Military readiness should be the primary concern of military leaders, not indoctrination about race. Yet Dakota Wood, research fellow at The Heritage Foundation and two-decade Marine, says the latter is going to destroy the military:

As a young Marine Corps first lieutenant assigned to an infantry battalion in the late 1980s, I had charge of the unit transport section of operators, mechanics, and supervisors tasked with taking care of our fleet of combat vehicles.

This group of Marines, like all with whom I served over a 20-year military career, was a wonderful cross section of America representing all walks of life.

He says the Marines were of nearly every race, and from numerous states. Various economic, religious, and cultural backgrounds all mixed together, and, he says, “Everything just worked and worked well. Why?”

Because they were all Marines, wearing the same uniform, supporting the same combat organization, serving the same country. They all had been through the same training. They had to measure up to the same standards. They had to make the same cutoff scores for promotion.

They humped the same combat loads, ate the same field rations, fired the same qualifications at the rifle range, suffered the same annual refresher training for proper use of gas masks. They worked the same long hours in hot and sweaty, cold and damp, sunbaked or frigid or windblown field conditions, tolerated the same irritating micromanagement, and enjoyed the same positive leadership interventions from higher headquarters.

They were a team, committed to each other and expecting the same high levels of performance irrespective of skin color, ethnicity, economic or social background, accent, or taste in music. Each shared in the accomplishments of his fellow Marines, and each was quick to take to task any teammate who fell short of standard.

It was wonderful.

So why do the social justice warriors want to ruin that camaraderie, that esprit de corps?

I can’t help but wonder what it would have been like if each person in that section had been pitted against each other, assessing his fellow Marine’s trustworthiness or reliability or capability based on the color of his skin.

What if the black Marines judged the white Marines from the perspective of oppressed and oppressor? What if the white Marines viewed the black Marines as having achieved their rank or position by virtue of tokenism, or the black Marines assumed that the white Marines held their positions because the “system” was structured to ensure white dominance?

What if the Latino Marines viewed everyone with suspicion, presuming that they were to be treated as an inherently separate group that spoke a different language among themselves and therefore were not to be trusted? And what was with the Samoan and his completely different childhood, body type, food preferences, and speech peculiarities?

How could this group of Marines have operated as a team, especially when stressed in a combat situation?

The short answer is that they couldn’t. Because the racialists are not concerned, first and foremost, with the readiness of the military, or even the lives of America’s finest. They want to score points on a social justice measure, and to divide rather than unite.

Wood concludes:

Success in combat depends on the cohesion and competence of the forces involved. These, in turn, derive from teamwork and standards, which are built on trust, mutual respect, merit, shared experience, and a belief in service to a higher purpose. Critical race theory and other such divisive concepts would destroy all this.

Read the whole thing here.