The Merit Restoration Problem

On March 27, the New York Times reported that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth struck four Army officers—two Black men and two women—from a brigadier general promotion list. NPR confirmed at least six blocked promotions across multiple branches. This piece does not address Generals George or Hodne. The argument is structural.

One blocked officer is a Black armor officer, flagged for a paper he wrote fifteen years ago, examining why Black officers historically opted for support roles over combat positions. The system that encouraged officers to produce race-conscious scholarship is the same system that used race-conscious criteria to shape promotion slates. The paper is not the problem. The system that incentivized it is.

That system was codified. President Biden’s Executive Order 14035 mandated that every agency make DEIA a priority component of strategic planning. The DoD Human Capital Operating Plan for FY 2022–2026 embedded demographic targets across recruiting, retention, and promotion. The Pentagon’s Strategic Management Plan devoted one of every six pages to diversity initiatives. This shaped every general officer promotion board during its effective period.

The problem Hegseth confronts is mathematical before it is political. When promotion boards operate for years under demographic weighting, the senior ranks reflect those inputs. Any correction toward merit-based evaluation will produce demographic outputs that differ from the managed outputs. Critics will call those new outputs evidence of racial bias. They are evidence that racial bias previously existed in the other direction and is now being removed.