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The military was recently attacked by Republicans in Congress for committing the crime of being too awake. Prosecution Exhibit A, presented at a House hearing last week, is a course taught at West Point Army Military Academy titled The Politics of Race, Gender, class and sexuality. Worryingly, there was also a recent day of withdrawal of all military personnel to discuss white supremacy and extremism in the ranks.
Is this, critics from Capitol Hill and Fox News asked, what should our fighters be thinking about? If they are taught about racial disparities, will they not stop seeing themselves as equals on the battlefield?
Here are some important facts to keep in mind. Firstly, West Point had a social science department right after WWII, when senior military officers realized that military leaders would need to know more about politics, society, and history to function in an America. broad and democratic. Requiring cadets to take social science courses, and even creating a Sosh major, did not detract from their military exercises and training.
Second, West Point’s Course on Race, Gender, Class and Sexuality was created and incorporated into the curriculum in 1999 long before awakened or critical race theory became buzzwords. It was proposed and designed by a professor of foreign policy at the time, Major Isaiah Wilson, who ranked first in his class at the Armys Command and General Staff College, was hired by General David Petraeus to being its leader during the Iraq War, and is now president of Joint Special Operations University. In other words, he’s no softie. The professor who teaches the course now, a civilian by the name of Rachel Yon, took over from Wilson in 2012, before the kerfuffle on Wakeup and CRT. (Yon was one of the Wilson professors at West Point when he was a student in the ’90s; in other words, he’s not a fashionable person.)
Third, Wilson believed it was important to teach such a class at West Point because, like many American institutions, the military has never been a mainstay of racial or gender equality, and as more and more blacks and women are moving up the ranks, the presence of prejudices emerging as a problem, so the grassroots should at least be aware of it. (Wilson himself is African American.)
The problem has not gone away in the past 22 years either. Senior officers recently expressed concern over the discovery that many members of the white supremacist militias were once (or still are) in the armed forces. In response, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin appointed a commission to study how to eradicate extremism. Stopping for a day to discuss the issue critics have also complained about was part of the campaign.
A crucial shift in the open recognition of the problem and even of a systematic racial bias within the military and West Point came last year, during the protests against the murder of George Floyd by the police. These protests coincided with a fledgling movement to change the names of 10 army bases, all located in the southern states, to the names of Confederate slave generals.
In an article in The Atlantic almost exactly a year ago, Petraeus wrote that during his years as a serving officer, often stationed at these bases,
I never thought much of these men about the nature of their service during the Civil War. Nor did I think about the message these names sent to the many African Americans serving on these facilities, messages that should have been noted by all of us.
Likewise, when he was a cadet and later a professor at West Point, Petraeus did not question the reverence shown towards Confederate General Robert E. Lee, who was a great commander but also like all the other guilty Confederate officers. of treason. We weren’t encouraged to think about the cause Lee had fought for, he writes, at least not in our military history lessons.
Petraeus told me that it wasn’t until he retired from the military in 2011 that he began to think how strange it was that the leaders of the Anti-Union were more widely honored with their names on federal forts, roads, barracks, gates, residential areas, etc. than those who fought for the country. These thoughts deepened as he read several biographies of Pres. Ulysses S. Grant, the commander of the Union Army and later president for two terms, who was hardly honored either at West Point or at Army bases. Petraeus said he has been considering for some time the military to publicly address this disgrace. The events of the past few weeks, he said, referring to Floyd’s murder and the protests that followed, were the catalyst for writing his Atlantic essay.
This brings us to Secretary Austin and General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, both of whom were criticized by Congressional Republicans during a House Armed Services Committee hearing last week. Florida Representatives Matt Gaetz and Michael Waltz, the latter a former Army Green Beret, led the charge, citing cadets and their parents who were disturbed by the suspension to discuss extremism and the division of race course.
Thanks for your anecdotal contribution, Austin responded. Got 10 times that amount of information, 50 times that amount of information, from the other side who said, Hey, I was glad I had the opportunity to have a conversation with ourselves and with our leaders.
Milley dug deeper. I want to understand white rage and I am white, he said. What prompted thousands of people to attack this building and attempt to overthrow the Constitution of the United States of America. I read Mao Zedong. I read Karl Marx. I read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a Communist. So what is wrong with understanding, having some understanding of the situation in the country that we are here to defend?
A few points are also worth noting here.
First, neither Austin nor Milley would like to be faced with these kinds of issues. Both commanded troops in combat. (Austin is a retired Four Star Army General.) Milley graduated from Princeton and has an MA in International Relations from Columbia, but, a retired officer who knows him tells me, likes to introduce himself. like a guy who came to Princeton by being a hockey player and started being part of the lower half of the class who helped the upper half achieve what they did. Yet they see that race and gender are not just social issues but national security issues and that addressing these thorny issues is part of their job.
Second, their critics, most of whom had never heard of Critical Race Theory a year ago and couldn’t define it now, are simply using the debate as a way to score points against Democrats and, in some cases to push the race, including the suppression of blacks. voters in the election, off the table as a valid question.
However, third, the critics are right. In various institutions, the CRT has been distorted beyond recognition by both sides of the debate; race as a defining issue has been overestimated and has exacerbated social tensions. A retired senior army officer, who asked not to be identified, not wanting to participate in this debate, told me:
Generally speaking, I am concerned that over the years the military has devoted an excessive amount of time / attention to the social issues of the day and a variety of topics unrelated to the preparation of the military. operations. Having said that, if we screw up these issues like we do from time to time, the consequences can also distract us tremendously. It is therefore difficult to find the right balance.
It would be nice to have a substantive debate on this issue, but it has become difficult, if not impossible, now that it has become a tool of partisan warfare.
Milley and other officers like him have been trained to avoid partisan fighting as long as they are in uniform (and even beyond). But they are not the ones who engage in politics. They know the story. In the late 1940s, the racial integration of troops was denounced by many as making the military a social experiment, to the detriment of national security. In recent years, similar objections have been filed against letting women and self-reported gays openly join the military. In all these cases, the shutters are passed; the inclusion of those who were once excluded has become normal and the nation is still safe (or, to the extent that it is not, our gaps have nothing to do with the presence of military personnel and women black or homosexual).
Milley has her own experience of political exploitation. Last July, he followed President Trump from the White House to Lafayette Square, unaware that he was being used in a photo op to legitimize tear gas from protesters minutes earlier. He quickly apologized for his presence and gradually began to drift away from Trump’s orbit, more properly assuming his duties as an independent military adviser. The whole incident has undoubtedly shaped his actions since, and led him to renounce any timidity in retaliating against politically motivated attacks by members of Congress.
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There is another piece of history that Republicans in Congress should keep in mind. Senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade fell apart when he went too far over a bridge and accused several of the Red Army’s war heroes of treason. In 1954, defense attorney for one of the accused soldiers finally said from the witness stand, Senator, can’t we just drop this? Do you have no sense of decency, sir? Finally, have you left no sense of decency? Soon after, McCarthy was censored by his once intimidated Senate colleagues.
Today’s Congress has long since abandoned much of decency for many reasons. Military officers also don’t enjoy the same presumptive respect they once did, in part perhaps because fewer members of Congress and fewer Americans have generally served. (Donald Trump not only suffered no political damage, but won the election nonetheless, having derided John McCains’ record as a war hero.) Yet there are probably limits to this. that Republicans can go on shouting at decorated generals or using the military as a prop in their attacks on Democrats. These limits have probably not yet been reached; there are more screams to come.
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