Employee morale is important everywhere. It’s what motivates employees to do their best, be productive, and focus on the mission. The same is true within the military. If troops aren’t feeling as though they are valued and able to be confident in their abilities, it can lead to poor performance. And when we’re talking about the people responsible for keeping our country safe, we need to ensure morale is high.
Unfortunately, employee morale all throughout the Department of Defense is low. And there may be a good reason for that happening.
Affirmative action is considered to be a national security risk when it is used within military service academies. If the US military uses it as a way to determine who fills officer corps ranks, it could change everything – and foster resentment among the ranks.
Essentially, affirmative action is when you give priority to one group that has been previously discriminated against.
The Department of Defense believes that using affirmative action can increase diversity. And while that’s true, a veterans group also says that using racial characteristics to build an officer corps has the potential to harm national security, weaken the force, and lead to low employee morale.
Scott McQuarrie is the president of Veterans for Fairness and Merit. When he spoke to the Daily Caller News Foundation, he commented that “It is a national security imperative that DOD stop using racial preferences, by whatever name, and return to a race-neutral, equal opportunity, merit-based system of selecting who will be our future military leaders.”
Do we want people chosen to lead our military based on their qualifications or their race? Obviously, qualifications – and if people of color also have the highest qualifications, they will rise through the ranks organically. That is what will ensure that everything is fair without fostering so much resentment – which is what is happening right now.
As McQuarrie pointed out, “In the military, even slight differences in leader quality can make the difference between mission success or failure and life or death on the battlefield.”
If the United States is going to have the strongest military presence possible, we need to be selective about who our leaders are. Promoting people based solely on the color of their skin is a dangerous practice.
Imagine working hard and knowing that you are the most qualified person to lead your troops. Only, you’re not the one who is promoted. Instead, it’s the person of color at your right who you have had to carry through countless exercises. It’s hard to have high morale when that sort of thing happens. And unfortunately, it happens far too often.
The military isn’t the only place where this is happening. If you talk to any white man or woman in Corporate America, there is an instance where they were denied a promotion to give it to someone of color who was far less qualified – and it’s all done in the name of diversity and affirmative action.
Low morale is found in companies that participate in such practices.
The only difference is that those companies aren’t involved in national security. They aren’t putting the entire country at risk because of an eagerness to create a diverse workforce.
A case is currently being heard against the University of North Carolina. The board passed over white and Asian-American students in favor of certain minorities, which was said to violate the constitutional rights of the disregarded students.
The decision of the case will determine whether public universities, which can include military service academies, are able to consider race when they make admission decisions.
It all comes down to this: do we sacrifice performance for racial diversity?
