Category: Military Interest

The Army announced several measures on Thursday to reduce the possibility of racial bias within its promotions and military justice systems, but banning Confederate flags and renaming posts bearing the names of Confederate military commanders will have to wait — possibly for a Pentagon-wide order.

“We are advisers,” said Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville during a press conference. “And we pass that military advice to our civilian leaders, and they are working through that and trying to come up with a long-term and enduring policy.”

“We certainly have some ideas on the best ways to do this, whether its the symbology of certain things or taking a look at what the names of certain posts should be,” McConville added.

In early June, Army leaders and Defense Secretary Mark Esper said they were open to a discussion on renaming Army posts that bear the names of Confederate commanders. But President Donald Trump tweeted on June 10 that his administration “will not even consider” the move.

That apparently doesn’t mean the idea is dead. Congress could ultimately push the issue forward, even as the Army waits for a Defense Department-wide policy.

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The U.S. Army will remove photographs from their process of selecting and promoting officers, as part of an initiative to combat racial biases.

The Army announced the launch of Project Inclusion on Thursday, a “holistic effort” aimed at promoting diversity and tackling racial disparities in the service. As part of the initiative, official photographs will no longer be part of officer selection boards beginning in August, while other personnel decisions will be reviewed under similar “evidence-based standards.”

“The Army must continue to put People First by fostering a culture of trust that accepts the experiences and backgrounds of every Soldier and civilian,” Gen. James C. McConville, Army Chief of Staff, said in a press release. “Our diverse workforce is a competitive advantage and the Army must continue to offer fair treatment, access and opportunity across the force.”

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Microelectronics are in nearly everything, including the complex weapons systems the Defense Department buys, such as the F-35 joint strike fighter, the Pentagon’s director of defense research and engineering for modernization said.

“It is so ubiquitous and because it is … so fundamental to everything we do,” Mark J. Lewis said via video conference today as part of a forum sponsored by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association.

Because of the importance of microelectronics, he said, the department is shifting the way it goes about buying microelectronics and ensuring they are secure to use.

“We want the Department of Defense to have access to state-of-the-art capabilities, which we do not have today,” he said. That’s because the department is not buying on the commercial curve, he explained.

In the mid-1990s, DOD adopted a “trusted foundry” model for procuring microelectronics, Lewis said.

“The idea [was] that in order to deliver parts that we could trust, we would enable foundries that would manufacture our microelectronics where we had control over every step of the process — or so we thought,” he said. “That model, we think, has failed.”

The department isn’t a large purchaser of microelectronics, Lewis said, so companies that adhered to the department’s “trusted foundry” model were unable to make a business case for following it.

“As a result, they haven’t been investing,” he said. “The chips that we buy, the microelectronic components that we buy from those trusted foundries, are in some cases two generations behind what’s available on commercial state-of-the-art.”

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Family planning, lack of dependent care, sexism and sexual assault were among the top reasons more women leave the military than their male counterparts, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office.

While the percentage of females serving in the military increased slightly between 2004 and 2018, during the same period, female enlisted and officers were 28 percent more likely to leave the service than men, according to a May Government Accountability Office report about female active-duty personnel.

The Department of Defense has recognized for years that increasing the gender diversity of its force relies first on bringing more female recruits into the service. The GAO report states that efforts to retain women need to be treated as equally critical to maintaining a diverse force.

“DoD has identified that female recruitment and retention is important to diversity in the military, but the services do not have plans that include goals, performance measures, or timeframes to guide and monitor current or future efforts to recruit and retain female active-duty service members,” the report states.

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