Diversity Thursday

it was just yesterday...

Over at WSJ, recent Midrats Podcast guest and former Congressman Mike Gallagher, along with Kevin Wallsten remind us where we were just a year ago in their article, How DEI Caused a Military Recruitment Crisis.

So much progress has been made over the last year in a move away from sanctioned sectarianism and institutional racial discrimination that it is easy to forget how bad things were.

We should not forget. Much of the progress is based on executive action, not legislation or significant new action in the courts. With the courts, quite a few firewalls have been put in, but not enough. Without proper legislation, we are just one election away from returning to this.

Under President Biden, senior officers worked to make our military less white, precipitating a recruitment crisis.

During the first Trump administration, lethality was the military’s overriding focus. That changed in 2021. Mr. Biden issued an executive order embedding “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” across “all parts of the Federal workforce.” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin took the unprecedented step of ordering a “stand-down” to combat “extremism” in the armed forces. By the time an independent report commissioned by the Pentagon found these concerns to be baseless, they had already formed the ideological permission structure for a DEI crusade.

This was endemic and promoted at the highest levels.

In 2022, Gen. C.Q. Brown (later promoted to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) issued a memorandum that set numerical quotas for everyone from white males to Pacific Islander females among commissioned officer applicants to the Air Force. Racial discrimination likewise distorted admissions to the U.S. Naval Academy. Black applicants scoring in the fourth decile had an admission rate higher than that of whites in the eighth decile.

The authors refer back to the article from Jacob Savage that we covered in December. It is here they make the tie-in to recruiting, and it is spot on.

…the military isn’t the media. It requires young people to sign up for unglamorous and sometimes dangerous jobs far from home. By signaling that white men were less welcome, DEI initiatives pushed thousands of them away from military service.

Between 2013 and 2023, annual male enlistments in the Army fell 35%, from 58,000 to 37,700. From 2018 to 2023 the number of white Army recruits dropped from 44,042 to 25,070. No other groups saw such steep declines. Meanwhile the share of white high school boys who in Monitoring the Future surveys said the military is doing a “good” or “very good” job declined from 76% in 2014 to 57% in 2024.

While all that was going on, in comments here, readers reported in first person how this overt discrimination was impacting multi-generational military families.

Don’t forget, this was policy.

The focus on DEI also fueled a “recommendation recession.” The percentage of white male veterans who said in a 2019 Pew study that they would advise a young family member to join the military was 81%. Only 63% said so in the 2024 Survey of Military Veterans, which also asked why. Far more white male respondents pointed to the military’s “DEI and other social policies” (66%) than to the “possibility of physical injury or death” (38%) or the “possibility of psychological problems” (35%). These recommendations matter: According to a 2023 article in the Journal, 80% of recruits have relatives who served.

Good news, there has been nice progress in correcting the recruitment problem, and as part of a larger shift in the vibe at The Pentagon, it isn’t just among white men.

Initial evidence suggests the reset is working, with the Pentagon announcing its “best recruiting numbers in 15 years.” All active-duty services met their fiscal 2025 recruiting goals, and 2026 recruiting numbers suggest “a strong and promising start.” The Pentagon hasn’t released data on white male enlistments, but the postelection 2024 Reagan National Defense Survey found a 12-point increase in the willingness of white people under 30 to serve compared with a year before. In the 2025 survey, the share of adults who would encourage a young person to join the military increased 8 points among whites and 14 points among veterans from two years earlier.

DEI advocates often framed their initiatives as necessary to attract female and nonwhite recruits. Today’s evidence contradicts that self-serving view. Female recruitment is up from 16,725 in 2024 to 23,985 in 2025. Encouragement to enlist increased among blacks (9 points), Hispanics (14 points), and women under 55 (15 points) since 2023 in the Reagan National Defense Survey.

As we have often pointed out here, perhaps it is because the nation has moved past 1973, and spot welding on an outdated and counterproductive Cultural Marxist theory on a free people is just a bad idea.

We are not even close to fixing the larger problem, however.

This note towards the end wraps it up nicely.

If the U.S. wants to sustain its all-volunteer force, we must rebuild trust in the military as a uniquely egalitarian institution in which standards are uniformly high, excellence is rewarded, and no one receives special treatment. And we must maintain this commitment across administrations.

Again, Congress must act. This progress cannot be sustained on Executive Orders, personality, or the whim of who is going to court or not.

The present administration needs to use this as an opportunity to dig in the records and put out in public the red in tooth and claw discrimination we all saw on active duty.

If they won’t do that, or perhaps in parallel with that effort, I think the trial bar might have some additional work to do.

For those of us who have been writing about this topic and our readers, summary in the article is not news. This was not done on the down-low behind closed doors. We saw it on active duty. Heck, some of us were ordered to “make the metrics work” and participated in it. <guilty>

We wrote about it at the time. I’ve been writing about such action since the Bush43 administration. Gen. Brown et al above is not the story, but the final form of the story.

There are worse stories.

Admissions and promotion are a zero-sum game. People were harmed. A class of people who should take action. A class action.

All the records are there; all they need is proper discovery. I’d prefer present Pentagon leadership take a proactive approach in line with the "Truth and Reconciliation Commission” concept, but if not, let slip the lawyers of wrath.