U.S. Representative Jim Banks (R-IN), Chairman of the Military Personnel Subcommittee, delivered the following opening remarks at a hearing on the health and welfare of the force and the impact of current Department of Defense and service policies.
Rep. Banks' remarks as prepared for delivery:
Today's hearing is focused on the personnel policy makers…who are charged with developing the policies, guidance and programs that affect recruiting, accessions, assignments, benefits, career progression, and much more…
And it's no small secret that policies—especially personnel policies—drive military culture. Strategic leaders in their efforts to form a shared belief system risk substituting continuous oversight with policy and guidance on how to think, feel, and behave.
And some of the most culturally transformative guidance and policies in the military services over the last decade have been in the personnel arena, most notably: Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI). For more than 10 years former President Obama and President Biden, have issued Executive Orders establishing a coordinated government-wide initiative to promote Diversity and Inclusion.
Navigating these policies is no small task, especially considering the military personnel system you are tasked with running is supposed to be based on merit, not social engineering.
I am concerned that policies you must implement not only contradict the military culture necessary to ensure an effective fighting force, but that the cultural upheaval this administration is pushing on DOD and the military services may continue to lead to recruiting and retention problems.
For example, DEI. It is no secret that the backlash to DEI policies has been strong. Last week, Axios quoted Johnny Taylor, president of the Society for Human Resource Management: "The backlash is real. And I mean, in ways that I've actually never seen it before."
And yet even as Americans have pushed back, the Department of Defense continues its focus on DEI. This has an impact on recruiting and retention. This has an impact on potential service members seeing their future success as dependent on their race or gender, not merit.
We are not going to end our recruiting crisis by chipping away at merit-based personnel actions with requirements and directives to take, for example, gender into consideration, as Lieutenant General Burt advocated for when addressing state LGBTQ laws: "If the good match for a job does not feel safe being themselves and performing at their highest potential at a given location, or if their family could be denied critical health care due to the laws in that state, I am compelled to consider a different candidate, and, perhaps, less qualified."
The bottom line is, I am concerned. Especially, that this administration and the military services are dismissing the cultural changes these personnel policies are forcing on the military without considering their effects on recruiting. It may just be correlation that recruiting has struggled since the focus on DEI as a national security priority; but I'm deeply skeptical of that. This needs to be investigated.
