At the forefront of today’s cohort of right-wing, nativist Know-Nothings are those who specifically attack the U.S. military for the “wokeness” of its policies and practices.
The military continues to wrestle—internally and externally, in its training, its policies, and its practices—with a wide array of manliness-threatening LGBTQ and transgender issues. This struggle even extends to the use of gender-neutral, inclusive, non-threatening pronouns. Service academies and war colleges—educational institutions supposedly devoted to intellectual development and critical inquiry—have felt obliged, if not obligated, to address long-standing issues of racial disparity, dominance, and rage in their curricula. The enduring ideological question of whether environmental and climate conditions should be a matter of priority concern for the military remains a subject of visceral debate. On top of all this, the Army is removing the names of Confederate generals (like Benning, Bragg, and Hood) from Army installations and associated landmarks. Although mandated by Congress, this renaming process has provided yet another pretext for finger-pointing.
What critics deride as “wokeness” is, for the military, seed corn for institutional vitality. Faced with the many divisive forces at play in American society today, as well as its own internal ethical shortcomings, the military needs wokeness among those in uniform now more than ever.
Like “cancel culture,” “virtue signaling,” and “critical race theory,” wokeness has regrettably been distorted into a pejorative. Yet, at its core, wokeness conveys critical self-awareness and altruistic allegiance to the rights and just treatment of others. It is this pure form—not its distorted, pejorative antithesis—that a military rhetorically committed to the virtues of good order and discipline (selfless self-discipline) and unit cohesion (unifying unity) needs more of. Effectively, wokeness is where the Golden Rule (“Love they neighbor as thyself”) meets the National Motto (“Out of many, one”).
The cabal of anti-woke critics consists largely of lawmakers who have never actually served in uniform. Non-veteran Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), for example, has said: “Perhaps a woke, emasculated military is not the best idea.” Non-veteran Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) has similarly claimed: “Our military must stay focused on their mission, remain apolitical, and not be subject to ‘woke indoctrination.’” And, in introducing the Restoring Military Focus Act, non-veteran Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) has opined: “The Pentagon’s job is to develop our men and women in the Armed Forces into a united, lethal, and battle-ready force to defeat our enemies and defend our interests. It is not supposed to be a woke social engineering experiment wrapped in a uniform.”
What isn’t clear is whether these critics are concerned that allocating time to the dialogue and training at the heart of a humanistically-grounded approach to wokeness would unjustifiably steal time from warfighting preparation or whether anti-woke polemicizing is merely a rhetorical dog-whistle for the barely concealed racism, sexism, and homophobia they embrace in their heart of hearts.
Let’s consider, as we must, the larger context of civil-military relations, based on a social contract of mutual rights, obligations, and expectations among the three parties to the relationship: the military, its executive and legislative civilian overseers, and society as a whole. To sustain a truly healthy state of civil-military relations, the military must fulfill the expectation and the obligation to be operationally competent, a source of sound strategic advice, politically neutral, and, perhaps above all else, socially responsible.
Social responsibility is indeed the baseline minimum expectation for an institution that cuts such a broad swath across society and reaches even into other societies. A socially responsible military, were one to exist, would be representative of society, affordable, worthy of prestige without asserting special privilege, and morally superior without being morally arrogant. Such a military would, in other words, practice what it preaches and set an example of professionalism worthy of the trust and confidence of society at large.
The U.S. military, however, is a long way from demonstrating sufficient social responsibility. Consider some of the incidents that hit the news on just one day alone: May 18. The commander of an Army chemical weapons depot was suspended, a Marine who embraced far right-wing beliefs pleaded guilty for his involvement in January 6, and an Indiana Army veteran was convicted of killing a Muslim man in a road rage incident.
These aren’t random, isolated incidents committed by a few solitary bad apples in an otherwise healthy barrel. Having tracked such incidents since the initial days of the Clinton administration, I can attest to the fact that hundreds of such instances of misconduct by those in uniform occur annually. Simply ask (and answer) these questions: Is there racism in the military? Yes. Is there sexism, gender discrimination, and various forms of sexual abuse in the military? Yes. Is there homophobia in the military? Yes. Is there even religious discrimination, persecution, and harassment in the military? Yes.
To be sure, each of the armed services and the Defense Department has espoused a set of core values like loyalty, courage, service before self, and devotion to duty. But these core values are little more than window dressing for public consumption. There is little evidence to indicate that they actually reflect or guide the behavior of those in uniform. They were at some point dictated from on high, rather than emerging bottom-up from a consensus-based institutional process.
A strategically effective military must commit to being socially responsible in order to align itself with its own professed values. “Wokeness,” in other words, is a matter of consistency for the military as well as a matter of achieving institutional and societal justice (which is the view of a majority of Americans as well).
Let’s, then, ignore the anti-woke agitators who dominate the airwaves and give more credence to the likes of Pat Ryan (D-NY), newly minted U.S. representative, West Point graduate, and combat veteran. “I have zero time for the political distractions and BS, and I will very aggressively call that out,” he said last January. “The ultimate irony to me, a lot of people calling this out haven’t spent a single day in uniform, and I think that certainly shows in how they’ve conducted themselves.”