USA Today Wonders Why There Are Few Black Senior Military Officers

It seems like every few years someone in the media recycles the same criticism against the military about the lack of diversity in the higher officer ranks:

The lack of Black officers in the Army’s key combat commands has diminished the chances for diversity in senior military leadership for years to come, resulting in a nearly all-white leadership of an increasingly diverse military and nation. 

The Army, the largest of the armed services, has made little progress in promoting officers of color, particularly Black soldiers, to key commands in the last six years, a USA TODAY analysis finds.

Black people make up 22.7% of enlisted soldiers, 16.5% of warrant officers and 11% of officers on active duty as of July 2020. At the officer levels, this is actually a decrease from 21%, 18.4% and 12.6%, respectively, in 2010. The stakes of fairness and equity are manifest. So, too, is military’s ability to defend the nation. (……)

But not enough, some argue. Consider the new commanders of what the Army considers its operational brigades, including front-line units such as infantry, artillery and armor. There are 96 such brigades of around 4,000 soldiers led by a colonel. Just two of the incoming commanders of those units are Black

In 2014, when USA TODAY first began collecting such data, the Army had no Black colonels leading its combat arms units. Command at battalion and brigade level is practically a prerequisite to leading the Army’s legendary divisions such as the 82nd Airborne, 10th Mountain and 1st Armored. Not coincidentally, the last five Army chiefs of staff have commanded infantry or armored divisions.

The story is only slightly better an echelon below brigade. At the battalion level, where lieutenant colonels are in charge of about 700 soldiers, there are 13 Black battalion commanders out of 231 combat units, or 5.6%.

USA Today

You can read much more at the link, but the biggest initial hold up to becoming an officer is attending college and completing the ROTC program or going through OCS. In 2019, 29% of the African-American population aged 25 to 29 held a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 45% of the white population in the same age range. Until this gets fixed the pool of available African-Americans to become officers remains lower than for whites.

The next issue buried deep in the article is how so few African-American officers want to branch into combat arms:

Parents, clergy, coaches, even soldiers often discourage aspiring minority officers from joining combat units, Beagle said. Heavy casualties among African Americans, particularly early in the Vietnam War, and the prospect of better post-military employment options made non-combat units such as logistics a preferred choice. 

From my experience joining support branches to develop job skills is why so many African-Americans do not join combat arms compared to white soldiers. I have seen many friends of mine in non-combat arms branches receive some great job opportunities after their military service.

Another issue briefly buried in the article is how an assignment to lead an ROTC battalion can be considered as delaying an officer’s career. Having promising African-American officers recruiting and training college students in ROTC could encourage more African-Americans students to become Army officers. The easy fix is to make an assignment to an ROTC unit a position which gives battalion command credit. This would then enhance and not delay an officers career.

Something else that should be considered is opening up Division command to officers other than the usual Infantry, Armor, Field Artillery, and Aviation branches. For example why can’t a successful Logistics officer be a Division commander? This would increase the pool of African-American applicants for senior leadership positions in the Army.

This would definitely make the combat arms branches unhappy since they have a stranglehold on these senior leadership positions. If something like this is not done it is likely that the USA Today will be recycling this same article ten years from now explaining the same problem.