Only Fat Dumb Criminals Can Make the Air Force ‘Diverse’

By Daniel Greenfield September 07, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog 

Air Force Chief of Staff Charles Q. Brown Jr, Biden’s nominee to replace Milley as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had signed off on a memo to impose a 43% quota for white male officers in the Air Force. That would be catastrophic at a time when the Air Force is struggling with recruitment, faces a shortage of over 1,000 pilots and 86% of its pilots are white men.

Brown, who claimed that America is racist and that he faced racism when someone questioned whether he was parked in the right spot, has been obsessed with remaking the Air Force in his own image. 

Even with only 1 out of 2 key aircraft and bombers ready to fly, the woke chief of staff has emphasized diversity in hiring and promotion at the expense of merit and ability.

Now a Rand report funded by the Air Force shows what it will take to achieve diversity. And diversity, which is more important than winning, won’t be achieved as long as the Air Force clings to basic qualifiers like weight, test scores and no criminal record.

“The most-important barriers for all gender and racial and ethnic groupings,” the report argues, are the Air Force’s “BMI” or Body Mass Index and “height requirements” as well as the “minimum standards” for the Armed Forces Qualification Test and education standards.

Earlier this year, the Air Force had lowered BMI standards from 20% for men to 26% and from 28% for women to 36% for women. And in 2020, the Air Force had dropped a waiver for a minimum 5’4 height requirement for pilots in order to attract more women. There were also complaints that aircraft had been designed around the height of the average white man.

The fighter jets of tomorrow will need to come in a variety of height and weight cockpits to accommodate every possible body shape no matter how impractical that may be.

“For black men, the greatest barrier is the AFQT and education requirement, which decreases their representation by roughly 3.5 percentage points. For Hispanic men, the BMI and height requirements decrease their representation by more than 2 percentage points,” the Rand report notes.

Armed Forces Qualification Test score standards have already been lowered. The Navy will be accepting those who score as low as “the 10th percentile, lower than 90 percent of all test results”.

The Air Force currently expects an AFQT score of 31. Back in 2004, the Air Force’s chief of testing had argued that, “we don’t want people to think we are lowering the standard of quality coming into the Air Force. It appears that way because 36 is lower than 40, but it will still be the same quality of applicants we are accepting into the Air Force today.”

31 is even lower than 36. But somehow it still isn’t low enough.

The same is true for height, obesity and all the other standards. Diversity requires further compromises in even the most basic expectations. The problem is that “enlistees must have a high school diploma or GED, no more than two dependents and not be a single parent, and have no felony convictions.” They’re also not supposed to be criminals or drug users.

And without the illiterate single parents with extensive criminal records and drug use (who are also short and fat) how are we ever going to find the Top Guns of tomorrow to win our wars?

Gen. Anthony J. Cotton, the head of Strategic Command, who claimed that he could have been easily killed by racist cops just like George Floyd, bragged that at the Air Force diversity is a “warfighting imperative”.

An ongoing theme of Air Force press releases is that, “diversity makes the Air Force stronger”.

But if diversity is making the Air Force stronger, why does the Air Force have to accept fat and dumb enlistees? How do fat dumb personnel make the Air Force stronger?

Those are questions that we’re not supposed to ask.

The premise behind DEI in the Air Force and across the military was that talented and qualified personnel were being kept down by unconscious bias and overt racism. The only reason that the Air Force didn’t have the same percentage representation as the country as a whole at every level were systemic barriers that had been put in the way of a naturally diverse service.

If this were true then diversity would not require lowering standards. The fact that it does shows that the accusations of racism were a lie. The issue wasn’t the Air Force, it was the recruits.

Lowering standards proves that diversity doesn’t make the Air Force stronger and it isn’t remedying an injustice. So what arguments are there for lowering standards for diversity?

“I hire for diversity, because they all bring a different perspective,” Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr argued. The notion that a diversity of ideas can only come from a diversity of skin colors is a deeply racist concept that reduces not only our bodies but our minds to the sum of our race. White and black people can only come up with the ideas already encoded into their DNA.

What incredibly diverse ideas have Brown, Cotton and other diverse Air Force officials brought to the table beyond the need to trash everything else in order to enable more diversity?

Is the more diverse Air Force any readier to win wars? No. Aircraft readiness standards and force strength standards have fallen badly under Brown. The Air Force has become weaker and ‘woker’. Brown’s obsession with politics over warfighting will cost lives if we’re in a major war.

“It is a strategic imperative that we have and raise an army that is reflective of our nation and reflects the core values for which our nation was founded,” Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost, the head of U.S. Transportation Command, contended. Those two things don’t go together.

Our nation was founded on merit, not on the hollow pursuit of quotas. A military that best embodies our core values is one in which the best qualified people rise to the top. One reason America has been so successful in defeating peer competitors is that we had the best men.

Now we are lowering our standards to accommodate fat, dumb criminals who may be completely inappropriate for the job, but will hit the racial and ethnic quota numbers.

The racial quotas that Gen. C.Q. Brown Jr. signed off on specify in granular detail that there must be 4.5% male multiracial officers and 3.5% female Asian officers. It doesn’t matter if they can read or write, are too fat, too short or have eight kids by eight different fathers. What matters is that they’re diverse. And when diversity is the only thing that matters, everything else is lost.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.