A former Joint Staff director of operations believes current Pentagon officials are not adequately prepared for a military conflict, in part due to cultural factors such as critical race theory.
Retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold, in an op-ed for Task & Purpose this week, accused “our most senior politicians and military leaders” of having “a form of dementia when it comes to warfare” and said the subsequent result “is a dangerous and potentially catastrophic malady.”
Newbold, who retired in October 2002 over his opposition to the United States’s invasion of Iraq, argued that the military’s “two main purposes” are to “deter our enemies,” and “if that fails, to defeat them in combat,” and he also alleged that the military “cannot be a mirror image of the society it serves.”
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“Values that are admirable in civilian society — sensitivity, individuality, compassion, and tolerance for the less capable — are often antithetical to the traits that deter a potential enemy and win the wars that must be fought: Conformity, discipline, unity,” he wrote.
The retired Pentagon official also pushed back on critical race theory, a decades-old concept that has gotten significant media attention in recent years, which he claimed was inconsistent with what the military needed to do to be successful. Critical race theory is a theory that 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 is to dismantle the system in place.
“Indeed, the military wears uniforms because uniformity is essential,” Newbold stated. “The tenets of Critical Race Theory — a cross-disciplinary intellectual and social movement that seeks to examine the intersection of race and law in the United States, but which has the unfortunate effect of dividing people along racial lines — undermine our military’s unity and diminish our warfighting capabilities.”
One cause of questions about whether cadets were being taught critical race theory came when Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave an impassioned answer as to why teaching cadets about the theory, and others, is valuable.
“I want to understand white rage, and I’m white,” Milley told the House Armed Services Committee in June. “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.”
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Conservatives have frequently pushed back on the implementation of critical race theory in various educational or professional settings, questioning whether the DOD is spending too much time on it instead of competing with adversaries.
