Senate needs to confirm Marine Corps commandant
During the reddest days of the Iraq War in 2004, a Marine officer stationed in Fallujah helped move a wounded Marine colonel to urgent medical care just after their joint office area had been blown up by an insurgent rocket. This Marine’s name is Eric Smith, the current acting and four-star ranked commandant of the US Marine Corps. General Smith is one of hundreds of senior military officers whose promotions are on indefinite hold due to a single US senator. The reason? The Pentagon’s abortion access policy for troops and their families. The fight has also crossed over into the Pentagon’s massive annual appropriations. House Republicans have pushed against spending funds on diversity programs and transgender health.
And yet a “woke” — better defined as a modern, agile, and inclusive — US military is not to be feared or politicized but rather viewed in a more honest and comprehensive way.
We need only spin the globe and examine history books to find relevant if also unexpected comparisons. The Germans (1944), Japanese (1945), Koreans (1953), Iraqis (1991), and ISIS (2014) all encountered a US military in the middle of “woke” (race, gender, or orientation) policy shifts opposed by traditional segments within the Pentagon at the time, as well as some loud politicians. The eventual understanding and acceptance of the differences that make the United States great — such as welcoming LGBTQ service members — ended up strengthening the US military and making it more representative of our country.
We write as an active duty enlisted Marine — with numerous overseas deployments — and as a former frontline State Department official who worked closely with our military across ranks, from corporals and captains to commanding generals.
The current debate about a “woke” military boils down to one of empathy and effectiveness. Former commandant of the Marine Corps David Berger said the core of America’s strength lies in its diversity. “Our advantage militarily is on top of our shoulders,” he said. “It’s not actually our equipment. We are better than anybody else, primarily because we don’t all think exactly alike. We didn’t come from the same backgrounds.”
This diversity of thought argument is enshrined in Talent Management 2030, a seminal planning document that positions the Marine Corps to be a pathfinder for how the modern military can “operationalize” its diversity.
As the war in Ukraine has shown, having monolithic organizations — such as that which is endemic in the Russian military — where groupthink is not only expected but demanded leads to bad analysis, poor leadership, and squandering of lives. The Marine Corps, our nation’s most expeditionary force, seeks not only to avoid those mistakes but to ensure the level of shared identity and diverse thought among Marines becomes the norm and enshrined within the Corps.
While historical “woke” policies have focused on identity, today’s high-stakes global competition among Russia, China, and the United States requires a more expansive ideological approach. General Mark Milley’s June 2021 testimony to Congress showed an example of this when he was questioned on certain texts being taught at the United States’ military service academies. Milley testified, “I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist. So what is wrong with understanding — having some situational understanding of the country for which we are personally here to defend?” Both of us know Marines who are as well-versed in Afghan poetry and Plato as they are in “Starship Troopers” and “Catch-22.”
The evacuation in late summer 2021 of Afghan, American, and other nations’ personnel from the Hamid Karzai International Airport, despite the tumultuous ending, demonstrated at the ground level that having an understanding of others and their backgrounds is critical to making the best of a bad situation.
One of us was a member of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit that provided a cornerstone of support to that frenetic operation. In Kabul we had Marines and sailors who were members of the LGBTQ community, just as we had every race and creed, and people on all sides of the political divide working sideby-side. None of that mattered. The goal was to save as many people as possible. There was no hesitation when female Marines and sailors worked alongside infantrymen in the processing and searching lines at the Abbey and North gates. The mission is the mission. And this newest generation of service members cares about that mission and not the background of the person next to them. They are a Marine or Navy corpsman and that’s all that matters. Genuine comradery.
The understanding of others’ points of view and an empathic, not sympathetic, understanding of individuals has historically been an esoteric military skill. Such soft skills were believed to be best developed by academics, intelligence specialists, and various other civilmilitary specialists. “True warriors” concentrated on the “real” fighting.
But the age of Great Power Competition has brought the ideological battlefield back to the forefront in a way that has metastasized from Cold War days to the modern, cyber-enabled battlefield of ideas where AI, bots, and viral disinformation epitomize the Twainism of a lie going around the world twice before the truth can even tie its shoes.
Being resilient as a nation and as a military requires us to better understand each other and those we may face in future conflicts or current competition. While we, as a nation, do not subscribe to communist rhetoric, those we are in competition with do. While we do not espouse authoritarianism — albeit some American politicians seem attracted to the notion — those we are in competition with do. Understanding these divergent opinions while simultaneously strengthening our internal diversity will allow us to successfully counter these monolithic, groupthink-centric nations and rely on the enduring strength of our nation: our diversity and adaptability.
Weakness flows from fear and unnecessary division. The Marine Corps needs its commandant confirmed by the Senate, along with all of the other top military brass across every service branch.
Intentionally inflamed culture wars inflicted on our military — not originating within it — are best left to political campaigns and not pushed onto the backs of those who fight our nation’s real wars.
The United States, after all, can remain militarily strong by welcoming into our armed services everyone a nation as big as ours needs in uniform. And then encouraging them to make multidecade careers out of it rather than be shunted aside or pushed out because of alienating and outdated politics.
Intentionally inflamed culture wars inflicted on our military — not originating within it — are best left to political campaigns, however short-sighted, and not pushed onto the backs of those who fight our nation’s real wars.
Jeremy Kofsky is an active duty Marine with 12 deployments and the first-ever enlisted Brute Krulak Scholar at Marine Corps University. Kael Weston teaches at Marine Corps University and is the author of “The Mirror Test: America at War in Iraq and Afghanistan.”