Pete Hegseth gave the West Point commencement address this spring and told the graduating officers that pronouns cannot stop enemy fire. This is true. It is also not the thing that is happening to military readiness right now. The thing that is happening, per Slate’s reporting today, is that Hegseth’s DEI purge is removing people who are trained, credentialed, and in some cases uniquely skilled for their roles, because those people entered the military through a program that had the word “diversity” in its title.
Medical specialists. Language analysts. Intelligence professionals with clearances and years of in-theater experience. They were tagged. They were removed. The fact that they were also good at their jobs was, in the processing logic of the purge, secondary to the fact that they got there through a diversity pipeline. The pipeline was bad. Therefore the people in it were bad. Therefore they should leave. This is the reasoning, and it is the reasoning of someone who has confused the process for the product.
The philosophical case for meritocracy in the military is sound. You want the best qualified person in a combat situation. Nobody credibly disputes this. The problem is that “meritocracy” describes the outcome of a good selection process, not a justification for removing people who were already selected, already trained, and already performing. The analysts who were removed were not bad analysts. Nobody is alleging they were bad analysts. They were removed because of how they were recruited, not what they produced.
The progressive response to this has been to frame it as a human rights issue, which may also be true, but is not the argument that will move the people who need to hear it. The argument that moves people who care about winning wars is the operational one: you have made the military worse at the thing it is for. Hegseth gave a speech about pronouns while the military quietly got weaker.
He described the purge as restoring a warrior culture. The warrior culture now has fewer language specialists and medical personnel.
When the Secretary of Defense measures success by the number of diversity programs eliminated rather than the number of missions succeeding, what is the metric really tracking?
Sources
Slate: The Dumbest Way Pete Hegseth Is Draining the Military
Slate: Pete Hegseth Keeps Turning the Racism Dial Higher and Higher
Slate: Hegseth Just Delivered a Slap in the Face to a Loyal Ally. The Implications Are Huge.
