Streetwise Professor

I’m often tempted to say that those in charge of our military are not serious people. But I catch myself. They are in fact very, very serious people–the problem is that they are serious about agendas that are inimical to military effectiveness and national defense.

The most virulently inimical agendas is of course DIE. The current Air Force Chief of Staff, Charles Q. Brown–leading candidate to be JCS Chair–is perhaps the most egregious example. Brown is a quota monger:

The topic of the Air Force memorandum was officer quotas set by race and gender.

Similar quotas had been issued by political appointees in a politically correct military, but they had focused on slowly boosting minority officers rather than calling for a purge of white men.

The 2014 quotas had looked for an 80 percent white, 10 percent black and 8 percent Asian officer corps. While choosing officers by any racial category rather than merit is racist, wrong and illegal under civil rights legislation, this fell short of Brown’s proposed racist purge.

Brown’s quotas limit the number of white officers to 67% and cut white men down to 43%.

The Air Force officer corps is currently 77% white: getting it down to 67%, a reduction of 10%, would require serious effort to purge white officers and bar the doors to any new ones.

That will improve military effectiveness how, exactly?

A recent AF “experiment” suggests that “how much” is a negative number:

As part of the larger military-wide effort to promote diversity in the service’s pilot ranks, the 19th Air Force command near San Antonio, Texas, “clustered” racial minorities and female trainees into one class, dubbed “America’s Class,” to find out if doing so would improve the pilots’ graduation rates. However, not only did the effort fail to boost minority and women candidates’ success rates, but officers involved say they were ordered to engage in potentially unlawful discrimination by excluding white males from the class, documents show.

Excluding white males will help how, exactly? Specifically, how will it build unit cohesion?

Obviously, it won’t. It is inimical to unit cohesion. Military units need to suppress differences to succeed, not accentuate and emphasize them. I mean, I can’t even.

What was traditional boot camp all about? Suppressing individual differences. Making everyone believe he was just a soldier or a sailor or a Marine. One of thousands.

Some of the quotes in the Front Page article just leave me shaking my head:

“I am a Black man who happens to be the Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force,” Kaleth Wright, now retired, had tweeted  “You don’t know the anxiety, the despair, the heartache, the fear, the rage and the disappointment that comes with living in this country… every single day.”

Uhm, you have reached the highest enlisted rank in the US Air Force. Yeah, I’m sure that happens a lot in racist countries. Damned white supremacism.

Or this:

Anthony Cotton, the Commander of US Strategic Command, had claimed that, “when I see what happened to Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks—and the list goes on and on… that could be me.”

No, General-Successor-of-Curtis-Lemay, it couldn’t be you. What would be more likely to be you is the 10,000+ blacks murdered in Chicago, Philly, DC, St. Louis, etc., etc., etc. Why don’t you talk about that? Why don’t you do something about that.

There’s also a vignette in the article about Brown whining about the cosmic injustice of being questioned about a parking spot.

Three people who are living proof of the lack of discrimination against blacks in the Air Force whining about how oppressed they are.

But this should not be surprising. Today, victimhood is status, and people compete intensely to prove how victimized they are, rather than to count the blessings that they have. Just another of the fucked up aspects of 2020s US culture.

Another illustration of the Diversity Cult: Air Force Assistant Secretary for Manpower and Reserve Affairs Alex Wagner proves–PROVES I TELLS YA–the power of diversity. Because of diversity, the AF avoided the incredible faux pas of handing out the wrong kind of socks as swag at SXSW! OMG! To think that the fate of the country’s defenses were rescued by such a brave woman!

Air Force Assistant Secretary for Manpower and Reserve Affairs Alex Wagner, shares a personal story about socks…yes socks… to explain why the military needs Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI).

We are not a serious country. pic.twitter.com/HYKJ7qbRXV

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) March 24, 2023

But how does diversity help when the shit really goes down, Alex? Can you give me an example of that? I’d say I wait, but I’m not into reenacting Waiting For Godot.

(As an aside, recruiting at SXSW is itself a testament to idiocy and cluelessness. It’s leftish, hipster central.)

The repeated invocations of the benefits of diversity, like Wagner’s, are catechisms. Statements of a faith. NOT empirical truths. In fact, social science research (since at least Putnam) suggests the opposite: diversity undermines trust. And there is no environment where trust is more essential than in battle. None.

I could go on.

And then of course there’s the trans obsession in the military, e.g., the Navy thinking that a drag queen is totes what is needed to rescue plummeting recruiting numbers:

I guarantee, even if it does boost recruiting numbers, it will reduce the number of recruits that the Navy should want to attract: it would be subtraction by addition.

FFS, couldn’t they have just rebooted the Village People?

Again, I could go on. . .

And there’s the green angle. And no, I don’t mean green as in the Marines are the mean green machine. No–green as in environmentalism, and specifically the climate change cult.

I’ve written before about the SECNAV prioritizing climate change. (How will that beat China, Mr. Del Toro?) But it’s a Whole of Government effort. For example, the Energy Secretary, Canadian-born Jennifer Granholm, endorsed Joe Biden’s pledge to make all US military vehicles electric by 3030. Sorry! Sorry! By 2030.

This idea is cosmically stupid on more dimensions than I could possibly explore in a lifetime–even if I was 40 years younger.

Say, just how big and heavy would a battery on an M1AE (for electric!) Abrams have to be? And, pardon my impertinence, but how would you charge it, exactly? And boy won’t it be fun for the crew when that sucker gets hit and cooks off!

Again, I could go on . . .

Although the exempli gratia are virtually endless, I think you get the point. Those in charge of the US military are serious about just about everything except fighting and winning wars.

Meanwhile, recruiting is in the toilet and the Navy is a shitshow.

If the shit does get real, these termite years of race and gender and climate obsessives will result in the loss of wars, and mass casualties.

But the corpses (especially the officers’) will be diverse. And isn’t that what really matters?