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According to documents shared exclusively with The Daily Wire, “the Biden-Harris Defense Department paid outside organizations millions of taxpayer dollars to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, including race-based career advancement programs, in the U.S. military.”
The Daily Wire reported that the University of Missouri Kansas City was awarded $760,000 by the Department of the Navy to “design a program that would give preferential treatment to non-white students and women in STEM applying for Defense Department jobs.”
In a second example, Cornell University was awarded approximately $202,000 to “provide Diversity training that is mission imperative to ensure readiness and addressing discriminatory behavior from a cognitive perspective.” Between 2022 and 2024, nearly $270 million was requested by the Pentagon to fund the DEI agenda of the current presidential administration.
The Gateway Pundit spoke to recent Army retiree Col. Nicholas Braun (a pseudonym) on the condition of anonymity who admitted being somewhat surprised that nearly $270 million was requested for the promotion of DEI in the military. For him, it was a gut punch to see such a massive amount of taxpayer money being used for the leftist DEI agenda, while combat readiness suffered.
According to Heritage Foundation’s executive summary of the 2024 index of U.S. military strength, readiness across the Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps is suffering. Interestingly, the think tank reported one exception, concluding that the Army is “very strong” in the category.
But Braun offered a different assessment. For example, he pointed out that for service members go into a Combat Training Center (CTC) rotation, they have specific standards that must be met. And in recent years, he said brigade level training has been slashed to focus on training at the platoon and company level.
“We didn’t have the budget to conduct live training events to standard at the battalion level and all brigade level live collective training was cancelled at home station because it was too expensive,” he explained. “While we’re stepping back on our training standards because of monetary constraints, an entire armored brigade combat team could be getting a year’s worth of top-level training with the money they’re using for this DEI crap,” he lamented.
“Every single brigade that deploys overseas has a minimum [percentage of] personnel that’s required to be on the ground,” Braun shared. However, he has firsthand knowledge of brigades that have deployed in recent years, not able to meet the minimum personnel threshold for their Department of the Army assigned mission.
“At the division level,” he said, “they pull people from one brigade to fill another right before they leave, or after they’ve left to get to the minimum number required.” Describing this as “a constant shell game,” he pointed out, “you now have other units with shortages and no scheduled backfills of personnel.”
Rather than addressing the problem, he said commanders lie. “A unit status report, a classified report, goes up to the Pentagon for every unit in the Army, informing them of where they stand with regard to readiness,” Braun said. “Numbers are reported, but there’s also something called the commander’s subjective upgrade that also gets reported.”
“[In these reports], they’ll say they’re going to meet the required threshold [for deployment] when, in fact, they’re not getting any more people, because they have no inbound personnel,” he disclosed. “This kind of lying happens every month on unit status reports.”
“The problem is commanders that are honest don’t get top ratings and their careers end, but those that just say ‘everything is fine’ are the ones that get the top ratings,” Braun pointed out. “Everyone understands: to get ahead, you don’t report honestly.” According to him, “Candor—which is an Army value—is not appreciated by senior commanders.”
“If the balloon went up right now and every unit had to deploy,” Braun said, “we would get an Army at about 75 to 80 percent strength on a good day.” With that, he offered “the ugly secret that no one wants to talk about: We can’t get out the door with a 100 percent of our people, yet we’re blowing hundreds of millions of dollars on DEI classes and sensitivity training and a whole bunch of other stuff that’s not necessary to fight and win a major conflict.”
“The precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan did nothing to bolster confidence in U.S. military capabilities,” Braun admitted. “On top of leaving massive amounts of weaponry in their country, we’re now giving arms and ammunition to the Ukrainians and the Israelis.”
He doesn’t necessarily object to arming Ukraine and Israel, because in either example, “People have to die, [and] I would rather they not be Americans,” he explained. “But what we have not done is ramped up the production of ammunition to backfill the war stocks that we’ve been giving them.”
“The expenditure of 155-millimeter ammunition in Ukraine is about 90,000 rounds per month,” Braun said, while disclosing “the United States is producing about 14,000 rounds a month.” From a strategic perspective, he said, “If I’m the Chinese or the Russians, I’m going to sit back until the U.S. Army depletes itself, then I’ll make a move.”
“The U.S. better start paying attention to these things and nix the DEI craziness before it’s too late,” he warned. “$300 million dollars would be better spent on training or backfilling ammunition expenditures, rather than the divisive politics of the DEI agenda.”
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