From the deckplates to the E-ring, leaders across the Department of Defense (DoD) are recognizing the need to embrace service member diversity and provide inclusive leadership to meet the demands of a peacetime force and prepare for war. This has prompted critics to argue that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training and programs are dangerous distractions from the joint force’s primary purpose of warfighting.1
DoD’s DEI programs are imperfect, but this does not mean DEI itself is misguided. Its critics often overlook the rapidly changing demographics of U.S. society.2 Failing to recruit and retain a diverse force would come at the military’s own peril—perhaps best exemplified by U.S. competitors China and Russia, which both perceive their demographic diversity as a security threat to be neutralized. While all three countries could be considered diverse, the U.S. approach provides an opportunity the armed forces should embrace to promote cohesion and prevail in the next war.
The Pacing Threat of China
Although the Chinese government officially recognizes 56 ethnic groups, the upper echelons of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are mostly from the majority Han ethnic group, which perceives other ethnic groups as potential threats. For instance, in a leaked speech transcript, Chairman of the CCP Xi Jinping implored members of his party to show “absolutely no mercy” to Uighurs in Xinjiang.3 To the CCP, national security means regime security, and because the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) serves the party, its primary mission is defending the regime from internal and external threats.4 Photographs taken during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre provide evidence of the PLA’s role in “defending” the regime from its own citizens.
More than 40 years after enactment of China’s one-child policy, the enduring fallout of the policy has forced the PLA to reckon with recruiting and conscripting from an aging population.5 Ironically, ethnic minorities in most provinces were exempted from this policy, meaning they are an untapped recruitment source.6 China is slowly dealing with this demographic reality—the share of ethnic minorities in the PLA grew from 4.4 percent to 6.75 percent between 2010 and 2020. Some minorities serve in “ethnic companies,” composed entirely of ethnic minorities but usually led by a Han commanding officer.7 Across the PLA, however, minority soldiers are widely seen and treated as inferior to their Han counterparts. Women face similar discrimination. According to a study on personnel issues, women generally must serve in women-only units commanded by a male officer.8 PLA-run media use sexist tropes to depict enlisted women, likely reflecting ingrained bias and disdain throughout the PLA’s chain of command.
Beijing perceives the world as inundated with security threats. Within China’s borders, the CCP has used force and coercion to subjugate Uighurs in Xinjiang, stifle Buddhist culture in Tibet, and nearly eradicate the dynamism of the formerly free and open Hong Kong. On the country’s periphery, the CCP faces a multitude of border disputes based on nationalistic and revisionist territorial claims, including quarrels in the East China Sea with Japan, mountain skirmishes with India, and perennial standoffs in the South China Sea with the Philippines, Vietnam, and others.
While U.S. strategists often see China’s military modernization as a multigenerational grand strategy to retake Taiwan, any of these smoldering disputes could reignite and divert resources from Beijing’s primary objectives.9 Put another way, Chinese leaders’ suspicion toward diversity and refusal to create an inclusive national identity exacerbates the regime’s instability, undermines the CCP’s narrative of a peaceful rise, and generates several flash points for regional conflict beyond a Taiwan crisis.
The CCP’s and PLA’s history of hostility toward non-Han peoples haunts its present and near-future plans. Recent polling in Taiwan suggests that more than 60 percent of its people identify exclusively as Taiwanese rather than Chinese or Taiwanese and Chinese. That figure was approximately 45 percent in 2007.10
After the 2019–20 crackdown in Hong Kong, a “One Country, Two Systems” solution for Taiwan increasingly lacks credibility. From Xinjiang to Hong Kong, Beijing has demonstrated both the will and ability to monitor and oppress entire groups of people deemed hostile to the regime. However, China’s aggression has only increased Taiwan’s resolve to resist an armed annexation and force the PLA to fight a costly counterinsurgency in addition to conducting a complicated amphibious operation. In short, the CCP’s suspicion of its own minority ethnic groups makes the PLA’s potential mission in Taiwan more difficult.
The Acute Threat of Russia
The Russian military’s demographic and organizational problems are well-documented by scholars and in personal accounts of Russia’s post-1991 wars.
Unlike China, Russia does not struggle to recruit ethnic minorities into its military—it is estimated that most Russian enlisted members are minorities, though ethnic minorities generally serve in segregated units.11 Russia’s most obvious military personnel issues—corruption, abuse, lack of training and equipment, humanitarian law violations, and a weak senior noncommissioned officer corps—are aggravated by a fundamental lack of respect, discipline, and trust throughout the force.
Arkady Babchenko’s memoir of the Chechen wars describes a military in which corruption and abuse are pervasive: commanders abuse their subordinate officers, who abuse their noncommissioned officers, who abuse their junior soldiers.12 In some cases, the abuse was based on ethnicity or religion; in every case, it is evidence of a military lacking respect, good morale, and discipline—a hostile environment for its own members.
At the most abstract level, a military that must be segregated to prevent internal conflict cannot be dedicated to the defense and success of a multiethnic state. At the most practical level, a military whose members are distrustful of one another does not succeed because units without trust do not operate well.13
Moscow also must contend with the long-term underrepresentation of women in the Russian military. Today, women comprise just above 4 percent of Russia’s active-duty forces and serve in integrated units, though they cannot serve in all roles.14 There are several obstacles for women willing to serve in the Russian military, including gender stereotyping, hazing, and sexual harassment and assault.
Faced with a declining population of military-aged Slavic men, Moscow has neither elected to make the force more attractive to women nor worked toward ethnic integration.15 Instead, it has sacrificed professionalization and relied on conscription and segregation, creating artificial barriers within the military’s talent pool and institutionalizing, rather than combating, social strife that distracts from the military’s mission.
Russia is now sending minorities to fight in Ukraine because of its desperate manning issues, but they were not trained to work together or trust one another, and they do not believe in the cause for which they are fighting.16 They are cannon fodder. Demographics is but one of many issues the Russian military faces, but that does not minimize the effect of Russia’s disinterest in social cohesion both within and outside its armed forces. Instead, those “hard” issues are aggravated by low morale and trust stemming from suspicion toward a diverse force.
Opportunities for U.S. Armed Forces
The U.S. military has experienced both the costs of not improving cohesion in its ranks, as well as the benefits of improvement. At the outset of the Korean War, some U.S. Army units refused to comply with President Harry S. Truman’s 1948 desegregation order, despite serious manning issues in forward units.17 As allied forces suffered setbacks in combat, integrating units and sending reinforcements wherever they were needed became a combat necessity.18 The gradual integration of the Eighth Army in Korea not only improved morale, but also remedied issues related to personnel, logistics, tactics, and leadership.19
The U.S. military continued to make incremental progress on inclusion while simultaneously meeting the requirements of the Cold War. Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt’s “Z-Grams” revolutionized the Navy’s personnel policies by promoting the inclusion of Black and female sailors. As a result, sailor retention rates more than tripled during his tenure.20 Admiral Zumwalt’s leadership proves that improving internal service cohesion can disarm the enemy’s attempts to weaponize discord while enhancing warfighting capability at every echelon.
Today, promoting diversity and inclusion is more than a morale-building activity; it is a warfighting imperative. Military theorist Colonel John Boyd wrote that in “moral conflict” combatants aim to “destroy moral bonds that admit an organic whole to exist.”21 This is achieved by stoking “fear, anxiety, and alienation” to produce friction and inefficiency among the enemy while simultaneously implementing “counterweights” against the adversary’s attempts to do the same. Most important, leaders must “make possible the human interactions needed to create moral bonds that permit us . . . to shape and adapt to change.” Service members and their units must intimately trust each other to continually reorient and adapt in a chaotic battlespace. Promoting inclusion within the ranks is critical to reduce the “attack surface” foreign powers can use to exploit divisions that distract from readiness and weaken the U.S. force.22
Inclusion across the ranks not only builds cohesion internally but also strengthens bonds with allies and partners. A 2022 RAND study on diversity and military effectiveness identifies “cross-cultural competence” as a critical enabler of alliances and partnerships.23 As in previous generations, many members of U.S. immigrant communities continue to serve in the military and lend their cultural and language fluency to operations. Cross-cultural competency enhances interoperability with U.S. allies and partners and builds more resilient and responsive coalitions to confront common adversaries.
Having racial, ethnic, and gender diversity across the U.S. armed forces is in the spirit of the country, but it also is pragmatic and necessary to meet basic military objectives. The United States relies on a highly professionalized, capable volunteer force. Faced with recruitment and retention issues, as well as a decreasing segment of the population that qualifies for military service, the U.S. military must appeal to the country’s best—regardless of background—to fill its ranks.24 A conscription service simply cannot duplicate the performance levels of a volunteer military, nor is it politically feasible.25
Building cohesion through diversity should not be a solely bureaucratic exercise; leaders across the services should experiment and innovate with diversity to enhance warfighting. For instance, commands could train service members to identify and counter adversary attempts to influence and exploit social tensions in the ranks as well as in broader society. Leaders and strategists also should study how internal social dynamics have affected combat effectiveness throughout history to inform approaches to managerial and organizational practice.
Warfighting is an inherently social endeavor, which is why the first task of leaders is often “know your people.” Deprioritizing diversity and inclusion out of fear of controversy would be neglecting this core responsibility. Rather than a diversion, diversity and inclusion are tools for leaders to understand their sailors’ backgrounds, take advantage of what they bring to the fight, and build cohesion across the force.
1. Andrew Mark Miller, “DoD Blasted for Tweet Touting ‘Diversity’ and ‘Inclusion’ as ‘Necessity’ in the Military,” Fox News, 9 February 2022.
2. William H. Frey, “The Nation Is Diversifying Even Faster than Predicted, According to New Census Data,” Brookings Institute, 1 July 2020.
3. Austin Ramzy and Chris Buckley, “‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Exposed How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims,” The New York Times, 16 November 2019.
4. Sheena Chestnut Greitens, “International Security & Grand Strategy: China’s Approach to National Security Under Xi Jinping,” statement before the U.S.-China Economic & Security Review Commission hearing on U.S.-China relations at the Chinese Communist Party’s centennial panel, 28 January 2021.
5. Loro Horta, “China’s Military Modernisation: Constrained by One-Child Policy,” RSIS Commentary 133, 1 September 2021.
6. “Social Policy,” Global-Is-Asian, 11 November 2019.
7. Kenneth W. Allen, Thomas Corbett, Taylor A. Lee, and Ma Xiu, Personnel of the Peoples Liberation Army (Washington, DC: Blue Path Labs, 3 November 2022), 35–36.
8. Allen, Corbett, Lee, and Xu, Personnel, 34.
9. Michael Pillsbury, The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2016).
10. Election Study Center, National Chengehi University, “Taiwanese/Chines Identity (1992/06–2022/12),” 13 January 2022.
11. Paul Goble, “Potential Wildcard in Ukrainian Conflict: Russian Army Not Ethnically Homogeneous,” Eurasia Daily Monitor 19, no. 27 (March 2022); and Valery Dzutsai, “Ethnic Rivalries Appear to Be Tearing Russia’s Army and Society Apart,” Eurasia Daily Monitor 7, no. 222 (December 2010).
12. Arkady Babchenko, One Soldier’s War (New York: Grove Press, 2009).
13. David Sniffen, “The Dynamics and Value of ‘Trust’ in the Military,” Small Wars Journal, 19 March 2014.
14. Mary Chesnut, “Women in the Russian Military,” CSIS, 18 September 2020.
15. Ethan Woolley, “The Russian Military Is Facing a Looming Demography Crisis,” Russia Matters, 1 February 2021.
16. Niko Vorobyov, “Russia’s Ethnic Minorities Lament the War in Ukraine,” Al Jazeera, 2 August 2022.
17. President Harry S. Truman, “Executive Order 9981: Desegregation of the Armed Forces,” 1948.
18. Morris J. MacGregor Jr., Integration of the Armed Forces 1940–1965 (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, U.S. Army, 1981), 431–81.
19. MAJ Richard T. Cranford, USA, The Impact of Racial Integration on the Combat Effectiveness of Eighth (U.S.) Army during the Korean War (Fort Leavenworth, KS: School of Advanced Military Studies, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, 2012).
20. CDR Joel Holwitt, USN, “Lessons from Admiral Elmo,” Naval History 34, no. 6 (December 2020).
21. John R. Boyd, “Patterns of Conflict,” slides, January 2007.
22. Julian E. Barnes and Adam Goldman, “Russia Trying to Stoke U.S. Racial Tensions before Election, Officials Say,” The New York Times, 16 March 2021.
23. Linda Slapakova, Ben Caves, Marek Posard, Julia Muravska, Diana Dascalu, Diana Myers, Raymond Kuo, and Kristin Thue, Leveraging Diversity for Military Effectiveness (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2022).
24. Roxana Tiron, “U.S. Military Faces Biggest Recruiting Hurdles in 50 Years,” Bloomberg Government, 21 September 2022.
25. James Pattison, “Using Volunteer Forces, Rather than Conscripts or Private Contractors, Is the Most Legitimate Method for Organizing a Military,” EUROPP, 8 May 2013; and Jeffrey M. Jones, “Vast Majority of Americans Opposed to Reinstituting Military Draft,” Gallup, 7 September 2007.
