The Air Force's Faltering Effort to Get More Diversity Among Officers May Be Out of Time
An Air Force effort to get more diversity among its officer candidates over the past two years fell short in most cases and now faces an uncertain future under the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump.
The diversity targets set in 2022 marked the first time in nearly a decade that the service had amended the benchmarks for commissioning officers from a variety of backgrounds. The Air Force was unable to reach many of those goals in the 2023 and 2024 school years for the Air Force Academy and Reserve Officers' Training Corps, or ROTC, according to data provided by the service.
Some Republicans have criticized the Air Force diversity targets and the wider long-term military effort at creating a force that better reflects American demographics as counterproductive or part of a left-wing political agenda. Trump and his pick for defense secretary, if confirmed, are widely expected to gut initiatives to bring more women and people of color into the military and government.
The Department of the Air Force aimed to have officer applicants be 67.5% white, 13% Black, 10% Asian, 1.5% Native American and Native Alaskan, and 1% Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander, according to the memo – the remaining 7% was targeted for multi-racial demographics. It also aimed for 15% Hispanic and Latino applicants, as well as 64% men and 36% women.
The August 2022 memo signed by Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall; then-Air Force Under Secretary Gina Ortiz Jones; former Air Force chief of staff and current Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Charles "CQ" Brown Jr.; and then-Space Force Chief of Space Operations Gen. Jay Raymond declared it was "imperative that the composition of our military services better reflect our nation's highly talented, diverse and eligible population."
For the Air Force Academy's 2023-2024 school year, the applicant pool met the diversity goals for white, male and Hispanic candidates.
But the applicant pool fell short in all the other categories – with 8% of the applicant pool being Black, 9% Asian, 0.8% Native American and Native Alaskan, and 0.9% Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander.
Female applicants made up 31.4% of the pool, falling short of the 36% the Air Force was seeking, according to the service data.
The 2022-2023 school year had a similar result, with the service academy hitting its goal of male applicants, and barely surpassing its target for white applicants by 0.2% and its goal for Hispanic and Latino applicants by 0.8%.
Air Force ROTC for the 2023-2024 school year similarly made its diversity target for men as well as Hispanic and Latino applicants, but it missed the other demographic goals, including among white applicants. Nearly the same trend was true for the 2022-2023 school year with the exception of white applicants, which it hit at 68%.
Numbers for Officer Training School and the direct commissioning program under the Space Force, which is part of the Department of the Air Force, were not immediately provided by the service department. Multi-racial demographics were also not included in the data provided.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/12/17/air-force-misses-officer-diversity-goals-trump-administration-signals-end-effort.html