What Happened When DEI Came to the Military?By Madeleine Rowley
https://www.thefp.com/p/dei-military-pete-hegseth-trump
A Free Press investigation reveals the extraordinary extent to which our armed forces put diversity over readiness. Pete Hegseth tells us that’s about to change.
Retired Air Force Brigadier General Christopher Walker, 59, spent almost two years as a senior adviser to the Air Force’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion at the Pentagon, attending dozens of meetings about implementing DEI initiatives. This was an unusual role given Walker’s career path: He had over 400 hours of combat flights and, most recently, had overseen West Virginia’s Air National Guard.
But in 2021, when the Air Force established its Office of Diversity and Inclusion, staffers assumed that Walker would be on board with their belief that DEI was a “warfighting imperative.” Why? Because Walker is black. But that assumption was wrong.
Walker was a mole.
Alarmed by DEI programs that were little more, in his view, than “Soviet indoctrination,” he leaked information to an organization called Stand Together Against Racism and Radicalism in the Services (STARRS). This group consists of retired military veterans and civilians who oppose woke ideology in the military. They, in turn, alerted lawmakers like Sen. Tom Cotton and Rep. Mike Waltz about what they were hearing from Walker and other active duty service members who opposed the military’s diversity policies.
“No one delved into how I thought,” Walker told The Free Press. “They took one look at me and assumed I believed these things. I learned to listen and had to bite my tongue a lot.”
Walker, who prefers to go by his pilot call sign, Mookie, took notes and mostly kept his head down, so he could keep reporting what was going on. “I thought, If this is allowed to stand, all of the senior people within the [Department of Defense] are going to bring along this propaganda and get rid of anybody who doesn’t go along with it.”
Mookie recalled a private meeting in 2022 attended by generals and other key Pentagon staffers. At the meeting, Alex Wagner, the Air Force assistant secretary, asked the group to brainstorm ways to get the general public to accept drag shows on Air Force bases.
Close to retirement and with nothing to lose, Mookie finally spoke up. “I reminded the group that since the 1980s, the Air Force has not allowed lingerie shows,” he said. “They don’t allow burlesque shows. So why would we allow drag shows?”
His comment seemed to have an effect. In June 2023, the Department of Defense officially banned drag shows on all military installations.
But that was the exception, not the rule. In 2022, Mookie recalls attending a training course at Georgetown University for Air Force generals and senior officers called “Managing for Inclusion.” The professor, he said, informed the group that white people were oppressors and black and Hispanic people were the oppressed, so they couldn’t be racist. The professor also taught the class how to ask someone for their pronouns at the beginning of a conversation.
“The whole thing was old-fashioned propaganda,” Mookie said. “But there were generals, including Lt. General Mary O’Brien [now retired] and Lt. General Leah Lauderback, and higher-ranked people within this course who were going along with it, clapping like trained seals.”
With the arrival of Donald Trump as president and Pete Hegseth as the new secretary of defense, the days of asking soldiers for their preferred pronouns appear to be over. Immediately after taking office, Trump signed an executive order putting an end to all DEI programs in the federal government. On Monday evening, he announced that he would issue another series of executive orders that would include the elimination of critical race theory and “transgender ideology” from the military.
And in his first interview since his closely contested confirmation, Hegseth told The Free Press, “My job is to reflect those lawful orders from President Trump throughout the chain of command.” Those orders, he added, are “to remove all aspects of DEI, including trying to mirror it, rename it, or delay those tactics.”
DEI policies as we know them today were formalized and solidified within the armed forces in 2011, when a blue ribbon commission concluded that the modern military required “demographically diverse leadership that reflects the public it serves.” To achieve that goal, the military needed to “pursue a broader approach to diversity that includes the range of backgrounds, skill sets, and personal attributes.”
The armed forces, which are 31 percent minority, had long viewed color blindness as a critical attribute for a fighting force. But the commission’s report took a different view. “Good diversity management is not about treating everyone the same,” it read. “This can be a difficult concept to grasp, especially for leaders who grew up with the… mandate to be both color and gender blind. Blindness to difference, however, can lead to a culture of assimilation in which differences are suppressed rather than leveraged.”
What was most ominous—shocking, even—is that commission members seemed not to understand the implications of their recommendations for combat troops. The military’s emphasis on color blindness was rooted in the logic of combat: When men and women of different races and religions are fighting alongside each other, focusing on their differences only harms unit cohesion.
Several high-ranking officers with combat experience who spoke to The Free Press understood the report’s fatal error. “So let’s say we have soldiers, airmen, Marines, and sailors, who have actually been in combat and who have actually covered one another, and who have actually sacrificed for one another, and they are all across different ethnic groups, races, and whatever,” said Mookie. “And then all of a sudden, some clown is saying, ‘Hey, but you know, you’re inherently racist.’ That just ain’t gonna work for unity.”
In his interview with The Free Press, Hegseth offered a similar rationale for his long-standing opposition to DEI in the military. “The dumbest phrase in military history, which was uttered by the Biden administration, is that our diversity is our strength,” he said. “Our strength is our unity and our shared purpose, our shared mission, our commitment to each other. DEI exists to accentuate differences in ways that drive people to view others differently because of the color of their skin or their gender or any other aspect, as opposed to setting those things aside.”
As it happens, it was during the first Trump administration that the military ratcheted up its DEI programs, although he seemed not to notice. Just like corporate America, the armed services raced to show the world they cared about diversity and inclusion after George Floyd’s death and the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020. Just weeks after Floyd died, for instance, the Army launched “Project Inclusion” to “improve diversity, equity, and inclusion across the force.”
At the Air Force Academy that same year, several upper-level leadership courses were replaced by courses that embraced critical race theory, which posits (among other things) that whites are oppressors and minorities are oppressed. These classes were titled “Class, Race, and Ethnicity in Society” and “Gender, Sexuality, and Society.”
The course description of the latter course, Behavioral Science 364, reads in part: “Our ideas about gender and sexuality—about men, women, masculinity, and homosexuality, for example—organize our social life in important ways that we often do not notice. These ideas are either invisible to us (such that we take them for granted as ‘normal’) or explained away (such that they seem like the ‘natural’ way life works). This course adopts a different approach by viewing gender and sexuality through the lens of the social—as shaped by social processes, including social interaction, institutions, ideologies, and culture—and how these beliefs create and enforce a system of difference and inequality.”
Once the Biden administration took office, the emphasis on diversity and inclusion became even more intense. At the Defense Department, DEI programs and personnel consumed increasing sums of money: $68 million in 2022, $86.5 million in 2023, and $114.7 million in 2024, according to a report by the Center for American Institutions, a research project affiliated with Arizona State University. In other words, nearly $270 million was spent to further the military’s DEI goals in just three years.
Much of the top brass sang from the diversity and inclusion songbook. In 2021, now retired General Michael X. Garrett wrote an article for Military Review saying that soldiers needed to acknowledge their differences. “A team experiencing healthy conflict—such as respectful, empathetic conversations about personal topics—is genuinely building inclusion and belonging,” he wrote. “Alternatively, a team that ignores its unspoken differences may fail to build camaraderie and risks silently condoning racist or extremist behavior.” In writing this, Garrett abandoned the U.S. Army’s “all I see is green” mentality.
In 2022, General C.Q. Brown, the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs who was then chief of staff of the Air Force, co-authored a memo that set “aspirational” race and gender quotas for Air Force officer applicants: He sought an Air Force that was 36 percent female, 67.5 percent white, 13 percent black, and 10 percent Asian. A subsequent lawsuit filed by the Center to Advance Security in America uncovered slides showing that the Air Force planned to achieve these quotas in part by making changes to its qualifying test to achieve the “desired end-state” of increasing the number of Hispanics in the Air Force. One would be hard-pressed to think of anything more corrosive to an organization that views itself as merit-based.
In his interview with The Free Press, Hegseth said that DEI is more entrenched in the Air Force than the other branches. “DEI tells young airmen and others, ‘Hey, if you’re a young black man or black woman, you have an inherent set of disadvantages,’ or ‘If you’re a white woman or a white man, you have an inherent set of advantages.’ You’re starting off from a place that creates division and skepticism. You can’t have that inside a unit.”
Although universities are no longer allowed to include race as a criterion for admission, thanks to a 2024 Supreme Court decision, the same does not apply to military academies. The U.S. Military Academy at West Point, for instance, has explicit minimum admission quotas based on race—for the class of 2027, which has 1,255 students, it sought to include at least 171 blacks, 138 Hispanics, and 61 Asians. It also offered a minor in Diversity and Inclusion studies. The Air Force Academy, which offered a similar minor, established a Cadet Wing Diversity and Inclusion Program in 2021. It consisted of about 80 cadets who wore a purple rope on their left shoulder, distinguishing themselves as “diversity representatives” throughout campus.
A fourth-year cadet at the Air Force Academy, who asked to remain anonymous because speaking on the record would destroy his career, told The Free Press that cadets were required to attend quarterly diversity and inclusion briefings. At one such briefing in 2022, the senior cadet said that the presenters lectured the students about not using “mom” and “dad” to describe parents. “They said the terms ‘mom’ and ‘dad’ weren’t inclusive because not everyone has a mom and dad,” the cadet continued. “We’re the ones who are supposed to fight America’s wars and take care of business, and they’re lecturing us about what not to call our parents?”
And then there’s this, from the father of an Air Force Academy cadet who serves on the board of the Air Force Academy Association of Graduates: “About two years ago, my son had to take economics 101,” he told The Free Press. “It’s a basic core curriculum course, and there are probably about 15 cadets in the class. And the first three or four were females or minority cadets, and they’re all in uniform. And the instructor addresses them and says, ‘Oh, Cadet Gonzales, Cadet Smith, Cadet Jones.’ And she got to my son and another white male. She said,`You’ll be Cadet White Boy One.’ And she said to my son, `You’ll be Cadet White Boy Two.’ My son said,`I beg your pardon, ma’am?’ She said, `All you white boys look alike. So you’re going to be White Boy Two, and the other boy over there will be White Boy One.’ ”
“This was on a Friday,” the man continued. “My son called me Friday afternoon, and he was quite distraught. He said, ‘Dad, I don’t know how to deal with this.’ And I just told him to pray about it. I said, ‘God uses everything for good, and we’ll work through this.’ He wanted to quit the academy. But the whole reason he went there, since he was in eighth grade, was we took him to the American Cemetery in Normandy, and he saw the crosses.”
Even the Army’s elite Green Berets weren’t immune from the effects of DEI. Master Sgt. Earl Plumlee, a Green Beret and Medal of Honor recipient who retired late last year after 25 years of service, said he was required to take annual DEI training online. He also said that Richard Torres-Estrada, who was reportedly suspended in 2021 for comparing Trump to Adolf Hitler in a Facebook post, was brought back to the Green Berets for the sole purpose of getting minorities to try out for special forces.
“It was very divisive because we consider ourselves the last meritocracy,” Plumlee told The Free Press. “If you’re a Green Beret, there’s only one metric for success, and that’s success. So when you have this diversity discussion, you’re just bringing an argument with no empirical facts. It’s like, Why are they bringing this to work? This is not a professional conversation. I mean, having guys explain their take on why their demographic has been struggling? Like, bro, everybody wanted you here. You met the metric. You’ve met the standards. You’re considered a standout performer across the board, and you’re being rewarded for it, right? What shackles are holding you back? You’re a Green Beret.”
Anna Simons, a retired professor at the Naval Postgraduate School and an anthropologist who studies combat teams, said, “The essence of cohesion is mutual indispensability: I need you; you need me. When the rubber meets the road, like in a ground combat unit, you want your teammate to approach a problem in a way that you don’t have to worry about. He’s not coming up with some innovative solution. He knows what to do. You’ve both had this mind meld, and you know that you can count on him or her to react the same way you would, so that you don’t have to think about it.”
In the short time since Trump has terminated DEI programs throughout the federal government, the military’s DEI websites have been deleted. The webpage for the Diversity and Inclusion minor at West Point is gone, and so is the Air Force’s diversity website. The same is true of the Defense Advisory Committee on Diversity and Inclusion website. The Free Press was unable to learn whether the academies still offer minors in diversity or have diversity training for cadets. West Point did not respond to an email from The Free Press. The Air Force Academy said it would respond, but hadn’t as we went to press.
Recently, Hegseth posted a short statement on X with a photo of a note written on his new Secretary of Defense stationery. “DEI ≠ DOD,” the note reads. “No exceptions, name-changes or delays. Those who do not comply will no longer work here.”
This comes as a relief to Mookie and many others who say that combat readiness wasn’t what mattered to the Biden administration; DEI was.
“Diversity is great, but you can’t sacrifice meritocracy,” said Mookie. “That just wasn’t their focus.”
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