February 21st was a bad day for DEI at the Pentagon. The top military commander (CJCS) and perhaps the DEI’s greatest advocate CQ Brown Jr. was relieved of his duties along with  the first female Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Lisa Franchetti as well as the Air Force vice chief of staff. None of the firings should have come as a surprise.  Brown did not do anything egregiously wrong and was a highly regarded pilot, but his views ran counter to the anti-DEI policy of the new SecDef while ADM Franchetti faced strong headwinds fighting the Navy’s declining readiness and fleet size. 

These notable firings appear to be only the beginning of the Trump administration’s attempt to weed out the woke policies inculcated during the Biden Administration. Trump’s SecDef, instead, wants to return the U.S. Military to its founding mission of warfighting and enabling the fighting force with a lethal capability to win wars and deter would be adversaries such as China.

Notably absent from the initial clearing out of top military officers that enacted Biden’s DEI policies was the Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. Eric Smith.

Gen. Smith was not the Marine Corps’ progenitor of the Marine Corps policy established by his mentor Gen. David Berger in 2021, along with Force Design 2030, which decimated the Marine Corps capability to be a global force in readiness.