Pete Hegseth, President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Defense, rose to prominence in part because of his critique that the Army has become “woke” — too focused on issues of diversity, equity and inclusion — at the expense of “lethality,” the ability to fight and win the nation’s wars.
In fact, one of his first directives moved to eliminate DEI programs. As part of a promised refocusing, he has advocated removing generals who have supported these initiatives from positions of command.
In December, the American Accountability Foundation, a conservative advocacy group, added to this call, sending Hegseth a letter identifying senior military officers who should be relieved of command for transgressions ranging from creating DEI programs to publishing social media posts celebrating Pride Month.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Reading the list, I was particularly struck by AAF’s criticism of one Army lieutenant general, among whose supposed offenses was “visit(ing) 14 historically Black colleges and universities” in an effort to recruit more Black officers into the Army.
Here, history provides a useful perspective.
This officer is hardly the first officer to identify HBCUs as prime venues for recruiting talented soldiers, and any assertion that there is a trade-off between recruiting from across all segments of American society and maintaining the Army’s ability to fight is worse than a false dichotomy.
It’s political posturing that actually threatens, rather than enhances, readiness.
In March 1989, Gen. Maxwell R. Thurman, then the commanding general of the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command and a man whose Washington Post obituary referred to him as “the feisty and innovative four-star general widely credited with saving the all-volunteer Army in its troubled years after the Vietnam War,” spoke at a conference of historically Black colleges and universities in Raleigh, North Carolina.
His goal: to convince those institutions to encourage and enable more young Black men and women to become officers in the U.S. Army. These efforts were part of a larger initiative to support ROTC programs at HBCUs and to recruit Black officers from among HBCU graduates.
In 1986, the Army established a task force focused on HBCUs, with the goal of “ensuring that … quality Black officers are trained to assume the role of leadership excellence.” Initiatives included “over 200 four-year Quality Enrichment Program (QEP) Scholarships (that) have been earmarked for HBCUs.”
The next year, the Army reached out to 16,087 Black high school students who had done well on the PSAT and “encouraged prospects to apply for a 4-year ROTC scholarship” and spent $82,000 on advertising in magazines aimed at Black youth. Thurman, for his part, created a scholarship program that would allow “outstanding Black soldiers who have officer potential” to earn a commission through HBCU ROTC programs.
Thurman would have bristled at the notion that he was anything other than a warfighter. Make no mistake: When he spoke to those in this audience about the need to recruit “the very best leaders,” he meant those that could most effectively lead soldiers in combat.
In other speeches, he was quite explicit about this. “You’re trying to maximize firepower up there,” he told one audience, so “… you’ve got to have smart people in the combat arms.”
Thurman was a key member of the generation of leaders who spent their careers rebuilding the Army after the Vietnam War. The force they created proved itself on the battlefield.
Thurman himself would command the 1989 operation that ousted Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega. Just more than a year later, the U.S. military defeated the Iraqi Army in 100 hours of ground combat in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. In those conflicts, as in every conflict in our nation’s history, Black soldiers and officers performed exceptionally.
This history raises a critical question for this moment.
One must wonder what might have happened to those leaders — and how the Army might have fared — if the critics of their day had called for a for a purge of military leadership such as is being proposed today. Or if they had argued that speaking to HBCU leaders or seeking to recruit the most talented graduates of those schools was somehow at odds with securing the nation’s interests. Or that leaders who did so were “clearly disqualified from leading our brave men and women into battle.”
In 2025, the stakes are too high for arguments that falsely claim that an investment in diversity is inherently a reduction in capacity.
The United States military faces continued recruiting difficulties while confronting challenges in Europe, the Indo-Pacific and the Middle East. The next war will require warfighters who are capable of leading soldiers against well-equipped and well-trained adversaries, who can operate complex equipment and understand the potential of artificial intelligence and how space and cyber have become fighting domains.
In these challenging times, we should reject any assertion that seeking to recruit the best leaders from across our nation conflicts with the requirement to field a lethal fighting force, or that doing so somehow disqualifies leaders who have served with distinction.
Rather, it is precisely the sort of leadership we should expect and encourage in our military’s senior leaders.
David Kieran is the Colonel Richard R. Hallock Distinguished University Chair of Military History at Columbus State University and the author of “Forever Vietnam: How a Divisive War Changed American Public Memory.” The views expressed here are solely his and do not represent any organization or institution.
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