Culture-war intrusion at the service academies hurts not just public trust in the military but also its combat readiness.
Culture-war intrusion at the service academies hurts not just public trust in the military but also its combat readiness.
A mericans have long been rightly proud of our military. But that might be changing. A recent Reagan Institute poll indicates that only 48 percent of Americans had “a great deal of confidence” in the military. Last year, confidence hovered at similar levels, around 45 percent. But compared with 2018, this is a precipitous drop — just four years ago, 70 percent of Americans expressed significant confidence in the military.
The reason for this decline? Sixty-two percent of Americans said the military had become politicized, thereby reducing their trust in it as an institution. Cultural questions are seeping into the last major nonpartisan institution in American life.
Indeed, in late November, Senator Marco Rubio and Representative Chip Roy published a brief bulletin that provided further evidence of this disturbing trend: namely, that the U.S. military services, and especially military educational institutions, are increasingly incapable of avoiding culture-war questions. The issue is one of prioritization: The military in general, and the service academies in particular, cannot become cultural battlefields. The Navy is especially vulnerable to the pernicious, distracting influence of these nebulous cultural questions. If left unchecked, the Naval Academy’s new practices will sap readiness and competence from the future force.
The modern American culture war has become encompassing in scope. It now permeates every factor of national life. Fortunately, the past year has not seen large-scale instances of civil violence. But the reality remains that the United States is deeply polarized, split coastal blue and central red states with decidedly different views of human personhood, family life, gender and sexuality, and overall human flourishing.
The liberal polity, in its modern sense, is designed to survive these tensions. The American republic is politically, economically, and geographically expansive enough to enable individuals and communities to pursue happiness in diverging manners. The very fact that the American system has cracked only once, and then only over the most fundamental of judicial questions — that of human enslavement — is a testament to its durability.
But for the liberal model to work, a handful of questions must remain beyond the reach of political debate. Property rights and protections on speech, assembly, and belief are probably the two areas that require credible pre-commitment on the state’s part. If men can neither secure the means to their self-preservation nor pursue happiness as they define it, society will shatter like a wine glass struck by a hammer.
Yet internal protections on behavior and property do not ensure the liberal polity’s continuation. Equally relevant is the external component. The liberal state does not typically remain free from threats for long. Liberal political norms are typically joined with capitalist economic systems and democratic representative government. There are tensions between all three aspects, but fundamentally, all are mutually reinforcing, even if cultural and historical context modifies the type of liberal-capitalist democracy in question.
These states commonly perform poorly at foreign affairs. Their international acumen typically stems from the non-liberal or pre-liberal features of their political systems, namely executives with the power and expansive authority of monarchs. The international environment is harsh, competitive, and often violent. Liberal democratic capitalist domestic politics may be competitive, but the nature of its harshness and violence is drastically distinct, and far more restrained, from that of any other regime. This places the liberal statesman at an inherent disadvantage when facing authoritarian counterparts.
This demands a robust, professional, forward-leading military that can deter and defeat long-term threats. The United States has had this sort of military for virtually its entire existence. Indeed, it is remarkable that the only issue the U.S. has consistently faced is poor resourcing. Apart from during the Civil War, the U.S. military has remained nonpartisan, generally apolitical, and thoroughly subservient to civilian control. Even when segregation was the moeurs of American political life, the military remained relatively aloof, integrating far more rapidly than the rest of society.
However, the status quo has shifted in recent years. General officers have become far more common at the highest levels of power, for example, threatening to link officer careers to partisan politics, a fact that undeniably motivated General Mark Milley’s full-throated defense of a variety of left-of-center academic theories last summer. “I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist,” said the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a comment that entirely misses the point. There are left-wing critiques of capitalism with which those who have proper education should wrestle, although Mao and Lenin are not among those thinkers who should be given credence. But regardless, the point is that one must, in a liberal society, take these ideas with a proper degree of skepticism. These ideas have penetrated both the entirety of the modern educational establishment and, increasingly, the service academies.
The Naval Academy has become a venue for the transmission of critical theory and the whole host of diversity, equity, and inclusion measures. The Naval Academy has traveled farther down the critical-race rabbit hole than any other professional military institution. It has embraced culture-war trends wholly unencumbered by self-reflection. When the Naval Academy teaches courses on “the social and physical constructs of race, gender, and ethnicity in the context of social inequality in America,” provides its faculty with resources on Ibrahim Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, and is reviewing its admissions process to identify points of bias, the issue has become pernicious. Ultimately, this unsavory constellation of viewpoints has transformed philosophy (whose serious consideration proponents of these views actively seek to silence) into radical ideology.
The Rubio–Roy report chronicles many instances of pernicious cultural modifications, all stemming from the embrace of this ideology. They include defense secretary Lloyd Austin’s counter-extremism stand-down order — a mandatory series of training events on extremism with no identifiable intellectual or strategic coherence — and Milley’s sympathies for left-of-center educational fads that treat the 20th century’s “professional revolutionaries” as serious thinkers. These trends identify the United States as an irredeemably sinful polity, founded to preserve and propagate white supremacy, which is of course part and parcel with liberalism, capitalism, and representative government. America holds “promise” under this ideology only insofar as it can be destroyed and rebuilt under a completely different set of intellectual premises. These premises are overwhelmingly Marxist in nature — capitalism and democracy, for instance, are violent because they are systemically racist; hence racial and class-based hegemony are essentially identical.
The issue is not an articulated critique of liberalism. A vital strength of liberal society is its ability to incubate critics who assess and test its systems, thereby ensuring a degree of experimentation and modification not possible in ossified illiberal states. It is rather that the criticism made is based on poor history, shoddy social science, and badly decayed philosophy. But even so, liberal society should be able to withstand any number of asinine viewpoints.
The danger is most clear, rather, when faddish ideology implants itself within military educational institutions. A professional military is unique. Its members must devote virtually all their attention to honing their craft. Any moment not spent preparing to fight is, in effect, wasted. Sailors, whether enlisted or commissioned, have even greater day-to-day responsibilities, given their need to maintain large, sophisticated pieces of equipment while deployed for months on end.
There is no combat need for a DEI initiative at the Naval Academy. And there is now a DEI office, complete with an annual conference, a series of curriculum advisory materials, and functionally undefined power to weigh in on academic choices. These programs are precisely what those university administrators throughout the United States have used to modify institutional behavior replacing inquiry with ideology. This is exactly the intention of those who will control the Navy’s DEI programs. There is now a diversity peer-educator program that emphasizes linguistic correctness in student interactions. That is to say, the program embraces the code words and linguistic tropes that the educated, refined upper classes demand employ as rites of passage, and denies those who reject this deeply classist, intellectually bankrupt cultural trend. There will almost certainly be additional curricular requirements, social regulations, and in time, modified admissions practices based upon shoddy philosophy and warped principles. If the Naval Academy and the other branches don’t reject these teachings, then we won’t just have to worry about declining trust in our military. We’ll have to worry about its declining effectiveness.