The Air Force's Black DEI Myths

Too Much Time and Money is Spent on DEI

What about DEI spending? I have seen articles grossly exaggerating the time and money Department of Defense had spent on its diversity training efforts:

“The Biden administration has described critics’ emphasis on military efforts to foster diversity as distorted and dishonest. Army leaders have noted that recruits receive just one hour of equal-opportunity instruction during basic training, compared with 92 hours of rifle marksmanship instruction.”

      Top general faces brewing storm after Trump picks Pete Hegseth for Pentagon chief - The Washington Post

     “The military has one job: keeping America safe from foreign enemies by focusing defense spending on capability and lethality. Under the Biden administration, however, military spending is increasingly focused on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, which waste money and divide troops… the Pentagon increased its DEI program funding request further, to a staggering $114.7 million.”
https://www.heritage.org/defense/commentary/dei-distracting-our-military-its-primary-task

      For those unfamiliar with the Defense Department budget, $114.7 million might sound like a lot. The fiscal year 2024 Department of Defense (DoD) funding bill was $824.3 billion, an increase of $26.8 billion above fiscal year 2023. The bill included a $1 billion increase above 2023 for climate and energy resiliency. The “staggering commitment” to DEI represented 1.4% of the 2024 budget. Articles like these are purposely meant to sound an alarm and insinuate that the DoD isn’t buying new weapon systems or critical parts but instead wasting it on pursuing equity and inclusion for the diverse minority.

https://democrats-appropriations.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/democrats-appropriations.house.gov/files/Defense FY24.pdf

      Mr. Hegseth announced that the Department of Defense will change the name of “Fort Liberty in North Carolina back to Fort Bragg. Bragg was the name of a Confederate General. The base was not renamed Bragg after that general but another solider with the same last name. I don’t know how much time and money was spent to identify a soldier with the last same last name as Confederate General Bragg out of the tens of thousands who have deployed and served heroically overseas. But I know it cost $6 million to change it from Fort Bragg to Fort Liberty.

    Recently, Mr. Hegseth announced he is directing the renaming of another military base to return it to its Confederate roots:

     Hegseth Revives the Old Name of Another Military Base

…Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth continued his efforts to revive the Confederate names of military bases, announcing on Monday that he is re-renaming Fort Moore, whose previous name honored the confederate general Henry Benning.
The base, which is in Georgia, will again be called Fort Benning.

    The base’s name was changed in 2023 as part of a wider bipartisan effort to eliminate military honors bestowed on Confederate officers who rebelled against the Union during the Civil War. Mr. Hegseth views those changes as part of a “woke” culture and wants to return the bases back to their old names.

    Current law does not let him do that — the military is no longer allowed to name bases after Confederate generals — so Mr. Hegseth has found other military troops with the same last names.

   Last month, he announced that Fort Liberty in North Carolina would return to the name Fort Bragg, but in honor of an enlisted Army soldier named Roland L. Bragg, who fought in World War II, and not the Confederate general Braxton Bragg. 

On Monday, it was Fort Moore’s turn.

    ‘I direct the U.S. Army to change the name of Fort Moore, Georgia, to Fort Benning, Georgia, in honor of Corporal (CPL) Fred G. Benning, who served with extraordinary heroism during World War I with the United States Army, and in recognition of the installation’s storied history of service to the United States of America,’ Mr. Hegseth said in a statement.

If we spend millions of dollars to change all the renamed installations back to reflect their Confederate heritage, will that represent a staggering commitment to the Defense Department’s missions?

     The time spent on diversity training has also been grossly exaggerated by anti-DEI activists such as Congressman Jim Banks of Indiana’s 3rd congressional district:

“With these looming threats, we MUST emphasize the readiness of our Armed Forces. In a response to then Ranking Member Senator James Inhofe of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Chairman Milley reported that DoD expended 5,359,311 Man Hours for Secretary Austin's Extremism Standdown and an additional 529, 711 Man hours for DEI specific training. That is a lot of training hours spent away from honing warfighting” capabilities, knowledge, and skills.

https://armedservices.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=1662

Let’s examine the 5.3 million man-hours for Secretary Austin’s Extremism Showdown. Though it isn’t now, in February 2021, military members storming the United States Capitol was considered extreme. Here’s an excerpt from “The Air Force Black Pilot State of the Union” that describes Lloyd Austin’s decision.

“In the days since a pro-Trump mob breached the Capitol on Jan. 6, senior leaders of the 2.1 million active-duty and reserve troops have been grappling with the reality that several current or former military personnel joined the rioters.
Last year, the F.B.I. notified the Defense Department that it had opened criminal investigations involving 143 current or former service members. Of those, 68 were related to domestic extremism cases, according to a senior Pentagon official. The ‘vast majority’ involved retired military personnel, many with unfavorable discharge records, the official said.” (Schmitt, 2021)

“’We need your help,’ Austin said during a five-minute training message while standing at the Pentagon press room podium.

     ‘I’m talking, of course, about extremism and extremist ideology — views and conduct that run counter to everything that we believe in and which can actually tear at the fabric of who we are as an institution,’ he said…
In his first public comments to the media Friday, Austin described two incidents of white nationalist behavior he experienced as a soldier.

     As commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, he said he was surprised to find that he had skinheads in his unit who had committed off-base murders. He also referred to comments made by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley during the aftermath of a mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2014 in which a radicalized soldier killed three fellow soldiers and wounded 16.

     ‘I’ve seen this before. I’ve lived through it as a soldier and as a commander,’ Austin said, calling on service members to read and discuss their oaths to the Constitution.

    The secretary also warned of the ‘aggressive, organized, and emboldened attitude’ of extremist groups’ recruitment and operations. He said the increasing speed and pervasiveness of social media was allowing hate groups to reach and recruit service members more easily.

‘It concerns me to think that anyone wearing the uniform of a soldier, or a sailor, an airman, Marine, a guardian, or Coast Guardsman, would espouse these sorts of beliefs, let alone act on them,’ he said. ‘But they do. Some of them still do.’” (Mahshie, 2021)

       Even with the serious nature of the stand-down’s topics if you take 5.3 million man-hours and divide it by “2.1 million active-duty and reserve troops” (excluding ALL DoD civilians) that’s 2.5 hours of training. Congressman Banks said 529,711 hours were spent on “DEI specific training.” That equates to less than 30 mins of training, but for the sake of argument let’s round it up to an hour.

     As a person who spent 24 years in active-duty and Reserve officer uniforms I can tell you that I spent dozens if not hundreds of hours in recurring training courses for computer security, law of armed conflict, safety. CPR, conflict of interest, rules governing interaction with the media, operational security (OPSEC), etc.

    Military leaders have called stand-downs to focus on lifesaving issues like safety and suicide prevention.

“DOD Announces New Actions to Prevent Suicide in the Military
Sept. 28, 2023 |

    On September 28, 2023, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin released a memo directing urgent actions to address suicide in the military community, building upon two years of significant wor”k towards suicide prevention across the Department of Defense (DoD).

    Following the Secretary's establishment of the Suicide Prevention and Response Independent Review Committee (SPRIRC) in 2022, the SPRIRC conducted internal reviews of 11 military installations consisting of 457 focus groups and interviews with 2,106 Service members and 670 civilian staff. Guided by this review and existing research, the SPRIRC made 127 near- and long-term recommendations to address this critical problem within the ranks.”

“USAF Calls for One-Day Stand Down, Safety Reviewfor Flying Wings

May 8, 2018 | By Brian W. Everstine
The Air Force is directing its flying wings to stand down operations and maintenance for one day in the next several weeks to try to find causes in a string of ongoing mishaps, and ways to improve overall safety.”

Calling a stand-down to address extremist actions that did result in loss of life at our nation’s Capitol is typical of the type of actions competent military leaders have historically done to preserve our warfighting capabilities. Anything said to the contrary by anyone, even a member of Congress, is a myth.