Hegseth’s Anti-DEI Crusade Will Drain Our “Best and Brightest”

Affirmative action has been considered a military asset for decades. Pete Hegseth doesn’t care

By Ellen Blain

Promising to help President Trump “rip the Biden woke yoke off the neck of our military,” the country’s twenty-ninth Secretary of Defense has gone to war—not against our enemies, but against military history and decades of judgment of the most senior leaders of the Armed Forces.

When Hegseth posted on X on his first day a note reading “DOD ≠DEI” and signed, “SecDef29,” the Air Force promptly removed videos from its basic training curriculum showing World War II heroes the Tuskegee Airman and Women Airforce Service Pilots. That followed the Coast Guard’s removal of Commandant Adm. Linda Fagan, the first uniformed woman to lead any military branch; the Air Force’s removal of Col. Julie Sposito-Salceies as commander of the 613^th Air Operations Center in Hawaii; and the elimination of the Air Force’s Barrier Analysis Working Groups.

President Trump has now even attempted to blame “the era of DEI” at the Department of Defense and federal agencies for the tragic collision of an Army helicopter with an American Airlines flight on January 29. Asked why he thought that was an issue with the collision, Trump responded, “Because I have common sense.”

Taking his cue, Hegseth dutifully followed on, saying during a White House press briefing on Thursday that “as you said in your inaugural,” the new regime would be “colorblind and merit-based. The best leaders possible, whether it’s flying Black Hawks and flying airplanes, leading platoons or in government. We need the best and brightest.” (He earlier posted that the removal of the video featuring the Tuskegee Airmen “will not stand,” and the Air Force has agreed to reinstate it.)

But Hegseth has already begun draining the “best and brightest” from our Armed Forces. This will only accelerate when, as Hegseth has promised, he ends affirmative action in the United States military academies: the institutions training “the best leaders possible,” and the last place where affirmative action remains legal.

Diversity in the military, and particularly among the officer corps, is not a “woke Biden agenda”—it’s an agenda that has been pursued by the United States Armed Forces since at least 1948. As the Department of Justice recently stated in federal court (in a case I argued), “Based on more than two centuries of military history [and] decades of battlefield experience, the most senior leaders in the Armed Forces have repeatedly concluded that a more diverse officer corps makes a more effective force: more lethal, more likely to attract and retain top talent, and more legitimate in the eyes of the nation and the world.” In the past two years, military leaders testified as much under oath in court, and two federal judges agreed.

The military did not learn this lesson easily. From the American Revolution through World War II, the Armed Forces were segregated, often subjecting minorities to different drafts, unwanted positions, and demeaning tasks. Racial violence erupted on bases across the country in 1917 and 1918, and again in 1943.

President Truman issued an Executive Order directing the desegregation of the Armed Forces in 1948, and the committee established to evaluate its impact was “convinced that a policy of equality of treatment and opportunity will make for a better Army, Navy, and Air Force.” Integration efforts accelerated in the following years, but de facto resistance remained. In the Army’s official history of the Korean War, the Army concluded that the 24^th Infantry struggled during combat due to the “corrosive effects of segregation and the racial prejudices that accompanied it.”

In 1962, President Kennedy convened another committee to examine the military’s race relations, and that committee again concluded that “equality of treatment and opportunity” was vital. It specifically recommended that the services recruit Black officers to address the “shocking” lack of diversity in the officer corps. But by 1968, Black Americans comprised 10.5% of the U.S. population and 12.6% of the Army; out of the 521 Army Generals, only one was Black.

In 1969, racial tension in the military exploded. Violence stretched from the United States to Vietnam, West Germany, Korea, Thailand, and Okinawa, from Fort Lejune, North Carolina, to a base camp in the Mekong Delta. Riots erupted across branches, among sailors, marines, soldiers, and airmen. One member of General Westmoreland’s staff called this internal violence “a war.” The Army Chief of Staff, recognizing that racial tension could “impair the Army’s ability to accomplish its mission,” directed the Army to address the crisis and “take a hard look” at the racial composition of the officer ranks. It was at this time—not, as Hegseth claims, in the last four years— that the Army first mandated “race relations” courses during basic combat training.

“The performance of the Nation’s military is tied to the individual’s belief that he or she will be treated fairly regardless of his or her background,” a Congressional commission of military leaders later stated. That belief was undermined, they continued, by “the popular perceptions of racial/ethnic minorities serving as ‘cannon fodder’ for white military leaders.” They concluded that a scarcity of minority officers is a national security threat.

“The Army does not view itself as an institution of social reform,” Secretary of the Army Stanley Resor made clear. “But we cannot ignore the realities of the society in which we live. If ignored, those realities can lessen our ability to defend the Nation.”

To ensure that military leadership “represents the servicemembers it is entrusted to lead,” the nation’s military academies—where a disproportionate number of officers get their start—have used affirmative action admissions policies since the 1990s. The number of minority officers has slowly increased. But after the Supreme Court eliminated affirmative action in civilian universities in 2023, the same group that brought that case sued the military academies, seeking a ruling that those policies also violated the equal protection clause.

The Biden administration did not need a “woke” agenda to defend affirmative action; they needed only military judgment. The Armed Forces—in a conclusion repeated in every decade since the 1960’s, across multiple administrations—made clear that diversity in the military is vital to national security. In the Army case, a three-star Army general and the Under Secretary of Defense submitted sworn testimony, explaining that a “highly qualified, diverse Army officer corps is essential to the Army’s ability to fulfill [its] principal mission to provide national security.” The Navy case was filled with high-ranking testimony to the same effect, and the federal judges overseeing both cases agreed.

The Secretary of Defense has sworn to demolish these programs, making the same arguments that were debunked in the 1960s. He asserts that in uniform, background doesn’t matter: “You wear green, you wear blue, you bleed red. That’s it.” But the Secretary of the Army understood enough in 1969 to reject this color-blind notion: “a [Black person] in uniform does not cease to be a [Black person] and become a soldier instead. He becomes a [Black] soldier.” As the Armed Forces well know, and as SecDef29 either doesn’t know or wants to forget, ignoring that reality has consequences.

In response to the question, “how do you think the troops will react” to eliminating diversity initiatives, Hegseth said, “Senator, I know the troops will rejoice.” If the military fails to attract and retain the best and the brightest, any rejoicing may be short-lived.

Ellen Blain is a Former Co-Chief, Civil Rights Unit, United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York and a Partner at Clarick Gueron Reisbaum.