The last thing the US military needs is to become a piñata in America’s woke wars. Having been given no choice, it must now deal with the reality. The details of the defence funding bill the House of Representatives passed last week can probably be ignored — they will probably be gutted in the Senate. The gist of the Republican message, however, will only get louder: “Act like real men or America will lose wars.”
It was a matter of time before the so-called war on woke affected US national security. The Pentagon now joins corporate America, state pension funds and the nation’s classrooms in the Republican crosshairs. For the first time, a US defence budget was passed with cultural riders. This included restrictions on LGBT+ rights, women’s access to abortion and diversity training for recruits.
The claim is that the Pentagon is being used as a social engineering tool by liberals at the expense of America’s ability to fight wars. The Republican party is increasingly drawn to anti-woke as its core message — roughly half of its presidential candidates do not bother to publish policies on their websites. Since Democrats will never agree that the US military suffers from a “crisis of masculinity”, the Pentagon will have to adjust to a new kind of polarisation. It will be costly and diversionary, and bad news for US national security.
The timing could hardly be worse. The real challenge facing the Pentagon is unrelated to woke. For the first time since it became an all-volunteer force in the early 1970s, the US military is failing to meet its recruitment targets. It is unable to enlist enough men and women of any description to its ranks. One of the culprits is a tight labour market, though previous periods of full employment did not stop the Pentagon from making its numbers. Another is the worsening obesity crisis among young Americans. Rising mental health problems are also a factor. For one reason or another, more than three quarters of Americans between 17 and 24 now fall short of the Pentagon’s standards. Neither party is doing much to tackle this.
That makes it a particularly bad moment for the Pentagon to narrow its range of recruits. It ought to be relaxing its entry criteria. Even at the best of times, the basis on which Republicans are demanding such restrictions would be questionable. As it happens, Russia’s war on Ukraine is providing a live experiment in what happens when an anti-woke military invades a country that is forced to modernise rapidly.
In contrast to Russia, which has almost entirely male frontline forces and is hostile to gay people in its military, Ukraine has virtually overnight become the most progressive fighting force in Europe. It had no choice. When a foreign occupier shows up, it makes sense to take any able-bodied adult who is willing to fight. Roughly a tenth of Ukraine’s combat troops are women. Some of its LGBT+ soldiers have chosen to wear insignia identifying them as such. The level of discrimination in Ukraine’s military and society at large has reportedly fallen sharply. You could say that there are no genders (or sexual orientations) in a foxhole.
America has had many debates over military demographics before. The torturous “don’t ask, don’t tell” compromise in the 1990s did not reflect well on anyone; opponents of military desegregation in 1948 were quickly silenced by the professionalism of African-American soldiers. But the US has never had the luxury of having an adversary quite so committed to supplying real time data to a domestic debate. Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, has explicitly described the invasion of Ukraine as a war against a woke west that embodies degenerate values, such as same-sex marriage.
We can judge the results for ourselves. Despite having one hand tied behind its back — being unable to strike Russian territory with its western-supplied missiles — Ukraine has defied all predictions of collapsing morale. Ukraine’s troops are more motivated than Russia’s. Its fighting forces better reflect society’s make up. There is no need to cite historical chestnuts about Alexander the Great or Richard the Lionheart being gay. Just measure the effectiveness gap between the Russian and Ukrainian militaries.
That little of this is acknowledged belies the Republican claim that their goal is military readiness. There are one or two areas where they make valid criticisms but these are drowned out by the hyperbole about masculinity. The best militaries usually reflect the societies they are defending.