Military leaders: Affirmative action is a national security imperative

Of the many issues raised by the contentious affirmative action cases that will be heard by the Supreme Court on Oct. 31, national security would not seem to be among them. Yet that is precisely what a distinguished group of former military leaders argue in an extraordinary friend-of-the-court brief supporting the affirmative action programs of Harvard and the University of North Carolina. 

The question before the court is straightforward: Can institutions of higher education nationwide — including West Point, The Naval Academy, The Air Force Academy and the many colleges and universities that enroll students in the Reserves Officer Training Corps (“ROTC”) — consider race as one factor among many in determining whom to admit?

The military’s message could not be clearer: “Because most of the military’s officer corps come from service academies or ROTC, the diversity of these institutions and programs directly impacts the diversity of our military’s leadership … History has shown that placing a diverse Armed Forces under the command of a homogeneous leadership is a recipe of internal resentment, discord, and violence.”

Among those who signed the brief: four former chairmen of the Joint Chief of Staff  — Gen. Joseph Dunford, Gen. Richard B. Meyers, Adm. Michael G. Mullen and Gen. Henry H. Shelton — six former superintendents of the U.S., Naval, and Air Force Academies and 17 retired four-star generals, including Wesley Clark and William McRaven. 

The military’s deep commitment to a diverse officer corps is rooted not in an abstract commitment to social justice, but rather in hard-earned experience. In 1962, just as American military involvement in Vietnam was beginning, just 1.6 percent of commissioned military officers were African American. Five years later, the nation’s military academies remained de facto segregated institutions, with Black enrollment at West Point, the Naval Academy and the Air Force Academy under 1 percent. But the troops doing much of the fighting in Vietnam were disproportionately African American, with Blacks comprising more than 25 percent of high-risk Marine frontline companies and elite army units early in the war. In 1967, 20 percent of all army fatalities were Black.

The vast discrepancy between an overwhelmingly white office corps and the large number of Black troops they commanded contributed to an atmosphere of acute racial tension within the armed forces. According to the military’s amicus brief, “in 1969 and 1970 alone, the Army cataloged more than 300 race-related internal disturbances, which resulted in the deaths of seventy-one American troops.” As the Vietnam War continued, the military argued in an amicus brief submitted in an earlier affirmative action case, “racial tensions reached a point where there was an inability to fight.”

The military’s conclusion from this period of intense racial strife was unequivocal: “The stark disparity between the social composition of the rank-and-file and that of the officer corps, fueled a breakdown of order that endangered the military’s ability to fulfill its mission.” It was in this context that race-conscious affirmative action was introduced at the nation’s military academies and in the armed forces. The new policy largely succeeded in producing the intended changes: The current entering class at West Point is 12 percent African-American, and the officer corps is 9 percent Black, though progress at the very highest ranks has been considerably more modest.

A central claim of the plaintiffs, who wish to eliminate affirmative action altogether, is that race-neutral alternatives are available that can produce high levels of diversity. Two large-scale natural experiments are now available to test this proposition, for two major institutions — the University of Michigan and the University of California — have for some years been legally barred from employing race-sensitive admissions. 

Reviewing its experience with the elimination of race-based admissions in an amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court, the University of Michigan concludes that it has substantially reduced racial diversity with the proportion of Black undergraduates dropping from 7.03 percent in 2006 (the last year of affirmative action) to 3.92 percent in 2021 despite costly and vigorous efforts to use race-neutral means, including socioeconomic status, to promote diversity. It notes that as of 2021, African-Americans comprised 19 percent of college-aged residents of Michigan — nearly five times more than their proportion of the University of Michigan undergraduate student body. 

Michigan’s conclusion is sobering: “the University’s 15-year-long experiment in race-neutral admissions thus is a cautionary tale that underscores the compelling need for selective universities to be able to consider race as one of many background factors about applicants.”

The experience of the University of California, which eliminated affirmative action in 1996, echoes that of the University of Michigan. In a separate amicus brief, the University of California reports the failure of race-neutral measures: “Comprehensive and holistic review … has not been sufficient to counteract the declines in diversity after Proposition 209 … UC’s experience demonstrates that the race-neutral methods which it has diligently pursued for 25 years have been inadequate to meaningfully increase student-body diversity.” At my own institution, the University of California at Berkeley, it notes that the proportion of African-American freshmen following the elimination of affirmative action fell by more than half from 6.23 to 2.76 percent.

The cases of Harvard and the University of North Carolina come before the court at a fraught time in international relations when the role of the military is of especially critical importance. In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and China’s escalating threats to Taiwan, the world is at a moment of tension not seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis. In a recent speech, the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said that “humanity is just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.”

This would seem a particularly inopportune time for the Supreme Court to ignore a solemn warning from the nation’s most senior military leaders. The elimination of affirmative action would have especially grave consequences for the nation’s military academies, which are even more selective than the University of Michigan and the University of California, and for the armed forces. 

In a post-George-Floyd America, the prospect of a return to an overwhelmingly white officer corps exercising life-and-death authority over rank-and-file troops who are now over 40 percent nonwhite is a deeply alarming one. But the current Supreme Court has shown itself to be willing to overturn decades of precedent. The question before it now is whether it will once again not only cast precedent aside, but also ignore the warnings of the nation’s most eminent military leaders on a fundamental matter of national security.

Jerome Karabel is a professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of the award-winning book, “The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.” He is currently writing a book tentatively titled, “Outlier Nation: The Epochal History of How The United States Became a Country Like No Other,” and has previously written for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, The Nation, The American Prospect, Le Monde Diplomatique, and other publications.