CV NEWS FEED // According to a new nationwide poll from the American Principles Project (APP), nearly three-quarters of veterans think the military has gotten too “woke.”
Seventy-three percent of veterans “believe that the U.S. Military has become too political regarding race, gender, and sexuality,” APP wrote on X (formerly Twitter) Wednesday.
Rep Jim Banks, R-IN, sounded the alarm about the numbers during a House Armed Services Committee hearing the same day. “Even worse, a quarter of the veterans would tell a young person not to enlist,” Banks said. “And when those veterans were asked to explain why, in their own words, the most common reason was politics.”
Banks then turned to Agnes Schaefer, the Biden administration’s Assistant Secretary of the Army for Manpower & Reserve Affairs. He mentioned an internal Army survey from February that had indicated “wokeness” was not a major recruiting obstacle.
“Why do you think those results are so different?” the lawmaker and Afghanistan War veteran asked Schaefer. “Why would it tell a different story?”
The administration official said she was “not familiar with the survey” and added: “This is a multi-faceted issue and I think we need to have a multi-faceted solution that addresses those concerns or misperceptions that people have.”
“This recent survey says that clearly politics, [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)], ‘wokeness’ is a problem,” Banks pressed. “What’s the army doing to change that perception about politics being a recruitment barrier?”
“I think all of us … in the military, all of us share that responsibility to be apolitical,” she answered.
“What is the Army doing about that?” the congressman asked.
“We are demonstrating that we are being apolitical,” Schaefer claimed.
“You’re trying to express that the Army is apolitical, but how are you doing that?” Banks asked again.
“I’m not sure why there’s an underlying perception that we are political,” the assistant secretary said. “I don’t know what that is.”
