In August 2021, the world watched as American forces scrambled to evacuate Afghanistan as the Taliban reclaimed power. The panicked withdrawal reached a tragic climax on August 26, when 13 American service members (and more than 100 Afghan civilians) were killed by a suicide bomber in the Kabul airport, where security was a U.S. responsibility. Four days later, when the last military planes took off from that same airport, hundreds of American citizens were left behind. A month later, when the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the CENTCOM commanding general were called before Congress to account for the failure, they neither offered explanations nor accepted responsibility. The message was clear: incompetence would be the new norm for the U.S. military—a predictably lethal status quo.

The Afghanistan debacle was dramatic, but it was only one small part of a much larger picture. The United States Armed Forces were once the envy of the world, in large part because we selected the best of the best and instilled in our fighting men an unshakeable military ethos. Both the ethos and the selection, however, have been in steady decline as the Department of Defense succumbs to a dangerous ideology: that of group quotas, or forced outcome equality for identity groups based on race and sex.

Critics of the current state of affairs in our Armed Forces waste precious breath on disturbing but minor issues like reading lists, drag shows, and TikTok trends. We must instead focus our efforts on the prevalence of race and sex-based quotas, and the accompanying collapse in professional standards, in the fight to reclaim the integrity of the institution of the military.

Quotas, by one name or another, have been defense policy since 1965, when Secretary Robert McNamara decided to make the Pentagon the leading edge of the effort to adhere to the principles and policies of the Civil Rights Act. This history is important to understand because it clarifies the mission ahead.

The military is often perceived by well-meaning Americans as the last holdout in the progressive march through the institutions. In reality, however, it was among the first American institutions to formally embrace the radical logic of group quotas: that it must proportionally represent the demographics of the nation, or else enjoy the presumption of wrongdoing and discrimination.

To recover from this institutional overreach, Congress and the executive branch need to commit to a few specific policy changes alongside a bold reorganization of the military personnel process and the structure of the Joint Staff. But before we can recommend policy, or even analyze history, we must come to understand the military as an institution. The prevailing consensus seems to regard our warfighting forces as just one more institution in civil society, bound by every social norm of the country they stand to defend. This is the logic by which group quotas are justified. The United States military, however, cannot serve its basic purpose unless it is set apart.

The Military as an Institution, Defined

When a citizen enlists in any of the service branches, he goes through a period of intensive training meant to melt away the effects and the mindset of civilian life, and to forge Americans into soldiers, sailors, airmen, or marines ready to devote their lives to the mass application of violence on behalf of American interests. This training must sweat and bleed the individual who reported for duty, because the DOD knows the life of American citizens, formed in individualism and liberalism, does not make for an easy transition to military service. Policymakers would do well to acknowledge this civil-military distinction.

The American military is a professional fighting force built on competencies and values not commonly found in civil society. Thankfully so, for we do not raise our children under the presumption of a violent life, and most do not even consider joining the military. Because the stakes of military operations are so high, the military must define itself by a commitment to the professional factors that make servicemembers and units more effective. Even though the years of all-out war are beyond our memory, the perils of an uncertain future make the stakes of military policy unquestionably high.

Some would have us believe that a diverse military is somehow the cornerstone of our national security, all the while minimizing any effect of DEI in practical application for men and women in uniform. This position contradicts itself; either the military’s efforts at diversity serve a critical national need, or they are so insignificant that they are not worth their costs to the services’ culture and the government’s bottom line.

When it comes to policy, the military must maintain a strict separation between values unrelated to the military profession and those values necessary to maintain an effective force. Like a drop of ink in a glass of water, the faintest hint of ideology outside the scope of the military profession will degrade the whole force’s effectiveness. Historical examples from eighteenth century France to the Soviet Army of the late Cold War attest to the reality of this threat.

At stake is much more than the relative quality of military units. A military consumed by politics and identity threatens the very integrity of our republic. In other sectors of society, the consequences of shirking the primacy of merit amount to a bad hire as university president, or maybe a missed revenue projection for a given fiscal quarter. In the military, the stakes are obviously much higher.