(Press Release) A year-long examination of DEI training in the military identifies millions of wasted taxpayer dollars are being spent to create a culture of “race and sex-based scapegoating and stereotyping.”

The report calls for an immediate end to the Pentagon’s multimillion-dollar DEI bureaucracy.

“Our research reviewed DEI policy in the military starting in the nineteen seventies to the modern day and concluded there are far more effective ways to promote unity and respect among military ranks than by spending millions annually to divide servicemembers by their gender or race,” said Prof. Donald Critchlow, Director of the Center for American Institutions at Arizona State University.

“Just as private companies have abandoned the toxic advice of DEI consultants and programs, military leaders should end social engineering based on critical race theory and restore approaches that promote character and merit.”

“It’s no surprise that young people are turning away from military service in record numbers. As this comprehensive report illuminates, DEI indoctrination has become a core component of military training that begins for officers even at the service academies,” said Matt Lohmeier, the former Space Force commander who was fired for his criticism of DEI policies.

“How can we be prepared to confront our adversaries if our warfighters aren’t laser focused on the mission but instead are divided and distracted by ideology?”

Highlights:

• “Eyes and ears” programs that encourage those trained and appointed to report overheard private conversations that challenge DEI precepts are common.

• An Air Force email claiming that personal pronouns are key to retention: “One way to foster a culture of inclusion is to add personal pronouns to email signature blocks. While this may not seem like a big deal, it can influence whether someone will stay in their organization.”

• Spending on DEI programming is increasing. The DOD’s allocation for DEI projects jumped from$68 million in fiscal year 2022 to $86.5 million in fiscal year 2023. The Pentagon is requesting
$114.7 million for fiscal year 2024.

• A 2023 incident at the U.S. Air Force Academy where the former head of the history department implored the academy’s board to return to civic-minded education. His plea was ignored. As the report sums up the episode: “Knowledge of the nation that cadets defend is elective. DEI is the core.”

About the Report

The National Commission on Civic Education in the Military made up of Commissioners Matt Lohmeier, Karrin Taylor Robson, and John Cauthen, worked with a team of ASU researchers to conduct a year-long evaluation of the history, evolution, and implementation of diversity and equity programs across all branches of the military and military academies.

The report is titled Civic Education in the Military: Are Servicemembers More Prepared for Micro-Aggression or Macro-Aggression? It is available here: https://cai.asu.edu/civiceducation

The report makes a series of straightforward recommendations:

• Immediately end the DEI bureaucracy or pursue alternative avenues to affect positive change despite existing policies.

• Return to the military’s outstanding tradition of merit-based selections and promotions and non-discriminatory equal opportunity.

• Make the syllabi for all humanities and social sciences courses taught at our military service academies publicly available.

• Provide educational training materials to enhance personnel understanding of American philosophy, politics, government, and the Constitution.

About The Center for American Institutions
The ASU Center for American Institutions was founded in October 2022 with a single nonpartisan purpose: Preserving and renewing our fundamental American institutions to maintain well-ordered liberty in an exceptional nation through the fostering and renewal of foundational American institutions including civic, religious, legal, financial, political, military and family.

Read the report online: https://issuu.com/rbarwick/docs/civic_education_in_the_military

Download PDF: CAI Civic Education in the Military Report

EXECUTIVE INTRODUCTION

The U.S. Armed Forces Should Not Be a Laboratory for Social Experimentation.

The sole purpose of the U.S. Armed Forces is to defend the nation against its external enemies. The service academies train officers committed to fulfilling this mission.

This mission—defense of the nation—makes the U.S. Armed Forces arguably the most important institution in the United States. Without a nation, other institutions are meaningless because they would not exist.

Given its importance, the U.S. Armed Forces should not be a laboratory for social experimentation, especially one based on Critical Race Theory, a contentious and abstract social theory.

Yet, as this Commission Report on Civic Education in the Military shows in great detail, Critical Race Theory is promoted within Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) training throughout the military from the Pentagon through the ranks and in our service academies.

Critical Race Theory is based on an assumption that no matter what progress is made on ensuring equal rights for minorities, “white privilege” and “sub-conscious” racism continues to prevail among whites, no matter their professed support for diversity and inclusion in their workplace, community, or immediate and extended families.

Critical Race Theory assumes that racism is systemic from the very founding of the United States and that the U.S. Constitution was drafted to ensure the white privilege of slaveholders.

Whatever the appearance of progress—constitutional amendments and legislation to protect equal rights for racial minorities—is a façade that still preserves white privilege.

Critical Race Theory is based on assumptions, not empirically derived evidence, and is by nature divisive. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs, which rely on Critical Race Theory, should not be seen as workplace sensitivity training.

The Commission on Civic Education in the Military began as a project to review civic education in the military.

Our research team did not expect to find Critical Race Theory so embedded and pervasive. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs are found throughout the U.S. Armed Forces and our service academies.

This year long study documents just how pervasive these training programs are in our Armed Forces and Service Academies and that DEI extends well beyond just formal training programs in the military and service academies.

The Founders of our nation understood and feared a politicized military. History had shown them that a politicized army easily became the tool of tyranny.

The Armed Forces of the United States has proudly upheld this long tradition of separating mission from politics.

The commissioners for this project believe that military training for service men and women in all ranks needs to inculcate and reinforce pride in our nation, pride in service, and in our country’s motto, E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many One).

Donald T. Critchlow
Director, Center for American Institutions

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The National Commission on Civic Education in the Military finds that cadets and midshipmen at our military service academies are receiving extensive training in so-called civic education about racism, sexism, unconscious bias, and intersectionality that subverts our ideals.

Furthermore, soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen across all branches of the military are occasionally subject to similar trainings across the military at all organizational levels.

These trainings rely heavily on the tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and are provided with the express goals of fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the workplace, and of rooting out alleged white supremacy in the military. Training is implemented by a vast DEI bureaucracy that extends from senior leaders at the Pentagon to the lowest ranks.

This year-long research project examining online and published materials available to the public, yet hidden from the unobservant bystander, is divided into three main parts.

The first section provides the background of DEI training beginning in the 1970s through mandated executive orders in the 2010s and 2020s. This background is important to understand the changing nature of DEI training in the military and the issues raised by today’s training.

The second and third sections—DEI training in the services and at the three major service academies, respectively—reveal how extensive, divisive, and damaging this training is for those serving in our military.

The research reveals serious problems within our military complex. The U.S. military now has a well-developed, taxpayer-funded DEI bureaucracy dedicated to rooting out “white privilege” and white supremacy, and that allows for (and sometimes teaches) the overt criticism of the United States, its founding, its founders, and its founding documents, alleging that they are all rooted in systemic racism.

This bureaucracy, with its accompanying trainings, is supported and implemented by Pentagon leadership. Trainings presented across all branches of the military and at our service academies not only include concepts but also encourage behavior that is prescribed by CRT without presenting alternative perspectives. Military leadership regularly asserts that DEI training is essential to building strong teams; how it does that is left unexplained, and no data are presented corroborating such claims.

Our vibrant religious, economic, and political history, with all its nuance, is simply glossed over or criticized, and little or no training is offered as a means of helping servicemembers, cadets, and midshipmen understand and appreciate America’s founding philosophy or the Constitution servicemembers swear an oath to uphold and defend.

The commission posits the following:

• An effective military and healthy citizenry need to share and understand a common story as to the unique creation of the American Republic. A common story is necessary for unit cohesion, morale, and an effective fighting force. DEI carries inherently negative messages about Western civilization generally, and about the United States and its people specifically.

• As demonstrated in numerous surveys and reports, public K-12 educations fail woefully in teaching even the basics of American politics, government, and the Constitution. We cannot assume that recruits, servicemembers, new cadets, and midshipmen know the basics about the country they will defend. As one leader put it, “We don’t do a good job of teaching civics in school anymore; the military has to make up for that deficiency in its own training.”

• A sole focus on identity-related themes produces divisiveness within our military rather than vital unity. This is not to argue that identity themes should be necessarily excluded in civic education, but those training and providing professional military education to our men and women in uniform should be required to teach American civic values to help them understand the unique nature of our constitutional republic.

• The massive DEI bureaucracy, its training and its pseudo-scientific assessments are at best distractions that absorb valuable time and resources. At worst they communicate the opposite of the military ethos: e.g. that individual demographic differences come before team and mission.

Central Findings:

• DEI themes dominate the training and education that members of the armed forces receive about their country. As “white supremacy” and racism have become a central focus of DEI trainings, white supremacist racism is assumed to be the core problem of the nation and of the military; positive messaging about the country and its values disappears with the shift in focus. Servicemembers are asked to defend a nation that is an alleged cesspit of racism and discrimination.

• The defense of dividing servicemembers into racial, gender, and sexual identities is Orwellian. Rather than emphasizing that the strength of our military is a product of its unity and steadfast dedication to the American ideals of individual liberty and freedom, it is instead asserted that diversity (our differences) is our strength. Emphasizing differences and grievances sows distrust and undermines unit cohesion and teamwork.

• Traditionally, young people enlisted for many reasons, with a major one being patriotism — to protect the family, country, and faith. That patriotism, if held by a white male, now raises suspicions of white supremacy.

• The DEI bureaucracy extending from the Department of Defense (DOD) through the services and in the service academies is extensive and entrenched. Dating from the 1970s, its reach continues to grow and even extends to those leaving the service.

• Efforts to root out white supremacy involve not only training but appointing service members to act as the “eyes and ears” of the bureaucracy to turn in suspects. Suspicion replaces trust, understanding, and teamwork.

• DEI training focuses on rooting out “white supremacy” even though there is little or no evidence that there is a problem of white supremacy in the military. The massive hunt during the stand-down in 2020 located roughly 100 out of a force of 2.1 million. The ongoing search, implemented by Secretary Lloyd Austin in December of 2021, has turned up equally small numbers of extremists of any variety. The most recent study released by the Department of Defense, the “Study on Extremist Activity within the Total Force” offered little new data and could only conclude that “extremism in the military is rare but dangerous.”

Recommendations

Historically, military veterans were held up as ideal democratic citizens. The internalized values of duty, honor, and country that military service imparted along with teamwork, leadership, working with diverse groups, and problem solving made veterans the glue of their communities.

Military veterans, more often than non-veterans, volunteered and engaged in solving community problems. They carried the positive aspects of an inclusive warrior ethos into their communities.

The surest way to eliminate the concerning trends we have identified, and the growth of race- and sex-based scapegoating and stereotyping in the U.S. military, is to altogether end the DEI bureaucracy there.

However, until such a time as the executive or legislative branches of the government choose to end the DEI bureaucracy in our federal agencies and military, we are left to advocate the pursuit of alternative avenues that may affect positive change despite existing policies.

Therefore, to address the shortfalls noted above, the Commission makes several recommendations that are aimed at restoring the warrior ethos in our military, fostering a climate of genuine unity and strength, and helping servicemembers understand and believe in American civic values and the uniqueness of our Constitutional Republic.

• We join the members of Congress, the Heritage Foundation, and other organizations in calling for a return to the military’s outstanding tradition of merit-based selections and promotions, and non-discriminatory equal opportunity.

• We recommend that all syllabi that are taught in the humanities and social sciences at our military service academies be made publicly available. The public has the right to know, and to challenge, the extent to which fashionable or ideologically based academic theories – Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, Postcolonial Studies, etc. – shape the education of cadets and midshipmen at our military academies. These cadets and midshipmen will be commissioned as officers and are the future leaders of the United States military’s respective service branches.

• We support the inclusion of civic education – America’s commitment to freedom and opportunity – in military training. We recommend that the U.S. military provide educational training materials to its personnel that aim at enhancing servicemembers’ understanding of foundational American philosophy and values, the basics of American politics and government, the Constitution, and their oath to support and defend the Constitution. These formal training materials should be provided to personnel at our military service academies, in officer and noncommissioned officer (NCO) professional military education and training courses, and on a periodic and recurring basis on Department of Defense (DOD) installations, just as DEI trainings are offered at those places on a periodic and recurring basis

Read the report online: https://issuu.com/rbarwick/docs/civic_education_in_the_military

Download PDF: CAI Civic Education in the Military Report