The Army Needs a Few Good (Trans) Men of Color

Front Page Magazine’s exclusive report that Biden’s nominee for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Chief of Staff Charles Brown, had signed off on a 43% quota for white male officers made waves. In interviews, I warned that quotas had become more fundamental to the military than winning. And it’s been that way for a while. That’s why we have a very diverse woke brass that is incapable of winning wars, yet argues for abortion and transgenderism.

The Biden administration’s obsession with making diversity, equity and inclusion into the center of every military program has put more pressure on the woke brass to deliver results.

The U.S. Army missed its recruiting goals in the previous fiscal year by 25% or 15,000 soldiers. Next year recruiters expect to miss by at least 10,000 which suggests that it will be even worse. But the Army is far more concerned with missing its far more crucial equity recruiting goals.

The Army needs to recruit minorities: not the same old boring white men like Washington, Eisenhower or Audie Murphy. That’s why its recruiters are making videos in different languages through FLRI or the Foreign Language Recruiting Initiative. Beyond Spanish, the program focuses on Chinese, Russian, Tagalog, and numerous other languages.

Army flyers begin with “No Habla Ingles?” No problem. You can still “reciba dinero” and get “education gratis”. So long as you have a green card and a pulse, you’re in.

No Habla Ingles, an inability to speak English, or a nationality from two of the country’s major enemies, aren’t a problem. An AP story on the Air Force recruitment of foreign nationals notes that “in many cases the immigrants are not immediately put in jobs that require top secret clearance” implying that in some cases they are immediately put into such jobs.

The Army however isn’t just looking for warm bodies, but bodies of the right color.

That’s why active duty personnel are being barraged with requests to update their REDCAT information. REDCAT stands for Racial Ethnic Designation Category and was created to track conformity with identity politics quotas. Ever since racial and ethnic quotas were made a goal, recruiters and IPPS-A, the Army’s human resources system, have been pushed to bring REDCAT numbers into line with quota goals. And IPPS-A has been hectoring personnel to update their race and ethnicity data in the hopes of finding more hidden minorities in the ranks.

Some messages insist that “updating/adding REDCAT data is voluntary” while others demand that soldiers “personally update race, ethnicity and religion”. In pursuit of REDCAT quotas, a message from the United States Army Special Operations Command urges soldiers to “select the ethnic group code that includes the most accurate description of ethnic background or combination of ethnicities in their ethnic background.”

Anyone who can find any Cherokee or Latinos in their family tree is welcome to do so.

This is part of the ‘Tracking and Managing Diversity in Army Recruiting Efforts’. Since not enough diversity has been found, there’s a frantic search for diversity that may have been overlooked. Forget winning wars against China, this is about winning the war on racism.

And that’s the real woke war that the military is being tasked with fighting.

The cynicism of military racial quotas can be spotted in a message that notes, “if Soldiers opt out of even reviewing their data, the data that was converted will still exist, whether accurate or not.” It will also make it possible for convenient errors to creep in. Any soldiers with a last name that sounds Hispanic will shortly be listed as such, even if their last name is Italian. A whole lot of white men and women whose last name is Greene, Davis or Jackson may accidentally end up black. Such mistakes happen and there will be too many of them for anyone to check.

The REDCAT numbers will show that the U.S. Army looks more “like America” than ever.

At the Virginia National Guard, past recruitment was aimed at making the Guard “match the demographics of the state within 1% of the REDCAT” and when that failed, developing a “target for underrepresented groups each FY by comparing census data” and then “if the demographics are not within the 1% target develop three (3) COAs to attain the objective by 28 February of each year.”

Rather than getting the best people or even adequately qualified people, the goal is to match the force to the census data in a completely senseless exercise so that the people they do get are 20% black, 7.2% Asian, and 0.6% American Indian, or develop a plan to get those Asians.

That’s what deciding that the military should “look like America” really means in the ranks. You can’t have too many white men, but too many black men could also become a problem. If the goal is to match the census, then you can’t have too few minorities or too many. Come on in Jiang, we haven’t met our Chinese quota yet, sorry Jose, we have too many Hispanics already.

But the one thing you can never have too little of is identity politics virtue signaling.

The woke military brass celebrated Pride Month with drag shows and rainbow flags across bases from Japan to Texas. Taking part in LGBTQ pride parades and drag shows is another duty.

Commanders are not only required to examine “the unit’s demographic racial and ethnic designation categories” for “at least twice a year”, but they also have to review “member participation in ethnic and special observances”. We may not win any wars, but as long as everyone shows up to hold a rainbow flag and applaud Bob twirling in a tutu, it’s all good.

Who needs a few good men when you can have a few good trans-men of color? And who cares if they speak English? No Habla Ingles? No problemo! Having HIV is not a problem. Being from an enemy nation is not a problem. Being a man who believes he’s a woman is not a problem.

Being white, especially a heterosexual male, is a very big problem. We need a military that looks like America and white heterosexual men look nothing like America.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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