The above is gonna be a REAL HARD pill for lawmaklers in Congress to swallow to fund…..
The military must recruit more women and more immigrants—and change its culture to embrace diversity as a strength—to be successful in the future, experts said Wednesday at a symposium timed to the 50th anniversary of the all-volunteer force.
The remarks come at a time when politicians and conservative commentators have blamed “wokeness,” a catch-all term generally used to deride diversity and inclusion initiatives and programs for female service members, for what they believe is a decline in military effectiveness. For example, on Wednesday, Rep. Mike Waltz, R-Fla., recently named chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Readiness, tweeted, “I am ready to get to work to better equip our military and turn our focus away from woke priorities and back to winning wars.”
A Reagan National Defense Survey late last year found a decreased confidence in the military among respondents, with 62 percent believing military leadership has become overly politicized, and 50 percent believing “so-called ‘woke’ practices” were undermining military effectiveness.
But Lindsay Cohn, an associate professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College, rejected the idea that “wokeness” is hurting recruiting, saying there is plenty of data showing why people don’t join the military, and “wokeness is not on the list.”
“We don’t have any indication that people are not joining the military because they’re afraid it’s too woke, or because they’re afraid it’s too soft,” Cohn said during a panel discussion at the recruiting symposium, which was organized by the Marine Corps and hosted by the U.S. Naval Institute.
Instead, she said, research shows that trust in the military is “becoming more and more a partisan issue,” and that trust is going down “primarily among Republicans”—but is still very high….
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