Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth has made no secret of his disdain for the DEI cancer that has metastasized inside the Department of Defense.
“The dumbest phrase on planet Earth in the military is ‘our diversity is our strength,'” Hegseth said in a recent appearance on “the Shawn Ryan Show” podcast.
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As I’ve posted, the USAF has gone so far as to complain that it has too many white guys as pilots; see Unexpectedly, the USAF Finds Itself With a Critical Shortage of Pilots While It Says It Has Too Many White Officers.
The ingrained stupidity that insists that the correct mix of skin colors or genders rather than skills and abilities creates an effective military organization popped back on the scene a couple of days ago when the X, formerly Twitter, account “Libs of Tik Tok” (@libsoftiktok) posted a year-old video of US Air Force Lieutenant General Kevin Schneider, commander of Pacific Air Forces and the air component commander of US Indo-Pacific Command usin an interview with something called the Department of the Air Force Company Grade Officer’s Council to emphasize the importance of DEI.
HOST: The next category of questions received a lot of attention from our members and that is diversity equity and inclusion. Love to start with that first question is, sir, there’s a widespread desire to incorporate DEI across the American landscape, what does the Department of the Air Force hope to achieve in incorporating DEI policies?
SCHNEIDER: Yeah, I think the short answer on that, we could we could go way deep on this, but the short answer is we want the best, most capable force that we can get and we’re trying to eliminate the barriers, you know, open the doors and making sure that, you know, that we can do that we can have the best most capable force…um…that our nation can provide. All too often that we’ve had limitations, either, you know, policy limitations that, that provide barriers, or we have not done the work with the American public to highlight the opportunities that, uh, come with military service, or specifically service in the United States Air Force. So we are getting after both of those, um, and ultimately that’s really what DEI is getting after, um, you know, identifying the barriers that currently exist, getting messaging out to the public as to what, uh, opportunities do exist and then just, you know, drawing the talent that we need to continue to to excel as a force.
HOST: Sir given that you are director of staff, do you have any guidance or input for CGOs on how do we better understand when we’ve made considerable gains with respects to Diversity Equity Inclusion?
SCHNEIDER: Yeah, this is the answer probably to a number of questions and I don’t mean to short change it by giving you this almost of a platitude of an answer. When we when we can stop having meetings about it or when we can stop having you know specific focused discussions on it, it becomes part of our DNA, you know, then we’ve achieved successful //cut.
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The whole video is available at the bottom of the post.
I think that Schenider was deeply disingenuous in his answers. There are no legal or policy barriers that prevent anyone from serving in a career field for which they are qualified and appropriately trained. His focus on the diversity and inclusion part of the equation ignores the elephant in the room, which is the equity factor. DEI holds that it isn’t sufficient to provide equal opportunity; the system must ensure equal outcomes. Equity impacts the careers of junior officers because race-based promotion and command selection quotas exist. Ignoring the career effects on many officers once DEI is part of the Air Force’s “DNA” in a presentation to junior officers is either thoughtless or dishonest.
Pete Hegseth was quick to respond.
Exactly.
There should be no mercy for guys like Schneider. He either believes what he is saying, which makes him a total poltroon, or he mouths corporate slogans, which says he has zero integrity.
Fortunately, Hegseth has already arrived at that conclusion.
“First of all you gotta fire the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs,” Hegseth said on the Shawn Ryan podcast. “Any general that was involved, general, admiral, whatever, that was involved in any of the DEI woke s***, has got to go. Either you’re in for warfighting and that’s it. That’s the only litmus test we care about.”
Now, we need to see how this plays out in real life once Hegseth is confirmed.
Complete Schneider Interview
