Diversity Thursday

As you read the below, keep this in mind. It is very rare that high dollar studies of already known subjects are done "just because." They are often used as an entering move to change policy and legislation. Don't forget that.

So, how tight are out budgets? Not all that tight, it seems.

As we flail about trying to figure out what is going on in the world from the South China Sea to Syria, what pray tell would you like the intellectual capital of The Rand Corp. focused on?

Hey, look! A black SUV just dumpted a bag of your money and a bunch of notes taken out in your childrens' names out front of Rand. Let's see whose name is on the bag, shall we?

Research for the study was sponsored by the Office of Diversity Management and Equal Opportunity in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, and conducted within the Forces and Resources Policy Center of the RAND National Defense Research Institute, a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, the Unified Combatant Commands, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the defense agencies and the defense intelligence community.

Of course. What is this critically imporant study about?

Planned, large-scale personnel reductions in the U.S. military could inadvertently reduce gains made in the racial and gender diversity of the force since the 1990s, according to a new RAND Corporation study.
...
“One aspect that hasn't been factored in much during past drawdowns is retaining a demographically diverse workforce.”

Before we dive in to the details, remember this: when someone inside DOD talks diversity they only care about race, ethnicity and s3x. 

They don't care about education, geography, or life experience. That you cannot graph. That you cannot break in to easily manipulated groups. See page 3 of the report where they roughly say the same thing.

In our study, we focus on gender and race/ethnicity, although we include other indi-vidual differences, such as education, in some analyses.

Here is one of the well known facts they bring up again. I has been true for a very long time that the combat arms are overly represented by whites and "hispanics." Support forces are over-represented by blacks. For me, that is a big, "So?" As the Navy taught me, pick your rate pick your fate. 

Tooth vs tail, and mostly by choice as especially Special Forces and many other challenging areas in combat army, you have to volunteer.

Cuts involving personnel with longer service could adversely affect black personnel, but cuts to personnel with shorter service could adversely affect women. Tightening test standards as part of a strategy to cut recruitment could result in adverse impact on female, black and Hispanic recruits, according to the study.

'Ole whitey seems to be gett'n everyone at every turn. I guess we aren't going to mature, are we?

Seriously, it saddens me to see our money being put towards a racial attitude more in line with the mindless bigotry of the KKK, we are better than that as a nation and a military ... but thereyougo.

The authors know that all of this is nothing new, but that is OK for them - they are just answering the mail. Those who want the study just need something more and fresh they can wave around to justify their sectarian and race-based obsessions jobs paid for by taxpayers;

The services are limited in how they can use demographic information in a drawdown context. Legal challenges that occurred during earlier drawdowns make it unlikely that the services will pursue demographically driven decisions during a force reduction.

For now.

One could also read this as a call for a change in legislation. Rep. Cummings (D-MD) did it to allow race based decisions at the USCG academy (and great shame on today Congress for doing nothing to reverse it), so don't get too comfortable.

...researchers recommend that the military conduct adverse impact analyses prior to making drawdown decisions. This could allow the services to identify interventions earlier in service members' military careers, such as initial career assignment, where they could have a greater long-term impact on demographic diversity. The analyses also can help the services identify whether information and assumptions involved in the force reduction process achieve the goals that the services set for the drawdown.

There you go. Did they sneak that by you? "Interventions" is a call for quotas and race-based assignments early on.

Read the report if you'd like. Heck, you and your children paid for it. You can get links to it here and read the abstract.

Recommendations mostly just provide job security for a few diversity commissars;

Recommendations

- We recommend that services not be required to make drawdown decisions based on gender, race, ethnicity, or other protected status, given legal restrictions on using demographic information in employment decisions.
- However, the services should anticipate potential consequences of drawdown decisions by analyzing potential adverse impacts in advance of implementing particular drawdown policies. The Office of the Secretary of Defense (Personnel and Readiness) should develop policy and direct that such analyses be performed, with assistance from the Office of Diversity Management and Equal Opportunity in executing these analyses.
- The Office of Diversity Management and Equal Opportunity should validate the services' predecision analytic results, which will require the Defense Manpower Data Center to acquire more detailed data for validation.

You can also read it all in its glory here. All this is in the lap of SECDEF Carter. People need to ask him hard questions about what he is going to do with the recommendations in the report, or what he is going to allow others to do with it.

Rand Rr1008 by CDR Salamander

End comment; doing the final edit and looking at the report once again, I thought again of the huge amount of hard work and intellectual heft dedicated to doing this. Look at all the undercapitalized thought that has gone in to supporting the anti-Assad forces in the last year. The lack of oversight in AFG.

Is it pathetic, sad, or criminal? I don't know - but I do know there is no accountability for those cutting the check.