Wartime service has long been a reliable way for Americans denied full citizenship to gain their rights. Black soldiers’ contributions to the Union cause during the Civil War helped convince Abraham Lincoln of the right to enfranchise Black men. Women’s work on the home front during World War I convinced a reluctant Woodrow Wilson to urge passage of the Nineteenth Amendment as a “war measure.” The repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was followed a few years later by the Supreme Court recognizing same-sex marriage rights.
Perhaps the Trump administration expects the process to work similarly and vice versa.
Despite the conflict with Iran and other recent military operations abroad, the Pentagon appears to be focused on purging minorities and women. last week, NBC News reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had intervened to block or delay the promotion of more than a dozen Black officers and senior women. According to NBC and New York Timessome officers worry that officers are being targeted because of their race, gender, or political beliefs. In one incident last year, Hegseth’s chief of staff, Ricky Buria, said bluntly that “President Trump would not want to stand next to a Black female officer at a military event.” of Times information. (Buria denied this.)
The Pentagon told NBC and Times that the ads under Hegseth are “political and biased.” However, the episode is part of a wider pattern. So far, Trump and Hegseth have dismissed or forced the retirement of several high-ranking Black and/or female officers: General CQ Brown as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Admiral Lisa Franchetti as chief of naval operations; Lieutenant General Telita Crossland as head of the Defense Health Agency; and soon Major General William Green as chief of Army chaplains. Hegseth has he said publicly that “our diversity is our strength” is “the dumbest saying in military history.” And delete Defense Department records of non-white service members, and seek to restore Congratulations to the Union soldiers who took up arms against their country in defense of slavery, Hegseth has shown little view that his service should be honored.
Trump is also likely to seek to ensure that remaining officials have no concerns about following orders that may be illegal. Both of them and Hegsth have seen for a long time a commendable war crime instead of contempt. Since 2016, Trump has been entertaining audiences at meetings with apocryphal stories about the American general. to shoot Muslims with bullets coated in pig’s blood. In 2020, he a dreamer about using military guns on American citizens, but they faced opposition from the Pentagon leadership. Yesterday morning, Trump publicly threatened to destroy Iran’s “entire civilization” and target civilian infrastructure, a war crime. He later backtracked, giving Iran the power to levy tariffs on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz; the passage was free before the US attack.
Registered service members are disproportionately white compared to the general population of the United States, while officers are overproportionally white. Women are also serving in greater numbers than ever before: About one fifth of the active military they are women. Yet Hegseth has been around for a long time deny service to womenespecially in combat roles, and once he wrote that, under leaders like Brown, “black soldiers, at all levels, will be promoted according to their color” (this is called an admission of guilt). Hegseth seems to want the group of senior officers to be a little different than it is now, after complaining. in his book that “white sons and daughters of America are leaving” the military. And he and Trump appear to be purging not only women and people of color, but officials they see as equally capable — like the Chief of Staff, Gen. Randy George, who he was fired after reportedly refusing to remove several black and female officers from the list for promotion to general.
Hegseth infamously claimed early in his tenure that promotions in the military would be “colorblind and based on merit.” Now it is clear that this was not true. During his confirmation hearing, Hegseth was unable to testify any evidence that the army had lowered standards in the name of diversity. If that is the case, then why have we seen so many senior Black officers and highly qualified women fired? Why did the Pentagon, for no good reason other than animus, fire trans service members after years of honorable service? “Race blindness and meritocracy” now appears to be a smokescreen for the politically motivated removal of not only Black men and women from leadership positions, but white officers who value their service.
The message sent to lower-ranking officers is that they will be evaluated on the basis of gender, race, or politics, rather than their ability—which will cause many officers to leave rather than stay and be victimized, and many capable officers not to sign up in the first place. It is difficult to deny the full benefits of citizenship to those who are willing to fight and die for their country; it is easier if the sacrifice is reduced or canceled. Rewarding or punishing officials based on race, gender or political allegiance to Trump could also help the administration’s larger project of undermining the demands of women and ethnic and religious minorities for equal treatment under the law in other parts of American society.
The progress achieved for ethnic minorities and women in the military services was difficult. During the Civil War, Frederick Douglass argued that the service of Black men in the Union Army would strengthen their claim for equal rights. “Let the black man have letters of bronze upon himself United States; let him take an eagle on his button, and a shovel on his shoulder, and a bullet in his pocket, and no power on earth or under the earth can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States,” Douglass said in 1863. “Nothing can be clearer, nothing more certain, than that the quickest and best way for man is that this high service is open to us, and this high service is open to us.
Douglass was right, although the process was not as smooth as he might have hoped. Black service helped justify the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments, but Reconstruction saw Blacks disenfranchised and subjected to Jim Crow restrictions. WEB Du Bois made a similar argument for Black service in World War I. Bringing back black veterans they were subjected to horrific racist atrocities which ultimately strengthened the resolve of the Blacks. Only after World War II – and over the objection of a large part of the brass – was the army integrated, and then only after a thorough internal investigation disproved the racist ideas that Black soldiers could only fill menial roles or serve in segregated units.
“Just as the service denied to a single Negro the technical training and work for which he was qualified, so much so that the service lost potential skills and undermined its own effectiveness. Aside from the issue of equal opportunity, the Committee did not believe that the country or the military services could afford this humanitarian devastation,” the final report from President Truman’s Committee on Equal Service and Opportunity read. “The committee found, in fact, that inequality contributed to inefficiency.”
Another way of saying it is that blatant racism and segregation 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 very different from also “wake up.”
The result has been something of a caricature of Republican grievances about diversity, equality, and inclusion, a system in which the disadvantaged rise not because of their ability but because of their comparability. Authoritarian regimes act like the Trump administration is acting—improving political credibility rather than competence. Merit, in short, has nothing to do with it.
Hegseth is a prime example. Unqualified for the job and convinced that brutality offers an easy way to victory, he has led the United States to the brink of strategic defeat by its weakest enemy in Iran. The current ceasefire leaves Iran with an even more hard-line regime than before, one in complete control of a shipping lane vital to the world economy. The Islamic Republic is said to be in a stronger position today than it was when the war began, and perhaps in a stronger position than it was. before Trump, in his first term, deleted The Obama-era nuclear deal.
On Sunday, Trump posted on his social media an announcement that he and his handlers seem to think is wise: “If you bring in the Third World, you become the Third World!” This archaic social Darwinism is the ideological mortar of the Trump project. It combines Hegseth’s distaste for diversity in the military leadership with an appreciation of brutality and the administration’s assault on birthright citizenship and its deployment of federal agents to occupy American cities. It is a worldview that can take an easy victory against a country like Iran, especially for the new, “unawakened” American military. Discrimination isn’t just good, as the US military discovered in the 1940s. It also makes you stupid.
