https://tomklingenstein.com/the-crisis-in-the-armed-forces/
Editor’s Note: A cold civil war is won or lost by the capture of institutions. Even today, many conservatives regard the military as one of the last institutions resisting capture by the new regime. Will Thibeau, director of the American Military Project at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life, argues that precisely the opposite is true: that the Armed Forces were “among the first American institutions to formally embrace the radical logic of group quotas.“ This new organizing principle is directly linked to a steep decline in military standards and performance, with life-and-death consequences for Americans and America.
Part I of Identity in the Trenches: The Fatal Impact of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion on U.S. Military Readiness.
In August 2021, the world watched as American forces scrambled to evacuate Afghanistan as the Taliban reclaimed power. The panicked withdrawal reached a tragic climax on August 26, when 13 American service members (and more than 100 Afghan civilians) were killed by a suicide bomber in the Kabul airport, where security was a U.S. responsibility. Four days later, when the last military planes took off from that same airport, hundreds of American citizens were left behind. A month later still, when the secretary of Defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the CENTCOM commanding general were called before Congress to account for the failure, they neither offered explanations nor accepted responsibility. The message was clear: Incompetence would be the new norm for the U.S. military — a predictably lethal status quo.
The Afghanistan debacle was dramatic, but it was only one small part of a much larger picture. The United States Armed Forces were once the envy of the world, in large part because we selected the best of the best, and instilled in our fighting men an unshakeable military ethos. Both the ethos and the selection, however, have been in steady decline as the Department of Defense succumbs to a dangerous ideology: that of group quotas, or forced outcome equality for identity groups based on race and sex.
Critics of the current state of affairs in our Armed Forces waste precious breath on disturbing but minor issues like reading lists, drag shows, and TikTok trends. This paper serves as a call for focus and precision on the prevalence of race and sex-based quotas, and the accompanying collapse in professional standards, in the fight to reclaim the integrity of the institution of the military.
Quotas, by one name or another, have been defense policy since 1965 when Secretary Robert McNamara decided to make the Pentagon the leading edge of the effort to adhere to the principles and policies of the Civil Rights Act. This history is important to understand because it clarifies the mission ahead.
