, the Army spent more than ten years and tens of millions of dollars to build the Army Combat Fitness Test (ACFT).

Whereas the previous Army Physical Fitness Test was a simple series of push-ups, sit-ups, and a two-mile run, the new ACFT was a diverse, six-event test meant to measure combat readiness more comprehensively.

One of the components was the leg tuck, which involves hanging from a pull-up bar and raising your knees to your elbows as many times as possible. The leg tuck was meant to measure soldiers’ ability to pull themselves up and over a wall or inside a window, and for those of us with airborne wings, the ability to pull your risers on a parachute to avoid hazards in the drop zone.

When the Army started introducing the test, women struggled disproportionately with the leg tuck, harming their overall scores and ultimately their promotion potential.

The Army treated this outcome not as a reality of training for war but instead as an injustice that had to end.

After an uproar from female generals and Democratic senators like Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, the Army replaced the leg tuck with a front plank, which does not measure soldiers’ ability to pull themselves up with their upper body.

As Amber Smith recounts, the Army was more than happy to discard genuine standards in order to forge a fighting force more conducive to liberal political imperatives.

Even men, who used to have to do 80 push-ups to earn an A+ score, now need only 50 while women must perform fewer still.

This is more than a question of fairly applying a uniform standard; it is gender ideology run amuck, corroding the very purpose and effectiveness of America’s defenses.

And it is telling that there hasn’t been another examination after the RAND study of combat readiness in integrated units over the past nine years.

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Smith exposes the corrosive effects of mandated racial diversity in a similar way.

Race- and sex-based quotas remain in place at West Point, the Air Force Academy, and in the mandates of the Under Secretary of Defense’s Strategic Plan for the Department.

These quotas demand a system of promotion and selection for military personnel based on something other than merit and professionalism.

Even most Republicans in Congress remain too timid to object to running the armed forces along the lines of the average H.R. department.

One could excuse Smith for not including a chapter to outline the state of the U.S. military before wokeness, and what it could be again. After all, it’s been over 60 years since our armed forces succumbed to blatant politicization.

But the military should only be about the mass application of brutal violence in service of American interests.

The world is so volatile, the stakes of warfare so high, the military does not have the luxury of social experimentation in the same way as civil society.

Will Thibeau is director of the American Military Project at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life.

First published on The Claremont Institute