New Docs Shed Light on Air Force’s ‘Goal’ to Reduce ‘White Male Population’ Joining Officer Ranks

The Air Force finally handed over a trove of documents pertaining to its sweeping “goal” of reducing the number of white male applicants in a popular officer program after spending months stonewalling requests for their release.

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman C.Q. Brown — at the time the highest-ranking member of the Air Force — issued a memorandum in 2022 that the branch was updating its racial and gender demographic goals for applicants seeking to become officers, in a bid to prioritize “diversity and inclusion.” Internal documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation include a slideshow from 2022 where the Air Force outlines racial and gender quotas and details how it hopes to “achieve” a reduced number of white males in its Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) officer’s applicant program.

The documents reflect the Biden-Harris Pentagon’s intense focus on implementing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies in the armed forces, even as the military continues to combat dwindling morale among its rank-and-file, recruiting and retention shortfalls and low pay.

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One of the slides in question, labeled “AFROTC White,” depicts a graph that shows the percentage of white male ROTC officer applicants declining from approximately 60% in fiscal year 2019 to a projected 50% in fiscal year 2023. The graph further details how the Air Force’s goal is to reduce that percentage down to approximately 43% by fiscal year 2029, denoted by a star with the label “achieve(d) goal.”

“White male population will decline as other demographics increase,” the slide reads.

The respective slides in question also explain that the Air Force is either on track or needs to do more to hit racial and gender quotas in the ROTC’s officer applicant pool.

For example, with the African American population, the slideshow suggests the Air Force “target [the] male population through ongoing programs and marketing” and notes it has already met its “female goal” for ROTC officer applicants. For the American Indian, Asian and Hispanic applicants, the slideshow says the Air Force is “on track to grow diversity.”

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Included in the slide deck are funding requests for diversity recruiting initiatives, including $500,000 for “diversity advertising campaigns” and $250,000 for “influencer engagements.”

In a separate set of documents from as early as 2022, the Air Force outlines its efforts to modify ROTC scholarship programs, which “play an important role in accession and diversity goals.” The Air Force suggests modifying the scholarship models could remove certain “testing barriers” to entry for under-represented groups.

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