Diversity Thursday
a goal is a quota is a cancer
Though in some areas in the civilian world things are moving in a modern and commendable way, it is important to remember that our military is still mired in a retrograde miasma of racialism and discrimination.
No one is hiding anything here - we show what we can now and then - but part of the problem is that there is so much extruding from DOD it is hard to keep track of.
As we look forward to General Milley’s retirement ceremony, a friend reminded me that we cannot avert our eyes as to what is coming next.
Everyone is entitled to a fair start, and for the next Chairman I will give him that, but we cannot forget where he is coming from.
As I like to do being that we have so many new readers every week who have not visited us on Thursdays the last couple of decades, let’s remind everyone of some baseline truths:
It is true in the civilian sector and is unquestionably a hard and fast rule in the military that senior leadership’s goals are your requirements. Full stop. You meet them, and if possible exceed them. If you don’t those who do will be advanced, you won’t.
When organizations say they support and desire, “viewpoint diversity” etc., check to see if what they actually measure. Ignore what they say, look at what they measure.
In the zero-sum game that is recruitment, promotions, and job selection - to give to one is to take from another.
Most men and women enlisting or entering an officer program today were +/- 3-yrs old when Obama was elected President. Note that the world view of most in the diversity nomenklatura is stuck in the late-1960s and early 1970s.
The military’s open door is that the end of our society’s mechanism of raising and educating its young. The first metrics that determine suitability of military service after physical condition are education, criminal record, and history of drug use. Unfortunately, there are significant group differences in these areas amongst self-identified racial and ethnic groups in the USA. We haven’t even looked at propensity to serve either. In a all volunteer force, that is a primary driver that is also outside the military’s controls. As such, the pool of available/interested candiates when broken down by race and ethnicity at the door of military does not “look like America.” As such, nothing further down the pipe will either.
As the NYT shows us, we don’t even have geographical diversity.
In the military, we know what objective characteristics are that lead to success in the service. We have decades of date representing tens of millions of data points. If we move from objective measures of success to more subjective measures - or worse prioritize metrics unrelated to performance - then the best will not be chosen. If you don’t pick the best, your organization will underperform. If your military underperforms, more of your people will die, and your nation is more likely to lose its battles and its wars. Nations that do that on a regular basis decline and disaggregate.
The diversity industry in the US military has adopted a 19th to early 20th Century one drop rule. With each passing year we become a more wonderfully blended nation as mixed race people have children with other mixed race people - and yet like some 1930s eugenicists measuring people’s skulls with calipers, the diversity commissariat insist on making people choose just one small part of their heritage - because there is advantages to the individual and the organization for them to pick one or the other.
The above incentivizes more racial self identification fraud and force moral harm on those who practice it for personal gain or have to deny one part of their family or another.
No diverse nation has ever survived in peace by having a spoils system based on race and ethnicity. None.
And so, with the brief and incomplete reminder of the cancer of sectarianism above, take some time to read the below from 10-months ago.
See who signed it.
There is a long path to go. A lot of work to do - but in the end, equality will win over the bigotry of equity. It has to - or is all falls apart.
Interesting that the powers at be have decided to denigrate and insult the heritage and ancestors of the areas who have and contribute the most to our military.
The first thing that jumped out at me on the map of counties with the highest recruitment rates was to notice where those counties are not. The map looked very much like those 2020 maps of Trumpland, and the obverse of the Hillary Archipeligo. How in the world a set of diversity goals can be met when the raw material to create them are so heavily skewed against the creation of diversity? That the top brass of the Air & Space Forces walked right past that question, probably didn't even notice it, is a sure measure of how weak that military leadership has become.