Before the military embraced the more extreme manifestations of diversity ideology, the institution provided Americans with a glimpse of what a society based on merit but free of discrimination could entail.
President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981 on July 26, 1948. It established that there should be “equality of treatment and opportunity in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin.” The positive aftermath of the order is hard to believe in light of the turmoil of the 1960s and the race-obsessed culture that followed and endures to the present day. The Army removed race designators from personnel files to ensure nondiscrimination, and the military spent legitimate organizational energy seeking to choose and promote the best, regardless of race. If the common trope of race-blind decisions was ever a reality, it was in the years after Executive Order 9981.
This changed with Robert McNamara’s Pentagon. The most far-reaching racial initiative of this era was McNamara’s Vietnam recruitment plan, Project 100,000. This project aimed to enlist individuals who previously didn’t meet the standard mental and physical criteria for military service by lowering the Armed Forces Qualification Test scores required for enlistment and by relaxing some physical standards.
The year 1971 saw the establishment of the Defense Race Relations Institute, later rebranded as the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute. A US Department of Defense joint-services school, DEOMI works in areas of equal opportunity, intercultural communication, religious, racial, gender, ethnic diversity, and pluralism. What policymakers forgot was any appreciation of the military’s unique status as an institution in American life.
To be sure, some conservative circles go too far in insisting that even kindergarten classrooms be pure bastions of cutthroat meritocracy. Yet military affairs must be a place for this rigorous adherence to meritocracy, because the crucible of war gives no quarter to a person or unit that is anything but qualified. Grace and exceptions can be found elsewhere, but not on the training fields, parade grounds, and command centers of a military America needs to be at her best.