The military was, once, a bastion of meritocracy, but that has changed. Now the military, like so many other institutions, has given way to “woke” staffing practices and worse, outright racism. While the Marine Corps goes without a commandant, President Biden’s nominee to be the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs seems to have admitted to engaging in racist staffing and promotion practices:

A government transparency group on Monday asked the Air Force to open a probe into Gen. Charles Q. Brown, who President Joe Biden recently nominated to fill the U.S.’ top military post, for potential illegal racial discrimination.

While serving as the Air Force’s chief of staff and before that as Pacific Air Forces commander, Brown made statements suggesting he selects individuals for certain roles and promotions based on their race to build purposefully diverse organizations, multiple sources show. Brown could be violating the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause that prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, the American Accountability Foundation (AAF) argues, making him ineligible to become the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

General Brown has attempted to defend the practice:

“I purposely build my office, my front office, and my team with [diversity], and I hire for diversity because they all bring a different perspective,” Brown said in an interview with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs in 2020.

“All of us have to seek out those diverse candidates to bring them in, and that’s what we’re trying to do in the Air Force,” he added, appearing to convey that pursuing diverse candidates is a practice he hoped to implement through the entire Air Force.

This is inexcusable. Not only should General Brown be denied that top spot, he should be cashiered from the Air Force and, as the old saying goes, ‘sent back to the block.’ He is manifestly unfit for command.

The military is like no other institution in the country. Not only does it function best as a meritocracy, it must function as a meritocracy. Nothing matters more than mission; nothing matters more than cohesion; nothing matters more than the ability to, as the Army used to teach, “close with and destroy the enemy by fire, maneuver and shock effect.” Nothing can be allowed to interfere with the military’s mission. This is a matter of national survival. Staffing decisions made using any critiera other than skills, qualifications, and demonstrated leadership will get service members killed and lose wars.

To see a vivid demonstration of how incompetence at the political level in execution can make a dog’s breakfast of an operation, one need only examine the American withdrawal from Afghanistan. We are at times forced to put up with incompetence in political leadership, as that is dependent on the vagaries of the voters. We should never have to put up with it in our military leadership.

There has been some pushback:

The American Accountability Foundation is a government oversight group set up in early 2021 to expose leftist backgrounds of Biden nominees get their appointments blocked, according to Fox News.

“Race-based hiring has no place in the military. Our men and women in uniform deserve to be led on missions by the most qualified and skilled officers and leaders our nation has, who will give them the best chance of success and getting home safely,” the organization said in a statement.

These days, one often hears the statement “elections have consequences.” Civilian control of the military is, of course, a founding principle of the Republic, one enshrined in the Constitution, and it’s the only thinkable relationship of the two. But when elections have bad consequences for the military, the entire country is in danger. That’s what is happening now; somehow, in the Air Force, we have an officer wearing four stars and openly engaging in what appears to be racist staffing and promotion practices. That’s inexcusable. That’s intolerable. And that’s another arrow the GOP should keep in their quivers for the 2024 elections.