Like many Pentagon chiefs who have come before him, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is standing up a task force to support his top priority for the department. In this case, it’s rooting out policies, education, and training that relate to diversity-equity-inclusion efforts—including a few that don’t actually exist.
In a memo released Wednesday, Hegseth announced the creation of the “Restoring America’s Fighting Force Task Force,” whose purpose, he wrote, is to ensure that DOD works “to provide merit-based, color-blind, equal opportunities to Service members but will not guarantee or strive for equal outcomes.”
The memo assigns five goals to the task force, which follows President Donald Trump’s own anti-DEI executive order.
The first goal is to ensure that the department does “not consider sex, race, or ethnicity when considering individuals for promotion, command, or special duty,” although there may be exceptions “due to clear operational need,” the memo says.
Check that one off: neither the DOD nor the military departments currently have any policies that would determine promotion or selection for a job based on anything other than merit.
The second target is “elimination of quotas, objectives and goals” for sex, race, or ethnicity in organizational composition, academic admission, or career fields.
Mark that one done as well. While the department has striven to attract a wider pool of applicants to military service in the post-segregation era, there are no quotas regarding any demographic, whether in recruiting, leadership, or otherwise.
Next, the task force will end all instruction or training about DEI, critical race theory, or gender ideology. The extent to which those last two have been part of military instruction at all, except in some academic settings at the service academies, is unknown.
DEI training has accounted for about 0.3 percent of total man-hours expended by the department, according to 2023 testimony from then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs Army Gen. Mark Milley.
U.S. Air Force Academy and ROTC cadets, for example, receive four hours of diversity training a year—the most of any cohort in the Air Force.
All military instruction should “promote a lethal force,” Hegseth writes in the memo.
“The U.S. Service Academies and other defense academic institutions shall teach that America and its founding documents remain the most powerful force for good in human history,” the memo reads.
And finally, the task force will disband any existing task forces that deal with “DEI, CRT or gender ideology.”
The orders to “eliminate” things that don’t actually exist drew fire from the Air Force’s recently departed civilian head of personnel.
“The men and women of the military deserve civilian leadership who make decisions based on reality, not lifted from a right-wing echo chamber more interested in generating outrage and clicks than America’s security,” Alex Wagner told Defense One on Wednesday. “And it’s already clear from his focus on imaginary problems that Pete Hegseth isn’t serious enough to lead a 3-million-person organization or to assure our allies that we’re ready today to deter, and if necessary defeat, any adversary.”
Wagner also opined on the subject in a Washington Post op-ed published Wednesday.
“Diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives are a tiny sliver of what the Defense Department does,” Wagner wrote. “And the few initiatives that exist serve a clear national security purpose.”
Those include service academy prep schools, which allow high school students whose academic records might not measure up to academy standards—including prior-enlisted service members and high school athletes—to take more science, technology, engineering and math classes to improve their chances of academy admission.
There are also the Future Soldier and Future Sailor programs, he wrote, which help potential recruits improve their physical fitness to be able to enlist.
The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request to clarify whether this effort will eliminate the Defense Department Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, which has since 1951 studied and made recommendations on the recruiting, retention, and well-being of women in the military.
The task force seems certain to shut down Lloyd Austin’s Defense Advisory Committee on Diversity and Inclusion, which stood up in 2022 and whose next meeting is scheduled for February.
But Hegseth’s task force also takes aim at policies put in place during the first Trump administration, under then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who in the summer of 2020 stood up the Defense Board on Diversity and Inclusion in the Military.
One of that board’s first actions called for the removal of photos on promotion packets, so that boards couldn’t take into account a service member’s physical appearance when making advancement decisions.
The board’s final report, which came out after Trump fired Esper after losing the 2020 election, made recommendations like “strengthen both community engagement and the narrative about military service opportunities during recruiting to attract more diverse candidates.”
That same month, Trump signed into law the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, which included provisions for diversity in promotion boards, inspector-general oversight of the Pentagon’s DEI programs, mentorship programs to improve diversity in military leadership, and the creation of a chief diversity officer and several other advisor positions within the defense secretary’s office.
The task force does not explicitly seek to eliminate those legally-mandated jobs, but they would be covered under Trump’s executive order.
The task force is to deliver a preliminary progress report to Hegseth on March 1, with a final report due in June.
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