Service in wartime has long been a reliable path for Americans denied full citizenship to secure their rights. Black troops’ contributions to the Union cause during the Civil War helped convince Abraham Lincoln of the righteousness of extending suffrage to Black men. Women’s work on the home front during World War I persuaded a reluctant Woodrow Wilson to urge passage of the Nineteenth Amendment as a “war measure.” The military’s repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was followed a few years later by the Supreme Court’s recognition of the marriage rights of same-sex couples.
Perhaps the Trump administration is hoping the process works just as well in reverse.
Despite the conflict with Iran and other recent military activity overseas, the Pentagon seems focused on purging minorities and women. Last week, NBC News reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had intervened to block or delay the promotions of more than a dozen Black and female senior officers. According to both NBC and The New York Times, some officials are concerned that officers are being targeted because of their race, gender, or perceived political affiliation. In one instance last year, Hegseth’s chief of staff, Ricky Buria, bluntly stated that “President Trump would not want to stand next to a Black female officer at military events,” the Times reported. (Buria denied this.)
The Pentagon told NBC and the Times that promotions under Hegseth are “apolitical and unbiased.” Nevertheless, the episode is part of a broader pattern. So far, Trump and Hegseth have dismissed or forced the retirements of several high-ranking Black and/or female officers: General C. Q. Brown as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Admiral Lisa Franchetti as chief of naval operations; Lieutenant General Telita Crosland as head of the Defense Health Agency; and most recently Major General William Green as the Army’s chief of chaplains. Hegseth has publicly said that “our diversity is our strength” is the “dumbest phrase in military history.” By erasing Defense Department histories of nonwhite service members, and seeking to restore tributes to Confederate soldiers who took up arms against their country in defense of slavery, Hegseth has demonstrated a limited view of whose service is to be honored.
Trump is likely also seeking to ensure that remaining officers lack any qualms about following potentially illegal orders. Both he and Hegseth have long seen war crimes as worthy of admiration rather than scorn. As far back as 2016, Trump was regaling audiences at rallies with apocryphal stories about an American general shooting Muslims with bullets coated in pig’s blood. In 2020, he fantasized about turning the military’s guns on American citizens, but faced opposition from the leadership at the Pentagon. Yesterday morning, Trump publicly threatened to destroy Iran’s “whole civilization” and target civilian infrastructure, both war crimes. He subsequently backed down, handing Iran the ability to charge tolls for ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz; passage was free prior to the American attack.
Enlisted service members are disproportionately nonwhite compared with the U.S. population as a whole, while officers are disproportionately white. Women are also serving in larger numbers than ever before: About a fifth of active-duty military personnel are women. Yet Hegseth has long been dismissive of women’s service, particularly in combat roles, and once wrote that, under leaders like Brown, “black troops, at all levels, will be promoted simply based on their race” (this is called confession by accusation). Hegseth seems to want the pool of high-ranking officers to be even less diverse than it already is, having complained in his book that “America’s white sons and daughters are walking away” from the military. And he and Trump seem to be purging not only women and people of color, but officers who see them as equally capable—such as the Army chief of staff, General Randy George, who was fired after reportedly refusing to remove several Black and female officials from the promotion list to general.
[Adam Serwer: The war-crimes president]
Hegseth infamously claimed at the beginning of his tenure that promotions in the military would be “color-blind and merit-based.” It is now clear that this was not true. During his confirmation hearing, Hegseth was unable to provide any evidence whatsoever that the military had lowered standards in the name of diversity. If that is the case, then why have we seen so many well-qualified Black and female senior officers dismissed? Why did the Pentagon, for no plausible reason other than animus, expel trans service members after years of honorable service? “Color-blind and merit-based” now appears to have been a smoke screen for a politically motivated purge of not only Black people and women from leadership positions, but white officers who value their service.
The message being sent to lower-ranking officers is that they will be assessed on the basis of their gender, race, or politics, rather than their abilites—which will cause many officers to leave rather than stay and be mistreated, and many potential officers not to enlist to begin with. It is hard to deny the full benefits of citizenship to those who are willing to fight and die for their country; it is easier if that sacrifice is minimized or erased. Rewarding or punishing officers based on race, gender, or perceived political loyalty to Trump could also aid the administration’s larger project of undermining the claims of women and ethnic and religious minorities to equal treatment under the law in other parts of American society.
The progress earned by ethnic minorities and women in the armed services was hard-won. During the Civil War, Frederick Douglass argued that Black men’s service in the Union Army would strengthen their demands for equal rights. “Let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S.; let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on the earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States,” Douglass said in 1863. “Nothing can be more plain, nothing more certain, than that the speediest and best possible way open to us to manhood, equal rights, and elevation is that we enter this service.”
Douglass was right, although the process was not as straightforward as he might have hoped. Black service helped justify the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments, but Reconstruction saw Black men disenfranchised and subjected to Jim Crow segregation. W. E. B. Du Bois made a similar argument for Black service in World War I. Returning Black veterans were subjected to horrific racist violence that ultimately strengthened Black resolve. Only after World War II—and over the objections of much of the brass—was the military integrated, and then only after an exhaustive internal investigation disproved racist assumptions that Black troops could only fill menial roles or serve in segregated units.
“Insofar as a service refused to a single Negro the technical training and job for which he was qualified, by just so much did the service waste potential skills and impair its own effectiveness. Quite apart from the question of equal opportunity, the Committee did not believe the country or the military services could afford this human wastage,” the final report from the Truman-era President’s Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services reads. “The Committee found, in fact, that inequality had contributed to inefficiency.”
[Adam Harris: The only thing integrating America]
Another way to put it is that overt racial discrimination and stereotyping made the military worse, not better. But that was before Hegseth, and his insistence that the problem with the armed services is that they are too diverse and too “woke.”
The result has been something like an inverse caricature of Republican complaints about diversity, equity, and inclusion, a system in which the incompetent rise not because of their abilities but because of their sycophancy. Authoritarian regimes behave as the Trump administration is behaving—optimizing for political loyalty rather than competence. Merit, in short, has little to do with it.
Hegseth is a prime example. Deeply unqualified for the job and convinced that brutality provides an easy path to victory, he has led the United States to the verge of a strategic defeat with a weaker adversary in Iran. The current cease-fire leaves Iran with a more hard-line government than before, one in total control of a shipping lane crucial to the world economy. The Islamic Republic is arguably in a stronger position today than it was when the war started, and probably in a stronger position than it was before Trump, in his first term, scrapped the Obama-era nuclear deal.
On Sunday, Trump posted on his social network a refrain that he and his toadies seem to think is insightful: “If you import The Third World, you become The Third World!” This archaic social Darwinism is the ideological mortar of the Trump project. It fuses Hegseth’s disdain for diversity in the military’s senior leadership and valorization of brutality with the administration’s attack on birthright citizenship and its deployment of federal agents to occupy American cities. It is a worldview that would assume an easy victory against a country like Iran, especially with America’s new, “unwoke” military. Bigotry isn’t just inefficient, as the U.S. military discovered in the 1940s. It also makes you stupid.
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