Top military leadership so white it looks like it’s 1950, critics charge
A photograph of President Donald Trump and his top fourstar generals and admirals, tweeted in October by Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper, was meant as a thank-you to the commander in chief. But it angered a lot of others, and not just those who erupted on Twitter.
“You would have thought it was 1950,” said Lt. Col. Walter J. Smiley Jr., who is African American and fought in Iraq and Afghanistan before retiring last year after 25 years in the Army. Dana Pittard, a retired major general, also African American, was equally frustrated. “It’s America’s military,” he said. “Why doesn’t this photo look like America?”
Yet the picture of the president surrounded by a sea of white faces in full military dress is an accurate portrait of the top commanders who lead an otherwise diverse institution.
Some 43% of the 1.3 million men and women on active duty in the United States military are people of color. But the people making crucial decisions, such as how to respond to the coronavirus crisis and how many troops to send to Afghanistan or Syria, are almost entirely white and male.
Of the 41 most senior commanders in the military — those with fourstar rank in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard — only two are black: Gen. Michael X. Garrett, who leads the Army’s Forces Command, and Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr, the commander of Pacific Air Forces.
Gen. Paul M. Nakasone, whose father is secondgeneration Japanese American, leads the U.S. Cyber Command. The Army has sometimes counted Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, the head of Africa Command and the son of a German mother and an Afghan father, as a minority commander. There is only one woman in the group: Gen. Maryanne Miller, the chief of the Air Force’s Air Mobility Command, who is white.
The elite service academies that feed the officer class — the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., and the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs — have increased their enrollment of minority recruits in recent years but remain largely white. The African Americans who do become officers are often steered to specialize in logistics and transportation rather than the marquee combat arms specialties that lead to the top jobs.
Interviews with more than three dozen white, black and Hispanic service members and officers depict an entrenched and clubby system with near cement ceilings for minority groups.
The Trump presidency, minority service members said, has only magnified the sense of isolation they have long felt in a stratified system.
“You had the feeling with Obama, that people were looking up” and trying to impress the country’s first black president, Pittard said, adding that similar sentiments existed under Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. That pressure, he said, has disappeared with Trump. “There’s not somebody pushing it,” he said.
Racism within the military appears to be on the rise. A survey last fall of 1,630 active-duty subscribers to Military Times found that 36% of those polled and 53% of minority service members said they had seen examples of white nationalism or ideologically driven racism among their fellow troops. The number was up significantly from the same poll conducted in 2018, when 22% of all respondents reported personally witnessing white nationalism.
In recent years, the Pentagon has faced intensifying criticism for a series of racist episodes. A lawsuit filed in federal court in February by a Navy fighter pilot accused airmen and officers at the Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach of seeking to cover up institutional racism directed against African American aviators, which he said resulted in their wrongful removal from pilot training programs.