Your tax dollars and mine have been spent on a report to determine that the officer corps of the US military is overwhelmingly composed of one skin tone and gender. The skin tone part is pretty easy to figure out, since it mirrors within a few percentage points the melanin spectrum of 40+ year-old US college grads in general, of which "people who are senior military officers" is a subset:
Seventy-seven percent of senior officers in the active-duty military are white, while only 8 percent are black, 5 percent are Hispanic...On the other hand, only 16 percent of officers are women while out here in the broader society, over half of us use the restroom without the urinals.
The reason for this is that combat arms postings are still off-limits to women. Without getting into whether that will ever change or even whether it should ever change, that brings us to the conclusion of this inane report:
The report ordered by Congress in 2009 calls for greater diversity in the military’s leadership so it will better reflect the racial, ethnic and gender mix in the armed forces and in American society.This is ridiculous. The purpose of the armed forces is to kill people and break their stuff. This isn't the frickin' Peace Corps we're running here, it is a warfighting machine. Much like the Los Angeles Lakers, it doesn't get its score at the end of the game graded on a curve based on how well it reflects "the racial, ethnic and gender mix" of America.
(H/T to Ed Rasimus.)
