Why Is There A Lack of Black Officers in the Combat Arms Branches?

There is a lot of race baiting in the media now a days in order to drive ratings and page views and now the Army Times has resorted to this tactic as well with the below article about the low number of black officers in the infantry, armor, and field artillery branches:

Command of the Army’s main combat units — its pipeline to top leadership — is virtually devoid of black officers, according to interviews, documents and data obtained by USA TODAY.

The lack of black officers who lead infantry, armor and field artillery battalions and brigades — there are no black colonels at the brigade level this year — threatens the Army’s effectiveness, disconnects it from American society and deprives black officers of the principal route to top Army posts, according to officers and military sociologists. Fewer than 10 percent of the active-duty Army’s officers are black compared with 18 percent of its enlisted men, according to the Army.

The problem is most acute in its main combat units: infantry, armor and artillery. In 2014, there was not a single black colonel among those 25 brigades, the Army’s main fighting unit of about 4,000 soldiers. Brigades consist of three to four battalions of 800 to 1,000 soldiers led by lieutenant colonels. Just one of those 78 battalions is scheduled to be led by a black officer in 2015. [Army Times]

You can read the rest at the link, but don’t bother because you can easily predict the way it is going to go.  I expect the race baiting from a major newspaper, but you would think that the Army Times would try and provide more context about why the numbers are the way they are.  To be fair the Army Times did try to provide some context on why black servicemembers tend to flock to combat service support positions because of the job training opportunities.  However, the Army Times makes it appear like the Army was specifically picking on black officers to separate as part of the recent force draw down:

The downsizing of the Army is having a disproportional effect on African-American officers. From the pool of officers screened, almost 10 percent of eligible black majors are being dismissed from the Army compared with 5.6 percent of eligible white majors, USA TODAY reported in early August. The Army is cutting 550 majors and about 1,000 captains as the Army seeks to reduce its force to 490,000 soldiers by the end of 2015.

The reason the black officers were disproportionately separated has nothing to do with the narrative of the big, bad racist Army, but instead the fact that black officers tend to join combat support branches.  The areas that were selected for the highest number of officer separations was in the combat support branches.  You can see the statistics on Slide 10 of this presentation. Remember the logistics support tail is much larger than the number of the trigger pullers that it supports; so of course they were going to see a larger number of separations.  There is nothing stopping anyone (other than females which will soon change) from joining the infantry.  If a black officer wants to join combat support jobs there is nothing wrong with that and they should feel encourage to do so instead of people pushing them to join the infantry which may not be something they want to do.

Instead of taking the race baiting angle the Army Times should have asked the question why higher level command positions are dominated by infantry, armor, and field artillery officers?  Why can’t a division be commanded by officers from other branches to include service support?  Does anyone want to make the argument that someone like General Ann Dunwoody was not competent enough to lead a division despite her logistics background?  Opening up division command positions to more candidates other than mostly from infantry, armor, and field artillery would allow more minorities and women to compete for higher level general officer positions.