Race Based Admissions at Service Academies: Bad Arguments in Service of Bad Policies

A federal court in Annapolis recently ruled against the plaintiffs in a suit challenging race-based admissions at the United States Naval Academy (of which I am an alum). Writing in Stars & Stripes Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman defends the decision. If his piece is representative of Harvard Law’s logical and legal rigor, then God save us.

Sayeth Feldman:

The court’s decision is legally defensible. The military needs a racially balanced officer corps, and the academies play a crucial role in training officers, especially those who make it to the highest ranks, and the academies play a crucial role in training officers, especially those who make it to the highest ranks.

Rather conclusory, wouldn’t you say? And the reasoning behind the conclusion is fundamentally flabby.

At most “the military needs a racially balanced officer corps” is a proposition. A hypothesis. And also an incomplete one.

Critically, this bald assertion ignores trade-offs. Using race as a criterion for admission to a service academy (or promotion) necessarily means that some individuals with superior qualifications that the military deems relevant for officers’ performance are denied admission to an academy. That is a cost. Is the cost worth the benefit? Feldman does not even raise the question, let alone answer it.

Saying “X is good, ceteris paribus” is a vacuous statement if ceteris ain’t paribus. And it ain’t here. And if it ain’t you have to compare the good of X with its costs.

And just what amount of “racial balance” is optimal? At what level of preference is the right trade-off between “racial balance” and performance-relevant qualifications (or signals of such qualifications) struck? Just saying “the military needs a racially balanced officer corps” does not even attempt to grapple with that question.

And there is another trade-off to be considered which Feldman ignores. Namely, such racial “balancing” undermines the no-discrimination principle which is and has been valued highly by many Americans. Martin Luther King, to name one.

Feldman (and apparently the judge) ignores whether the challenged means of achieving “racial balance”–racial preferences in admission to a service academy–is necessary, or even the best way, to achieve the stated goal of “racial balance.” There are other pathways into the US officer corps, notably ROTC and OCS. Those are likely less selective than the service academies but that is irrelevant if minorities who desire a career as a military officer can do so via these alternatives. This also has the benefit of avoiding the mismatch problem which is a baleful effect of racial preferences in higher education.

Along these lines, Feldman is factually incorrect when he insinuates that academy graduates are disproportionately represented “in the highest ranks.” True once upon a time, but today “ring knockers” no longer have a pronounced advantage over OCS or ROTC types.

In defending the lawsuit, the government argued the following, apparently to some effect:

Where things start to look very different is in the government’s explanation of why it needs a racially diverse officer corps. The government provided, and the federal court credited and cited, extensive evidence of racial violence in the military in the decades before and during the Vietnam era, including race riots aboard naval vessels. The court noted the history of racial discrimination in the armed services, especially in the Navy. Reviewing this context, the court accepted the government’s argument that a racially diverse officer corps is mission-critical.

Talk about a whopping non sequitur. Where to begin?

When reading that, I asked myself “What about the Trojan War?” because that war is about as relevant as the cited history, meaning that the sins of the past cannot justify the challenged policies of the present.

The racial strife in the military–and the Navy in particular–during the Vietnam era was not the product of too few minority officers. It was part and parcel of the racial strife that plagued the United States at that time. It was also a result of the problems within the military stemming from the Vietnam War, the draft, and the ending of the draft: as a result of these factors, if anything it was the result of too few minorities the the Navy’s enlisted ranks. That is, it was highly historically contingent, and those historical contingencies are absent today.

Moreover, at least until the rise of wokeness (to which, ironically, the academies have succumbed, big time) those tensions had abated substantially. As for “the history of racial discrimination”, the official discrimination against blacks ceased long ago and cannot justify discriminating in their favor decades later.

Put differently, there is absolutely no reason to believe that striking down race-based admissions at the service academies in 2024 would throw us into the bad old days of October, 1972 or anything close.

(As an aside, when I was at Navy in 1977-8 Admiral Elmo Zumwalt’s Memoir On Watch was assigned reading. Zumwalt was the Chief of Naval Operations that had to deal with the wind down of Vietnam, and in particular with the racial turmoil that plagued the fleet. On Watch discussed that history in some detail).

It actually speaks volumes about the weakness of the government’s case (and the judge’s reasoning in accepting it) that it had to go into the wayback machine to justify policies that have been found unconstitutional for private universities. (It’s also worth noting that private universities were also hotbeds of racial strife during the late-60s and early-70s).

Perhaps a case can be made for racial preferences for service academy admissions. But Feldman and the government go nowhere even close to making it.

This is serious business. The better the officers, the fewer the number of people who get killed in wars. If academy admissions standards are not related to the quality of the officers they produce, then adjust those standards. If they are related to the quality of the officers they produce, then given the vital importance of good officers in matters of life and death (not to mention national survival) then there had better be very, very, very good reason for making exceptions. Just saying “diversity is mission critical” like a mantra and citing to ancient history to support it doesn’t cut it.

SecDef nominee Pete Hegseth (criticism of whom has quieted substantially of late) has made elimination of DEI a major priority precisely because he believes not only is it not mission critical, it is mission detrimental.* And if you read things like this you realize that his argument is much stronger and much more currently relevant than that made by the government in the Naval Academy case.

Diversity at the academies is just one element of the diversity culture that has poisoned the military. And ironically, that culture is more racially fraught than that of the 80s, 90s, and 00s. It is more likely to recreate strife like that that plagued the military in the early-70s than to prevent it. I therefore hope that Trump and Hegseth make the court’s decision in the Naval Academy case moot by eliminating the policies that it challenged.

*As an illustration of how woke culture has penetrated the service academies, West Point colluded with the leftist ProPublica in a hit piece on Hegseth. ProPublica was going to report that Hegseth lied about being admitted to the USMA, and West Point confirmed–twice–that he had not been admitted. Hegseth then produced a copy of his acceptance letter. If you think West Point made a mistake, I have a bridge to sell you.