The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said the military must become more diverse and provide more advancement for black service members.
“Opportunity in our military must be reflective of the diverse talent in order for us to remain strong,” Army Gen. Mark Milley said during an ROTC commissioning ceremony. “Our nation is ready to fulfill the promise of our Constitution to build a more perfect union and to ensure equal justice for all people, and it is your generation that can and will bring the joint force to be truly inclusive of all people.”
Milley said that while black service members fill 20% of the military’s ranks, they are underrepresented in some fields, such as senior ranks and Air Force pilots. Of the 41 four-star generals currently serving, only two are black.
“We must get better,” he said.
Milley pointed to the current chief of staff of the Air Force, Gen. Charles Q. Brown, as an example of the lack of progress the military has made on racial diversity. When Brown was first commissioned in 1984, just 2% of Air Force pilots were black. Today, that number continues to stand at 2%.
Brown himself is used to breaking color barriers in the military, having become the first black officer to serve as the chief of a military branch last summer. He has also been open about the difficulties he faced making his way through the ranks as a black pilot, recounting in an emotional video last June that he has to work extra hard to prove to supervisors “that their expectations and perceptions of African Americans were invalid.”
Milley’s comments come as the Army has lamented its own struggle to increase the diversity of its officer corps. Pentagon data show that about 24% of the Army’s enlisted membership is black and 17% is Hispanic. Meanwhile, just 10% of the Army’s officer corps is black and 8.6% is Hispanic.
Maj. Gen. John Evans, the commander of Army Cadet Command, has been open about the Army’s efforts to increase black recruitment into officer programs and point them toward career paths that typically come with more opportunities for advancement.
“We’re trying to encourage our female officers and our officers that are ethnically diverse to choose combat arms branches to provide greater opportunities for them in the long term,” Evans said.
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Combat branches such as infantry, armor, artillery, and engineers provide officers with the type of experience they need to advance to higher ranks, with the Army hoping that the black officers who are now in those fields can recruit more black ROTC cadets to join them.
“It might inform their choices about selecting one of the, what we call the traditional six combat arms branches as a career path,” Evans said.
