The U.S. military has dedicated nearly 6 million hours since the start of the Biden administration on “developing, preparing, delivering, attending or assessing” new plans to address climate change, diversity, and extremism.
Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, provided those numbers to Sen. Jim Inhofe, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the senator announced.
Inhofe and 11 other Republican members of the committee wrote to Milley back in early November requesting information on the monetary and manpower costs of “the Biden administration’s progressive social agenda within the Department of Defense,” and the Oklahoma senator shared Milley’s response on Tuesday.
By a wide margin, the most expensive and timely venture was combating perceived extremism. Members of the armed forces, Combatant Commands, and the Joint Staff spent 5.4 million hours on extremism, an average of roughly two hours per service member, and it “is comparable to other Joint Force periodic training requirements,” Milley explained. It cost $535,000.
Collectively, the military personnel spent 539,771 hours on diversity and inclusion, excluding preexisting training, and it cost $476,874, while the 1,059 hours spent on the climate plan cost $5,000.
Inhofe was joined in the letter by Sens. Marsha Blackburn, Tom Cotton, Kevin Cramer, Joni Ernst, Deb Fischer, Mike Rounds, Rick Scott, Dan Sullivan, Thom Tillis, Tommy Tuberville, and Roger Wicker.
“We face real threats across the world, yet the Biden administration is more focused on promoting its leftist social agenda in the military instead of countering China, Russia and Iran or creating an effective counterterrorism plan,” the senators said. “Our military is not an extremist organization, and our service members, by and large all good people, are dedicated, faithful patriots.”
“We are alarmed that so much training time and taxpayer money was devoted to a partisan, political agenda instead of recruiting, training and equipping the lethal force we need to defend this country,” they added. “The Department of Defense’s primary task is to protect Americans from foreign threats. If the Biden administration doesn’t make this a priority moving forward, we will use all tools at our disposal, including the annual defense authorization bill, to ensure that it does.”
The comments from the Republican senators are the latest example of their criticism of the Biden administration’s emphasis on noncombat or readiness issues.
The lawmakers, in their initial request, referenced critical race theory, a decades-old concept that has gotten significant media attention in recent years, which they claimed was inconsistent with what the military needed to do to be successful. Critical race theory claims U.S. institutions were created with the implicit design to keep white people ahead of minorities, thus making the only way to achieve a fully just society would be to dismantle the system in place.
Conservatives, in particular, have pushed back on the teaching of critical race theory, alleging that it is divisive because it groups people into oppressors and the oppressed based on race.
Milley, during a House Armed Services Committee last year, gave an impassioned explanation as to why teaching cadets about the theory and others are valuable while he was grilled by conservative lawmakers.
“I want to understand white rage, and I’m white,” he explained. “I personally find it offensive that we are accusing the United States military general officers, commissioned [and] noncommissioned officers, of being ‘woke’ or something else because we’re studying some theories that are out there. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist.”
