After several difficult years, the Army and the Air Force recently announced that they are on track to meet their recruiting goals this year. The situation has improved for the Navy, but that branch of the military expects to once again to fall short. The Marine Corps, meanwhile, has met its enlistment goals, though it did have to tap into its pool of delayed entry recruits to meet the target two years ago.
In the Army, which is reportedly the smallest it has been since WWII, Secretary Christine Wormuth (D) recently stated that she thinks it is "healthy" to have a broader representation of people in the Army than those who come from military families, though she admitted that the majority of Army recruits (roughly 80%) are from military families.
Also, AFR reported earlier this year that a now-former DEI Chief Kelisa Wing exposed the anti-white sentiment at the Pentagon. After a hearing was held over comments she made against "white folx" in professional development sessions, Wing was reassigned to a new job.
In the Air Force, Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness (CMR), thinks the ongoing pilot shortage can be traced to a 2022 diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI) memorandum.
On August 9, 2022, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall and then-Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown, Jr. co-signed a document confirming the Air Force's intent to reduce the percentage of white male officers from 64% to 43%.
"The Air Force went so far as to tell white officers that they're no longer wanted," Donnelly summarizes.
As a result, white male pilots began turning to other alternatives.
"That leaves the Air Force with a shortage of pilots," the CMR president relays.
Still, in an apparent effort to improve recruitment results, the other services have adopted similar programs and policy changes.
"That accounts for most of the recruiting crisis," Donnelly says of the Pentagon's obsession with DEI mandates. "If you don't recognize there is a problem, you're not going to be able to solve the problem. I think they really need to reconsider whether this ought to be scrapped."
And Donnelly calls for a return to meritocracy.
"They ought to go back to recruiting where the propensity is highest and greater numbers might occur," she suggests. "They're just overlooking a very large market because the paradigm has shifted. Now everything is about diversity, and certain groups of people don't advance the cause of diversity. Therefore, the Pentagon, the services are not pursuing those recruits anymore, and that's what the data shows."
In other words, DEI is counterproductive. If the goal is to mitigate or reduce the recruiting crisis, then Donnelly urges the Pentagon to seriously reconsider and scrap many of these DEI goals, objectives, and quotas.
