The Patriot Post® · In Brief: Radicalizing Military Education
The military’s job, as it is sometimes said, is to kill enemy fighters and break their stuff. The ranks of our brave warriors should not be a petri dish for leftist social experiments, though that is exactly what Joe Biden and Barack Obama before him have done. J.A. Cauthen is a retired naval officer who graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 2002 and taught in the history department from 2007 to 2010. So he knows a thing or two, and he explains why the “divide and conquer” strategy of the Left is terrible for national security.
He begins with remembering the numerous fake research papers submitted to academic journals a few years back. The three scholars who did it were trying to prove a point about such “grievance studies” being utterly politically motivated. Then he writes:
If “grievance studies” lack academic rigor, and if some of their practitioners have been unmasked as charlatans rather than serious scholars, why have the nation’s military academies so enthusiastically embraced their arguments and conclusions? The overall politicization of the military, an historically conservative and apolitical institution, is one potential explanation. As a recent Heritage Foundation report on military readiness asserts, civilian and military leaders are advancing “divisive progressive social justice ideologies” across the individual services, largely by viewing “all matters through the lens of DEI.”
Purveyors of identity studies are, of course, adherents and advocates of DEI, and the success of their progressive political agenda in America’s other elite institutions — academia, media, government, and business — has renewed the objective of remaking the military in line with fashionable ideological views. Every federal military service academy, for example, has either established DEI offices or published strategic plans to expand this agenda. Increasingly, identity studies are required for some students, depending on their selected undergraduate major and minor.
For instance, a 2017 West Point memo requesting the creation of a diversity and inclusion minor (five courses and 15 credit hours) argued that the program of study would “leverage diversity and foster inclusion to prepare leaders of character … to effectively lead in a multicultural Army.” West Point established its diversity and inclusion minor in 2020, followed by the Air Force Academy in 2021. The Air Force Academy had a similar objective, asserting that the program would develop “leaders who not only understand and recognize the importance of diversity, but who actively create inclusive environments that leverage this diversity toward mission success.”
On its face, none of this rather vague language is particularly problematic. A deeper examination, however, raises legitimate questions about how the coursework in question supports the stated mission of the service academies and furthers professional military education. For example, some electives in these programs focus exclusively on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality — not exactly martial concerns.
He relays the details of a course at West Point, and another one at the Air Force Academy, and still another from the Naval Academy, which he calls “the first salvo in the campaign to increase identity studies across the military educational ecosystem.” The ultimate problem, he writes, is this:
DEI and identity-centric courses in civilian academic institutions are designed to divide and sort people into ever-expanding, aggrieved, and oppressed identity groups. We should not expect a different experience for military students and personnel. Where the military should be focusing on esprit de corps, critical thinking, tactical and strategic acumen, and developing an apolitical professional officer corps, it is instead aggressively embracing DEI and identity-based grievance studies.
… By continuing to teach and encourage disunity, discord, and discrimination in the military ranks, our armed services may have already lost the next conflict without even firing a shot.