Diversity Thursday

They will push and push the envelope until they are stopped. Sadly, it looks like SECDEF Carter is at best slow rolling, at worst is about to associate his name with active discrimination based on race, creed, color or national origin - to his great shame and the detriment of our military.

Why do we have DivThu? This is why we have DivThu;

The proposal, sent to Defense Secretary Ash Carter for approval, would require the Army, Navy and Marine Corps to consider minority candidates for key jobs such as aide-de-camp and military assistant to senior leaders.

What if I am half "minority?" What about 1/4? It looks like 1/64th is good enough, how about that? What if I am a mix of four, or eight minority groups? Which do I pick? Why? To serve whom?

Adopting a similar approach in the military “gives great prospect for alleviating persistent gaps in our senior leadership corps,” according to the proposal developed by Brad Carson, who stepped down recently as the Pentagon's top civilian official for personnel issues. Each of the services and special operations forces have struggled for years to diversify its top brass with little effect. For example, USA Today reported last year that of the Air Force's 280 generals, just 18 of them belonged to minority groups. Overall, the active duty force of more than 1 million troops is about 69% white, 17% black and 4% Asian, according to Pentagon figures.

Brad Carson. You are breaking my heart.

As anyone with any exposure to undergrad statistics will tell you, the problem, especially with black officer numbers, are way upstream from when the Navy gets a shot at them. Look at high school graduation rates. Look at standardized testing scores. Then look at college graduation rates and performance. Look at juvenile criminal statistics. It is all right there.

As a percentage of the population you are already at a significant disadvantage. The problem is there but to a lessor extent with some, but not all, Hispanic sub-groups. There is no problem with most Asian ethnic groups - just the opposite as in most respects they outperform all "white" groups but a few such as Jews. All this is well known. When it all plays out, more qualified groups will succeed in a competitive environment based on meritocracy. The only way to bend the numbers is to actively discriminate in favor of those non-critical factors, such as race. It is all artificial. You de-emphasize those factors that lead to success, emphasize those which do not. In the end, the whole organization suffers.

Take all those entering objective criteria upstream from the military's intake, and off the bat you are not going to be inline with national racial and ethnic statistics in your officer corps. Add to that free people making personal choices, and especially black officers (which is what most of this is about), and the winnowing continues.

The services generally choose their senior leaders from front-line combat units such as infantry. Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for example, is an infantry officer. Minority officers, however, are underrepresented in those units for a variety of reasons, including personal choice.

This too is all well known - and correct.

Finally, let us speak as adults here; we need to stop with this early 1970 racial theory cancerous squid ink. This is insulting to say in theory, and is not what we see day after day in the fleet.

Carter believes that emphasizing diversity is essential for the military to attract and retain the troops it needs for the future, said another Defense official also familiar with the proposal but not authorized to speak publicly about it.

“Our ability to attract and develop a highly talented diverse cadre of officers to lead our military is essential to mission success now and in the future,” the proposal states.

This is a deep, dark smear on the integrity on every officer and enlisted man and woman in our military. It sounds sweet and is at the top-5 of all the talking points - but I want you to read it critically. Diagram that sentence. Go deep in to its meaning.

SECDEF Carter is smarter and better than this. Whoever is advising him needs to go with Carson and take their parking spaces with them.

The Navy, while saluting the goal of greater diversity, worries that implementing policy carries the “significant risk of litigation,” according to a memo. The Navy memo calls for analyzing data on the problem and developing “narrowly tailored efforts” to avoid lawsuits.

The plan before Carter would direct each of the services to establish goals for race, ethnicity and gender among the officers it commissions to “reflect the diverse population in the United States eligible to serve in our military. Undertaking the additional effort to identify and recruit a diverse candidate pool will help us build a stronger force and expose more Americans to the opportunity to serve in our military.”

Here you go uniformed leadership. After decades of accepting the smear on you and your people, will you at last stand up and defend them? Or, will you accept that you and your people are racist, bigoted leaders who are just one step away from pulling the hood out of the closet?

The proposal calls on the services to report to Carter by May 1 on how they will incorporate the policy into their diversity initiatives.

Is your integrity on issues such as equality a hill worth dying on, or at least making a stand? Do you want to be known as the "quota guy?"

We just don't care what your DNA is. A leader is a leader. A performer is a performer. A Shipmate is a Shipmate. If you want to promote division, strife, and sectarianism - then follow the direction SECDEF Carter's advisors are leading him and us. Promote quotas. Give special treatment for self-identified race and ethnicity. Divide and establish pockets of preference. You will create division where none existed.

How evil is that? Do these people not spend any time with young men and women? 

People are not polluted with this kind of hate and division - it is fed to them. Shame on everyone in uniform who has "diversity" or "inclusion" in their job title. It promotes neither and are actually counter-indicators. 

Shame on any GS or SES who justifies their paycheck on promoting division and strife. 

Shame on any leader who is so morally weak and intellectually stunted to simply fall in to line to promote something that in their heart and head they know is not true - something that by supporting they signal that they think their Sailors, Soldiers, Marines, Airmen, and Coast Guardsmen are acting in a racist, bigoted, sexist and otherwise discriminatory manner. 

Shame on all of them. That is not the cadre of Sailors, Soldiers, Marines, Airmen, and Coast Guardsmen serving our nation, why do they think it is?

As always, who does this hurt the most? Our Shipmates who just happened to have a government approved racial/ethnic stamp on their records. Those who would rise to the top anywhere due to their talent and hard work but, because of some discredited and cancerous racial theory born in the Nixon administration, everyone will always wonder, "I wonder how many special breaks they got rising to the top."

That is the thing that should upset everyone who really cares about equality and promoting good order and discipline. SeaDaddyism is one thing, open racial and ethnic preferences give you the Austro-Hungarian and Yugoslavian military.

How did that work out?