A group of Senate Republicans are demanding a full accounting from Gen. Mark Milley on how much his woke agenda, including trainings on diversity and climate change, are costing the military.
In a letter sent to Milley last month, a dozen Republicans who sit on the Senate Armed Services Committee argued Milley is more concerned about non-existent issues like white nationalism in the military’s ranks than he is about actually training and recruiting forces.
“Today, efforts to recruit, train, and equip a ready and lethal force often appear to take a back seat to the Department of Defense’s ‘Climate Adaptation Plan,’ ‘Countering Extremism Working Group,’ and discussions of critical race theory. The DOD touts its ‘Climate Adaptation Plan,’ while a viable counterterrorism strategy in lieu of our presence in Afghanistan after a chaotic exit goes wanting,” the letter reads, according to The Hill.
The senators took particular aim at a Pentagon initiative to weed out “white supremacists” from the military by screening troops for potential “domestic terrorism.”
“All this is taking place despite clear data that pegs the number of extremists in our military as miniscule,” the senators wrote.
Servicemembers share Republicans’ concern that “the focus directed towards social issues” is distracting the military from its primary purpose: defending the country, the Republicans added.
Milley has until Nov. 8 to share with the committee the exact costs of the Pentagon’s woke initiatives, according to the letter.
Milley has defended his woke agenda during past congressional hearings, claiming it is necessary for troops to develop “situational understanding.”
“I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin,” Miley said during a hearing in June. “That doesn’t make me a communist. So what is wrong with understanding, having some situational understanding about the country from which we are here to defend?
“I personally find it offensive,” he said, “that we are accusing the United States military, our general officers, our noncommissioned officers, of being ‘woke’ or something else because we are studying some theories that are out there.”
