In December 2015, the Obama administration decided to allow women to serve in all combat roles. “There will be no exceptions,” Ashton Carter, then the secretary of defense, announced. Women would be accepted as “Army Rangers and Green Berets, Navy SEALs, Marine Corps infantry,” among other demanding roles previously open only to men.
As for physical standards, those would not change: “There must be no quotas or perception thereof,” Carter said.
In some ways, the policy has produced inspiring results. More than 140 women have completed the Army’s elite Ranger School and a few have passed the Marines Corps’ Infantry Officer Course (though none, as yet, has become a SEAL). Women serve with distinction in other combat roles, including as fighter pilots and tank commanders.
In other ways, however, the policy has realized the worst fears of its early critics. While elevating women who meet the same physical standards as their male counterparts, it has also led to an erosion of standards. From the initial laudable goal — equality of opportunity for all, regardless of gender — the military has been sliding toward something else: equality in outcomes. That is what today is usually meant by the word “equity,” at least in the context of diversity, equity and inclusion, or D.E.I.
Take the Army’s efforts to create gender-neutral fitness requirements, known as the Army Combat Fitness Test. The test, developed over a decade, was designed to be rigorous, requiring soldiers of either sex to meet physical standards appropriate to the roles they might perform — with the toughest requirements for jobs like artillery soldiers, which require a lot of muscle.
But that caused a problem: Women were failing the test at noticeably higher rates, according to a RAND study. Among active-duty enlisted soldiers, the fitness test had a pass rate of 92 percent among men but only 52 percent among women. (Women officers did better, with a pass rate of 72 percent.) Democratic senators, including New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand, were also putting pressure on the Army to delay implementation of the test, arguing, as The Washington Post reported in 2020, that it “could undermine the goal of creating a diverse force.”
The Biden administration yielded to this complaint.
The issue flared in a tense May 2022 exchange in the Senate Armed Services Committee between Christine Wormuth, the Biden administration’s Army secretary, and Tom Cotton, the Arkansas Republican.
“We wanted to make sure that we didn’t unfairly have standards for a particular subgroup that people couldn’t perform,” she said. “We didn’t want to disadvantage any subgroups.”
Wormuth also insisted that the new standards were “much more challenging” than the previous ones. Cotton, a former Army officer, was having none of it. “The new standards,” he said, “are absolutely pathetic.”
Among other details: To qualify for any job in the Army, according to Cotton, a young female soldier would only have to be able to complete 10 push-ups (down from 13 push-ups in the previous test) and run two miles in 23 minutes and 22 seconds — a slow jog. Standards for men had also been lowered. For the sake of inclusion and fairness, toughness would have to go.
What befell the Army has happened, in different ways, to other services. Last year, the Navy dropped its previous standard of terminating the careers of sailors who failed two consecutive fitness tests. That’s partly because the service is facing a recruitment crisis and doesn’t want to lose more people. But it’s also, as the chief of naval operations, Lisa Franchetti, wrote last year, “to acknowledge our diverse population.”
There’s also been a push to reinstate photo requirements, dropped during the first Trump administration, as part of the application process for promotion. Why? “We look at, for instance, the one-star board over the last five years, and we can show you where, as you look at diversity, it went down with photos removed,” said Vice Adm. John Nowell Jr. in 2021. In other words, where the application process was blind and candidates were judged on merit alone, diversity suffered.
All this raises the question of what a military is for. There’s no doubt the military has served to advance important moral and social values, never more so than in President Harry Truman’s 1948 order to desegregate the military or President Barack Obama’s 2010 decision to eliminate “don’t ask, don’t tell.” But those demands for equality did not require the Pentagon to lower standards or compromise lethality.
The difference with D.E.I. is that, almost inevitably, it does. It asks the military to become a social justice organization that happens to fight wars. In other walks of life, adulterated standards can lead to mediocrity — bad teaching in classrooms, bad medical care. In combat, it can mean death.
What’s happened in the military is only the most vivid example of the rot that sets into any institution that abandons merit for diversity, equality for equity, expectations for inclusion. In the whirlwind that has been the first few days of this administration, the long overdue ban on D.E.I. is, at least, a solid cause for hope.
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