GOP rep investigating Air Force scheme to reduce ‘white male’ officer candidates

Republican Indiana Rep. Jim Banks is probing the Air Force regarding documents pointing to the branch’s “race and sex quotas” in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) officer’s applicant program, according to a letter obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Internal documents and slideshows from 2022 obtained by the DCNF last week showed that the Air Force had set a “goal” to reduce the number of white males in the ROTC’s officer’s applicant pool and set targets for reaching a specific amount of numbers for other racial and gender groups. Banks pressed a high-level Air Force official on Tuesday to answer questions regarding the Air Force’s recently updated standards and what benefit it provides to solving the branch’s recruiting problems, which have worsened in recent years.

“The Biden-Harris [Department of Defense’s] use of race and sex-based quotas is un-American and it should be illegal,” Banks told the DCNF in a statement on Tuesday. “Republicans must work to put merit back at the center of our armed services.”

EXCLUSIVE: New Docs Shed Light On Air Force’s ‘Goal’ To Reduce ‘White Male Population’ Joining Officer Ranks https://t.co/xDMUG80wuu

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) September 19, 2024

The slideshow, created under the Biden-Harris administration’s leadership, depicts a graph where the Air Force hopes to “achieve” a white male population in the ROTC officer applicant program reduced to roughly 43% by fiscal year 2029, down from 60% in fiscal year 2019. The documents also showed how the branch wants to do more to hit other racial or gender-based quotas in the applicant pool, suggesting that hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to be spent on diversity promotion campaigns.

The documents also included 2022 email correspondences between U.S. officials regarding a request from Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Manpower and Reserve Affairs Alex Wagner, who at the time wanted to know “specifically what we are doing for and the timeline to meet goals for each specific demographic, for example, black males, white females, etc.”

Banks had previously urged Wagner during a congressional hearing in 2023 to avoid recruitment efforts based on racial or gender standards, and Wagner replied that he would “commit… to do everything possible to reach the broadest segment of America,” the Republican congressman’s Tuesday letter says. Given the recent revelations of the 2022 Air Force internal documents, Banks pressed Wagner to answer how setting race and sex-based targets in the ROTC officer applicant program would reach Wagner’s goal of “reach[ing] the broadest segment of America,” as well as why the branch would set such targets when it is already struggling with recruiting goals.

“It is difficult to understand how the Air Force could aim to cut recruiting of Americans who don’t check the right demographic boxes during the worst recruiting crisis in the history of the All-Volunteer Force,” Banks told the DCNF in a statement.

Like several branches of the military under the Biden administration’s guidance, the Air Force has fallen behind with recruiting and retention standards. The Air Force, along with the Marine Corps and Army, are on track to meet those targets this year but had missed them in 2022 and 2023, according to the Military Times. The Navy is expected to fall short of its recruiting goals this year.

Only roughly 57% of service members or military families polled by the Military Family Advisory Network in 2023 said they’d recommend joining the service, down from 74% in 2019. Among some of the reasons the respondents wouldn’t recommend service were the politically charged nature of the military, differences and divisions, and low pay.

This story originally was published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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