But I would not look for them first among the pilots. A survey of RAF personnel has revealed that confidence in the RAF chief and his leadership team has hit rock bottom, according to Sky News.
The figures will be a blow for Air Chief Marshal Sir Mike Wigston, who is to step down as chief of the air staff on Friday – with his career likely to be remembered by a disastrous recruitment drive to improve diversity that disadvantaged white men.
Sky News revealed this week how applicants were dismissed as “useless white male pilots” – as pressure mounted to attract women and ethnic minorities – and that the RAF had to pay £5,000 each to 31 white men who were impacted by the policy.
It only stopped when, as first revealed by Sky News last August, the then head of recruitment resigned in protest at what she deemed to be an “unlawful order” to discriminate against white men.
There was one paragraph that had me scratching my head at first:
While much criticism has been directed at Air Chief Marshal Wigston over the adverse impact of his diversity drive on white men, the survey also found that the proportion of personnel who agreed that their leaders were committed to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace had dropped 15 percentage points to 57% since 2022.
What? Was it not the RAF’s leadership’s eyes-tight-shut commitment to “creating a diverse and inclusive workplace” that caused all the trouble? Given that they put this objective before the defence of the realm, don’t they at least get credit for sincerity on that, if nothing else?
No. They do not. The RAF personnel who have ceased to believe that their leaders truly desire diversity have reason on their side. These were not the actions of idealistic dreamers; they were the acts of careerists frightened they would end up on the wrong side of a denunciation meeting.
This is the fruit of a movement that propagates itself by intimidation. Intimidation gets compliance, but ever fewer believe that the wretches who must proclaim it actually believe it.
This is why this DEI stuff needs to be ripped up by the roots, wherever it is encountered.
The end state of this isn’t some shiny happy city on a hill, it’s a noisome squalid little festering pesthole filled with people at each other’s throats.
Same with “Affirmative Action”, which is another idea forced into the military.
Let me tell you how it works, in the US forces, and how it has been for at least the last fifty years. Once you reach the point where they’re doing centralized promotion boards for Non-Commissioned and Commissioned Officers, the rules are very simple: The boards go through the records on a first sweep, and then they select who they will on whatever criteria are being used for that year. The criteria can be very faddish; some years they’re looking for one sort of background, other years another sort. Once they’ve run through the first time, they take and look at the race/ethnicity breakdown for those they’ve selected. If the numbers don’t match their goals, then they back up and start removing “the wrong kind” (for which you may read “white”) from the promotion list, and inserting the “right kind” from the list of people who weren’t selected, but who were the “right sort”. Given that many Military Occupational Specialties have really imbalanced race/ethnicity spectrums due to the choices made by recruits at the beginnings of their careers, you’ll see some very strange things happen. Like, when you look at Combat Arms occupations, the majority of the guys going there are… White. So, when the numbers need to be made up, that means that if you’re black or some other minority, you’re going to be picked up for promotion with some certainty, ‘cos they gotta get those numbers up.
I sat for years, in grade, while watching blacks I knew to have DUI charges, criminal charges, reliefs for cause, and all sorts of other things buried in their records get promoted ahead of me. If you think that doesn’t work to discourage people, or that the promotion of the manifestly unfit to higher rank doesn’t influence the quality of the force…? Yeah; you’re delusional.
I literally had an Asian/Pacific Islander NCO once tell me that he didn’t need to do anything at all to improve himself; he’d be promoted regardless, ‘cos “Asian/Pacific Islander”. At the time, I was relatively junior and naive as hell. I watched that useless POS retire as a Sergeant Major some fifteen years later, with a record that I know for a fact included at least two incidents of major misconduct that should have seen his ass thrown out of the Army.
All of this crap is destructive, wherever it is implemented. The right way to fix issues where minorities aren’t getting promoted is to go out and look at why; if it’s schooling? Get them schooling. If it is their assignments, fix that. But, do not, under any circumstances, start putting them in positions because “black” or anything else. That’s so destructive of good order and morale that it’s not even funny.
You don’t know how many really good guys we lost because of that crap, and not just the white ones. You’re a black? How would you like everyone and anyone looking at you as though you got your rank and position because of your skin color, not your actual merit? I know a couple of black guys who threw in the towel because of that, and what really demoralized them was that other blacks looked at them as “equal opportunity” promotions as well. You can’t overcome that stigma, and it sticks even worse than the old racial prejudices. I also happen to think it’s also a hell of a lot more demeaning.
A thoughtful essay (it is a long-ish read) that looks at this from a slightly different perspective is here:
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/womens-tears-win-in-the-marketplace
Feelz over facts every time. That is why I believe that women should not be in the armed forces at all or that they should hold positions of authority over men. Yes, I know NAWALT but as Pournelles Iron Law of Bureaucracy states, those are the people that take over and control the organisation. Every. Single. Time. Without. Fail.
IIRC, a serious nation’s military needs to be able to fight one major and several minor conflicts simultaneously.
So, our countries have simply chosen to label “fight against white male power” as their one major conflict.
Doesn’t leave much.
On the bright side, one spineless white male will retire on Friday.
In America it is called DEI, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, in the United Kingdom it is called EDI, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, but it is same Frankfurt School Marxist Critical Theory “Woke” doctrine whatever it is called.
In the United Kingdom it is, basically, mandated by the 2010 Equality Act – which the government has not repealed. There is a terrible mixture of ignorance and powerlessness. Many people really do not know that this is a totalitarian agenda, they think it is about being nice to black people and so on (an utterly false interpretation of these doctrines – but one which is spread by all government and corporate bodies) – and those ministers who do know that is Critical Theory totalitarianism appear to be powerless to stop it.
People who will not, because they are scared of being punished, admit that this stuff is totalitarian “Critical Theory” Frankfurt School Marxism, are of no use.
In France, in modern times considered quite a left wing country, it is unlawful for any public body to even ask someone what their race or religion is – that should also be the case in the United Kingdom and the United States.
“Jim Crow” discrimination laws were outlawed by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1954 – and they NEVER existed in the United Kingdom.
It is time to stop using “past discrimination” as an excuse for present discrimination against white, heterosexual, males.
It’s getting close to being illegal to document somebody’s ethnicity in the UK. See the northern England multiple rape scandals committed by men of no ethnicity, and the recent relevations about the Post Office Horizon scandal where people were horrified that accused offender’s ethnicity was recorded.
jgh – that is almost the opposite of what I mean.
The police in the various towns, not all of them in the north, knew very well what ethnicity these men were – that is why they did not go after them, till massive pressure was brought to bare.
Of course, there is some utter stupidity and ignorance involved – as the police were frightened of being called “racist” when Islam is NOT a race (it is a religion, a philosophy, and a legal system – indeed the various Schools of Islamic Jurisprudence are very impressive) – someone from what was the British Raj (now India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) does NOT have a different skin colour depending on whether they are Muslim or Hindu, it is NOT a matter of “race”.
It is frightening that there are powerful people in this country (including my dear friends in Central Office) who can not tell the difference between a religion and a race.
Under French law a public body is not allowed to ask for someone’s religion or race – the Prosecuting Magistrate is supposed to go after criminals regardless of their race or religion.
By the way skin colour is not a perfect guide to race – for example people sometimes say “but you look like us”, I may indeed look like the English, but my DNA shows that I am not English “ethnically” (although I do have a bit of Anglo Saxon DNA in me – from one of my grandmothers). The Association Football fans, oddly enough, get the word correct – when they pronounce England as a three syllable word – En-ger-land (from Angleland – land of the Angles, although there were more Saxons than Angles they are genetically similar anyway).
British is a different thing – that is a political and cultural thing. I am British. To some extent being English is also a culturally thing – it all gets complicated.
It all makes sense when you consider that the US military (and by the sounds of it, the British military as well) are just corporations at this point. They have the same corporate mentalities, corporate politics, corporate ladders to climb and corporate tickets to punch, same corporate promotion practices, same corporate HR nonsense, and corporate pandering advertising where no one who wants to stay in dares rock the boat.
Short of a president purging the Pentagon of everyone from the Secretary of Defense to the janitors and pulling a Pershing from the ranks and telling him to rebuild the DoD from the ground up into a killing machine, it’s just the way it is.
@Steven R
It all makes sense when you consider that the US military (and by the sounds of it, the British military as well) are just corporations at this point.
I think that is wrong. The military is and always has been a government department, and those who work there civil servants. In the past they have managed to generate a culture of military readiness that protected them in a bubble from the worst excesses of the swampy reality of government, now that bubble has been popped.
In fact I think the opposite is true. Corporations are becoming so enmeshed in government that it is often hard to tell the difference. Big corporations that is. Small ones who don’t live and breathe on the bounty of government patronage but have to do old fashioned things like winning and satisfying customers, they just don’t have the time and energy for this kind of bullshit.
I mean it is a corporate culture, where appearances that look like they meet the commander’s desires are more important than results, where it is okay to eat your young rather than put a stop to a Chosen One’s career (especially when the Chosen One is a protected class groomed from the academy to end up with stars on his or her shoulders and dead troops sacrificed at the altar of PC are a small price to pay so the Pentagon brass can tell Congress about all the diversity and opportunity and inclusiveness and equality and whatever other buzzwords you want to use. It’s a place where the Field Grade officers in combat arms who are doing their very best to keep effectiveness and standards up are threatened with their careers coming to a screeching halt if they prioritize training their troops in their actual jobs over SHARP presentations.
Every now and then the military is asked to do what it actually is supposed to do, but most of the time it’s just a dog and pony show for the brass. I’m always amazed that Sergeant Majors go on and on about pointless crap like hands in pockets because of “proper military bearing” and hand out Article 15s like they’re candy while turning a blind eye to the fact that troop morale in in the gutter and that commanders just want to make it to the end of their tour to get the sweet, sweet promotion and as soon as the change of command ceremony is over, it’s the next guy’s problem.
Well, according to Mr Tucker Carlson none of this really matters – as the United States Air Force has alien technology and the bodies of dead aliens, he “knows” this because an ex USAF officer said so – he needs no real evidence at all.
Most people are pointing out that Mr Carlson did not, in his talk for Twitter, even consider the possibility that the Russian military destroyed the dam in order to slow up a Ukrainian offensive (a standard military tactic – often used in war) – but I was far more concerned about what he said about UFOs and aliens, in the same talk (but hardly anyone seems to have noticed).
Mental illness is not a joke, it is not funny – it is a tragedy. And people who have developed a mental illness deserve compassion – as do their family.
One of my relatives served in Bomber Command during WWII, and I am very proud of him. He was a volunteer, as were all air crew, and he did not come back.
When he died in 1941 I do not think he would have been thought of as a useless white man. But now that is how young men like him today are dismissed by the very RAF in which he served. I scarcely have words to express my hatred and contempt for these gutless PC careerist fools. What can you say?
@Steven R,
You put your finger in the middle of it.
At the root, the culture in the American military (and, many others…) is broken, and the reasons that they are broken go way, way back.
Here’s the deal, really: The people running the whole mess are not actually invested in the institution as an institution. They fundamentally do not understand it; nor do they invest much of themselves in it. They’ve been selected, trained, and conditioned to be self-serving, self-interested careerists from start to finish, no matter how much they may mouth the words about “selfless service”.
They also really, truly, fundamentally do not understand how the institution actually works. They don’t grasp the realities that make men and women do what they do in the military, from joining it to staying in for careers. Everything they do is false, because their essential understanding of it all is also false; they work from erroneous premises to unworkable solutions, and then wonder why it blows up in their faces.
At the root, the decision-makers are deracinated, severed from connection with the reality of the corporate whole. You see this in the US military with its constant attempts to influence morale through massive stupidities like handing out the Ranger’s cherished black beret to all and sundry; their delusional attempts to forge cohesion via Distinctive Unit Insignia, aping the forms of morale while fundamentally misunderstanding how those things work.
They don’t instinctively grasp that the uniforms don’t make the man (in some senses…), the man makes the uniform. I guarantee you that if you were give me the power to prove my thesis, I could make frilly pink panties worn as an outer garment the mark of a universally-feared elite. This is something the managerial types just don’t understand at any level; they think “Oh, the Rangers are an elite fighting force; we’ll make everyone an elite fighting force by giving them the Ranger beret…”, and actually think it will work.
They’re basically idiots that cannot or will not look beyond the tips of their noses, who lack any form of introspection or self-understanding. I swear to God, I sometimes think that the US Army was taken over by space aliens some many decades ago, who have never, ever seen human beings before. Because, the personnel and management decisions they make couldn’t possibly be more wrong if that were actually the case.
Biggest part of the problem is sourced in who we pick to run the Army; the theory is, a college degree confers some sort of substitute for nobility, and those people are the only ones you can entrust with that level of responsibility. In truth? I think the IDF has it right; you don’t need much more than a high school diploma to serve as a company-grade officer, and anything past that rank, you don’t need a hell of a lot more. The military isn’t so much a profession as it is a vocation; you can have all the education in the world, and if you’re not connected or invested in it, you can’t understand it. Most of our officers, these days, are disconnected anomic types, whose understanding of what makes their men tick are entirely delusional.
You just have to look at a lot of the decisions these idiots make, and what they’re influenced into. Oh, we have a “race problem”, do we? So, let’s solve that by putting in policies and agencies that do nothing but emphasize that fact, instead of saying “We refuse to acknowledge race as an issue”, and then acting to alleviate the things from outside society that influence outcomes. I mean, instead of “Affirmative Action” that promotes on demographic numbers, how about an “Affirmative Action” that says “Yeah, you got a lousy hand of cards handed you by civilian life because skin color, and you’ve got limited opportunities in the Army because you lack education… So, here are some subsidized ways to fix that, but we’re not dropping standards for you just because you’ve got higher melanin content in your skin…”
That’s the way you have to do these things. You can’t go down the path we’ve blundered onto, and expect it to work. But, the educated-yet-idiot types we’ve anointed with the modern-day “mark of nobility” can’t see that. Mostly, because they’ve never truly been soldiers, and understood what it is to be a part of a unit, a family.
And, that’s the pity of it: We train officers to be exploiters, users… Not stewards or servants. They see their time in command as an opportunity to “enhance their careers”, and do whatever it takes, no matter how much damage they do to the unit or the men in it. They see the unit not as something to be cherished because it’s someone’s home, but something to be used, expended in the service of making them look good for promotion.
Entirely the wrong attitude to take. And, about 99.9% of the officers I worked for looked at it like that, because they simply did not see themselves as temporary stewards of someone’s home, which for most of the enlisted, was what the unit actually was.
Some related thoughts.
Yesterday I sat through a police briefing.
There was not one word about fighting against robbery and other crimes – what we got instead was EDI, equality, diversity and inclusion.
The population of Northamptonshire is 8.4% non white – so the police must move towards being 8.4% non white.
The population of the county is 52% women – so the police must move towards being 52% women.
I left (I had another meeting to go to) before the senior police officers got on to Pride Month, Trans Sexuals – and-so-on.
Listening and watching all this, a small part of the general decline of Western society, it is easy to understand how Mr Carlson fell into the mental state he is now in – but Mr Putin is no solution to any of this.
One must not obsess over all this – yes civilisation is in decline, but going mad (going insane) by obsessing about it all, is not going to help roll that decline back.
And, again, Mr Putin is no solution to any of this – people who turn to him (in desperation and despair) are like a drowning man clutching at a poisonous snake.