By: Scott Sturman
During their final year at the Air Force Academy (AFA), cadets choose the specific jobs they will be assigned while on active duty. This crucial decision, made in the nascence of one’s career, has far reaching implications with regard to career advancement. The Air Force Specialty Code (AFSC) links available jobs with an alphanumeric designation, and not surprisingly, pilot training represents the most popular AFSC for graduating cadets at the AFA. But the second choice is astonishing for cadets who have received a four year education worth $416,000 at an institution that is tasked to train career Air Force officers.
The minimum commitment for an AFA education is five years of active duty service, and the AFSCs that obligate cadets for the least amount of payback time represent the second most popular job selections in the aggregate. The act is known among cadets as “dive in five,” and it is borne of disillusionment and the realization that DEI entrenched military leadership, quota-based promotions, and falling standards are not what they signed up for.
DEI’s nonsensical, unsupported claims that phenotype and sexual identity are indispensable components of superior military performance and the intimidating effect of DEI political officers embedded within the cadet wing breed cynicism and psychological fatigue. Recent undercover investigative reporting that exposes blatant corruption within Air Force DEI programs and an admission of DEI’s lack of benefit, affirms the negative view of DEI held by most cadets. If the real Air Force is at all similar to the academy experience, then why devote a career to an organization with priorities more in line with Cloward-Piven than the Constitution?
DEI receives unabated, effusive praise in the AFA Association of Graduates (AOG) magazine Checkpoints, the primary information source by which graduates receive news about their alma mater. Other than an occasional, truncated letter to the editor, the settled science of DEI is treated like a godsend. The editors promote an embellished, one-sided narrative of DEI’s dubious benefits, but fail to sound the alarm that cadets are subjected to attend mandatory indoctrination sessions on gender identity. Delving deeply into the murky world of pseudoscience, civilian professors, who constitute 42% of the faculty, proclaim the proven existence of fifty-odd gender types—the validity of which cadets cannot contest in the classroom.
The ideological direction of the academy provokes escalating concerns from the graduate community, and as a result, their financial contributions to the AFA Foundation have plummeted. Corporate donations compensate for the shortfall, but as in the case of the United Services Automobile Association’s sponsorship of a DEI Reading Room at the academy’s McDermott Library, there is a risk of further polarization to the institution. Dependence on large contributions from entities committed to corporatism and stakeholder capitalism disenfranchises individual donors whose commitments are based on loyalty and commitment rather than politics.
Most graduates and cadets understand that DEI leads to detrimental repercussions and these problems will not be solved in the absence an open, non-censored forum. Too little free speech once again embroils a noble institution in a quagmire of its own making, and as a consequence, cadets are diving in five.