CJCS, CNO Fired over DEI, Is the Marine Commandant Next?
February 21st was a bad day for DEI at the Pentagon. The top military commander (CJCS) and perhaps the DEI’s greatest advocate CQ Brown Jr. was relieved of his duties along with the first female Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Lisa Franchetti as well as the Air Force vice chief of staff. None of the firings should have come as a surprise. Brown did not do anything egregiously wrong and was a highly regarded pilot, but his views ran counter to the anti-DEI policy of the new SecDef while ADM Franchetti faced strong headwinds fighting the Navy’s declining readiness and fleet size.
These notable firings appear to be only the beginning of the Trump administration’s attempt to weed out the woke policies inculcated during the Biden Administration. Trump’s SecDef, instead, wants to return the U.S. Military to its founding mission of warfighting and enabling the fighting force with a lethal capability to win wars and deter would be adversaries such as China.
Notably absent from the initial clearing out of top military officers that enacted Biden’s DEI policies was the Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. Eric Smith.
Gen. Smith was not the Marine Corps’ progenitor of the Marine Corps policy established by his mentor Gen. David Berger in 2021, along with Force Design 2030, which decimated the Marine Corps capability to be a global force in readiness.
Gen. Berger was perhaps the most willing participant in Biden’s goal for implementing the controversial and pointedly racist policy of DEI stating in 2021 by implementing Talent Management 2030 and stating that “the core of America’s strength lies in its diversity.” Berger further exalted his reasoning for the push for DEI by stating:
“We are a purely combat force,” he says, a distinction that separates the service from others. “We were built under a different set of circumstances — but that is changing.”
For the last four years, the Marine Corps leadership and institutions have enforced this radical, political ideology among its highest ranks and its institutions. The Marine Corps University has become a haven for this ideology and a safe space from dissent that started with dissenting opinions on Force Design 2030.
It was only fitting for Gen. Berger’s protégé Gen. Eric Smith to become his successor to carry on his vision of Force Design 2030 along with institutionalizing DEI, all while prohibiting any form of dissent or critique of these politically and culturally divisive measures that run counter to the historic Marine Corps core values of honor, courage, and commitment.
In a stunning break from the Marine Corps’ historic core values, on January 15th of this year, Gen. Smith made the claim to reporters that the Marine Corps never bought into DEI, knowing that Talent Management 2030, issued when Gen. Smith was the assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps had an entire section devoted to the implementation of DEI in its ranks.
Beyond the rank-and-file Marines, Gen. Berger and Smith’s legacy of promoting DEI and quelling dissent has been withing Marine Corps institutions such as the Marine Corps University.
Brigadier General Mathew Tracy, the President of the Marine Corps University (MCU) has become infamous for his spying on officers at social events to root out officers who are insufficiently woke. He recently boasted about it at the Naval War College’s Women, Peace & Security conference.
Along with BGen Tracy at MCU is the director of the Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation retired Lieutenant General Lori Reynolds, whose research explores issues of gender security with questions vital to national security such as:
- What is gender, and how is it different from biological sex?
- How are war narratives constructed through gendered discourse?
- How can we imagine non-violent masculinities and the role they might play in conflict?
- How might the USMC’s strategic narrative be problematic for WPS?
- Why don’t we think of diversity as a strength?
- How do we “do” diversity in the DoD? What is problematic about WPS “branding”?
To think that Gen. Smith was unaware of the pervasiveness of these so called “woke” ideologies were so deeply embedded in the Marine Corps and its institutions is remarkable.
Generals Berger and Smith’s legacy has perverted the Marine Corps’ core warfighting mission from moving toward gender-integrated basic training to degrading the ethos of “every Marine a rifleman” running counter to the renewed emphasis that Secretary Hegseth is putting on lethality in American military operations.
Under Berger and Smith, basic leadership values have eroded. When an investigative report last year found the condition of many barracks to be unsatisfactory, instead of holding the chain of command responsible for the care of their Marines, Smith and the rest of the senior leadership decided to outsource the problem to civilian contractors.
This emphasis on management over leadership began with Berger and continued this downward spiral under Gen. Smith. The question is whether SecDef Hegseth is taking note and how he plans to respond.
Gary Anderson retired as the Chief of Staff of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab.
This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.
