Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Grinston had this on the importance of “diversity and inclusion” relative to combat capability:

Diversity is a number—do you have people that don’t look or think like you in the room? Inclusion is listening and valuing those people[.]

Our army’s Training and Doctrine Command, via its official twitter account had this:

Inclusion & Diversity is what makes our [U.S. Army] better.

No. What makes our army—our military establishment in general—is whether we have soldiers and formations of soldiers who are capable, in defense of our nation and when called of our friends and allies, of successfully engaging, pursuing, and killing our enemies’ soldiers, our enemies’ formations, our enemies’ capability of mounting further attacks.

That’s also who we should see “in the room.” And no one else. Diversity will fall out of that, if we do a proper job of training for combat, rather than for political correctness. Every combat or combat support training graduate will be included—and that’s the inclusiveness that we need.

Our current military management’s (we seem to have a serious lack of leadership) emphasis on “diversity and inclusion” for their own sake, as epitomized by Grinston, is divisive, it’s stinking racism and sexism.

Grinston had the…political correctness…to make his claim against the backdrop of the travesty exploding in Afghanistan. About that contrast, Marine veteran Jessie Jane Duff is on the right track [emphasis hers].

This is what matters: 11 Marines and one Navy Corpsman killed. Americans.
I’m positive they didn’t look or think like you, Sergeant Major. Every flag drapped coffin looks the same.
We have an #AfghanistanCrisis and this is your tweet. Shameful.

Maybe it’s time to clear out the foolish and the idiotic who choose not to understand what it takes to have an effective military. Maybe it’s time to discharge or retire our military managers, from the Secretary of Defense and JCS Chief on down through most of the flag and GS equivalents in the Pentagon.