Pentagon DEI Budget Surges for Military-Wide Woke Training to Root out “White Privilege”

The Pentagon dedicates tens of millions of dollars annually to Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs throughout the armed forces and cadets at the nation’s military academies receive extensive training about racism, sexism, unconscious bias, and intersectionality. A year-long research project conducted by a special commission at a public university think tank has uncovered the unbelievable details behind a costly Department of Defense (DOD) initiative to root out so-called white privilege white supremacy in the military. The study, conducted by the Center for American Institutions at Arizona State University (ASU), began as a review of civic education in the military and uncovered a fervent woke movement throughout the nation’s armed forces. “Our research team did not expect to find Critical Race Theory so embedded and pervasive,” the center’s director, Donald T. Critchlow, an ASU American political history professor, writes in the introduction of a recently published report. He confirms that there is CRT and DEI training across the military from the Pentagon through the ranks.

It is important to note that the sole purpose of the U.S. armed forces is to defend the nation against external enemies, therefore the DOD’s mission is to provide the military forces needed to deter war and ensure the country’s security. The agency is the government’s largest with 3.4 million service members and civilians—in the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Space Force and Coast Guard—stationed at 4,800 sites in over 160 countries. Under the Biden administration the DOD budget for DEI training has increased significantly from $68 million in fiscal year 2022 to $86.5 million in fiscal year 2023, the report states. The agency is requesting a whopping $114.7 million for fiscal year 2024, according to DOD figures obtained by ASU researchers. “Training is implemented by a vast DEI bureaucracy that extends from senior leaders at the Pentagon to the lowest ranks,” the report says, adding that the “U.S. military now has a well-developed, taxpayer-funded DEI bureaucracy dedicated to rooting out ‘white privilege’ and white supremacy, and that allows for (and sometimes teaches) the overt criticism of the United States, its founding, its founders, and its founding documents, alleging that they are all rooted in systemic racism.”

Few training modules are available to the public, but the report includes enough to get the full picture. The Air Force teaches airmen to use proper pronouns as an element of inclusion and its Air Combat Command toolkit features examinations of white privilege. An Army course on race and gender in American military history defines racism as a possibility for a dominant group, while people of color merely express prejudice and gender as a social construct. The Navy promotes a “sailor’s drag show aboard a warship” and its anti-extremist training considers the violent and radical Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement to be a positive, apolitical public policy issue. A Marine Corps CRT course emphasizes diversity and inclusion while claiming that colorblindness is unsound because it protects white supremacy. The Marine Corps has also launched a special initiative “to eradicate racism, sexism, and negative biases that diminish our warfighting effectiveness.”

The military academies all have federally mandated offices of diversity and inclusion that coordinate training and support based on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and promote celebrations based on those identities. West Point offers a minor in diversity and inclusion studies and courses such as “social inequality” as well as classes that focus on feminist and queer theory. The Air Force Academy has a Transgender Working Group and U.S. history is an optional elective while required classes cover BLM, the New York Times’ 1619 project that aims to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the United States” and white fragility. The Naval Academy requires faculty to attend a diversity and inclusion conference and future Humanities and Social Sciences instructors to submit diversity statements describing how they will contribute to the academy’s diversity and inclusion mission.

In the last few years Judicial Watch has sued the DOD to obtain more information about the military’s outrageous DEI initiatives, including anti-American CRT propaganda at three academies. In 2022 we received hundreds of pages of records outlining CRT instruction at West Point that includes material on “whiteness,” a social science class on race, gender, and sexuality that focuses on queer theory, and a graphic titled “MODERN-DAY SLAVERY IN THE USA.” Months later, Judicial Watch obtained the Air Force Academy’s CRT training of cadets that shows the academy has made race and gender instruction a top priority. This includes a race, gender and sexuality course as a core class and mandatory training for cadets and staff on DEI concepts and skills to decrease incidents of microaggressions and unconscious bias. A cultural immersion movie nights initiative was also launched to teach cadets about racism, racial discrimination and the several historical events and policies that have impacted minorities through cinema.