Trump Must Investigate Biden's Army Secretary to Enact Lasting Pentagon Reforms
Christine Wormuth’s 4-Year Stint was a Nightmare as Human Resources Techniques Met Progressive Persecution
This report originally appeared in Restoration of America News; it is reprinted here with permission.
Next to our crisis at the Southern border, the crisis in our Armed Forces is the most pressing of what President Trump calls the “plentiful” challenges his Administration will “confront” and “annihilate.” The trick for the people confronting this challenge is that, unlike the onslaught of illegal immigrants which is enabled but not enacted by bureaucrats, the enemy in the Armed Forces is truly within.
As Restoration News has recently reported, the past quarter century has seen the ratio of civil servants to servicemen at the Department of Defense reversed, so that bureaucrats outnumber soldiers. Over that time, they have enacted policies which steadily wear down soldiers with regulations, reductions, distractions, and dictates. One indication of the effects of these policies has been a recent set of plane crashes in the Armed Forces, including the tragic mid-air collision on January 29 of a commercial airliner and an Army aircraft in Washington, D.C. This collision occurred after the Army aircraft, a Black Hawk helicopter, “blindsided” the airliner; one possible reason was that “its transponder [was] off as it headed into a heavy flight path.”
The most promising place to start when it comes to cutting a problem of this depth off at the root is with the bureaucrats themselves. Fortunately, some bureaucratic trails show promise—first and foremost that of Christine E. Wormuth, the Secretary of the Army until January 20. An investigation shows that Wormuth’s approach to her job has been to empower bureaucrats and consultants at the expense of soldiers. In the process she’s pushed policies ranging from management and mental health to DEI, transgenderism, and climate. All of these distract our servicemen and women and sap their determination and will.
The Attrition of Soldiers… and the Gains of Contractors and Bureaucrats
Wormuth’s initiatives at the Pentagon began with diminishing currently serving soldiers by focusing on a bureaucratic metric, recruitment. She said that one of her main goals was helping the Army manage “increased fiscal pressures.” These “increased financial pressures,” as a recent Restoration News report showed, came from two factors. One was Congress’s reliance on omnibus budgets pushed by DC interest groups who wanted special favors, which led to an inability for either party to reach budget agreements. The other was President Obama’s decision to make the Armed Forces bear a disproportionate weight of budget cuts under an agreement he reached with Republicans in 2011.
Wormuth’s response wasn’t to cut bureaucracy; it was to lower standards. One change was implementing “the Future Soldier Prep Course for applicants who need to improve their fitness or test scores before they can go to basic training.” This meant shifting tight resources to training recruits who couldn’t measure up and away from serving soldiers who can. Another was to target college-educated graduates, a less enthusiastic pool, with larger pay packages—inducing those who don’t want to serve to serve by spending more precious money. (Tellingly, this failed.) Other reforms, at unspecified costs, included to “train [recruiters] to start using digital job boards” and “piloting large-scale career fairs in major population centers . . . like private sector companies do.”
This nod to the “private sector” is supposed to warm conservatives’ hearts, but it’s also a common tactic of Pentagon bureaucrats: invest in sophisticated-sounding management reforms while ignoring the troops. Indeed, the Army whose Secretary was focusing on “digital job boards” was one in which only “25 percent of . . . combat aviation brigades are ready to deploy” and soldiers’ suicides were on the rise. Wormuth’s contribution to this crisis? To make it easier for soldiers to seek counseling—not to address the underlying causes of morale diminishment.
From Commanding to Management: The Command Assessment Program
In her final interview as Army Secretary, Wormuth made clear that her main focus during her tenure wasn’t on combat skills but on “analytic” ones:
I'm not sure we're always putting as much emphasis on the sets of skills…at the more enterprise level. Critical thinking, the ability to not just describe problems, but actually analyze problems and come up with recommendations for how to solve problems [are] critically important.
This definition of “skills” essentially reproduces the methods (reports, committees, counter-and-follow-up reports) of the bureaucracies and consultancies where Wormuth has spent her life. Unfortunately, Wormuth has made some strides in introducing these methods to the Army. Her vehicle is a program called the Command Assessment program, which was introduced in 2020 as a pilot but which Wormuth expanded and made permanent in one of her last acts in office.
The program aims to “review officers and senior enlisted personnel in line for command billets or sergeants major jobs.” It uses “a series of physical, mental and professional assessments, as well as a blind interview before a diverse panel directed to consider the candidate without conscious or unconscious bias regarding race, gender, service branch or military experience.” This program reaches not only commanders but their main link to the unit, sergeants major. It is essentially human resources training: the process by which management makes new additions to its ranks sing management’s tune at the expense of the well-being and effectiveness of the rank and file.
At least one Sergeant Major who completed this program seems to be singing management’s tune. Writing in the Army University Press’s NCO Journal in response to Wormuth’s concerns over recruitment, Robert E. Eichelberger proposed loosening recruiting standards when it came to ADHD and marijuana use.
This does not sound like the Army Americans want.
The Command Assessment’s Program’s Use of Mental Health and “Toxicity”: The Hidden Tax
Digging deeper into the program reinforces this perception. Its pushers, by their own admission, are psychologists. According to the American Psychological Association, in a celebratory report:
"Army psychologists were instrumental in developing BCAP’s standardized tests and semistructured interviews . . . from the field of industrial and organizational psychology . . . About 50 operational psychologists also support the program each year by interpreting cognitive tests, conducting one-on-one behavioral evaluations, and advising the final interview panel."
“This really looked at the whole person—your emotional side, your physical side, your mental side, and your strengths and weaknesses,” said one successful candidate. Another, who was turned down for higher leadership the first time but succeeded on a second try, realized that, since she was physically fit, the reason for her failure must be something else. She realized the reason was what was apparently the other main metric used in assessment: whether she had “toxic leadership” based on anonymous feedback from soldiers she had led. She then commenced “a difficult year of self-reflection and personal growth.” Based on this, she decided her problem was that, as a leader, “I had to be what I thought was assertive, but maybe it came across as aggressive,” because she had thought that assertiveness “wasn’t personal,” it was part of the job.
The soldier’s first approach—assertive and impersonal—sounds like exactly what’s needed when commanding troops. Indeed, at least one former serviceperson who spoke to Restoration News has testified to the fact that a hardline, take-no-prisoners attitude from superiors is key to soldiers’ individual growth. Taking a commander who has this attitude and forcing her to “try to swallow” the “jagged pill” of “think[ing] of myself as being somebody who’s toxic” doesn’t seem like what’s best for a lethal force.
But that’s not the priority for an Army Secretary taking her cues from “industrial and organizational psychology,” which was originally developed by Ivy League consultants to control blue collar labor and eventually found its way into secondary schools via bureaucrats promoting Social Emotional Learning (SEL). As Restoration News has previously reported, Social Emotional Learning (SEL) was the ground on which race and gender politics in schools was born. The same seems to be true in Wormuth’s army, where one of her top six goals was to “reduce harmful behaviors....”
Race, Sexuality, Gender: The Distractions, and the Language Games That Cover Them
Under Wormouth, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies are justified on the same management-psychology principle that blacklists Command Assessment Program applicants: preventing “toxic leadership,” or, as Wormuth calls it, “harmful behavior.” In Wormuth’s telling, supporting DEI against criticisms, “We do have a wide range of soldiers in the Army and we’ve got to make them all feel included.”
This “inclusion” extends past DEI to sexuality, where Wormuth has continued the transgender push of her late boss, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter. A disturbing Army instruction uncovered by then-Rep. Matt Gaetz made this clear. The instruction acknowledged that soldiers using a shower with a transgender soldier who identified as a female-by-gender but hadn’t undergone sex reassignment surgery, e.g. a biological male, had registered discomfort. In response, the army simply said that “all soldiers will use the building, bathroom and shower facilities associated with their [chosen] gender . . . .”
Wormuth’s response to questioning by Gaetz used the time-honed bureaucratic method of language manipulation. Having made a point of praising the Army as a “Team,” she now justified the policy choice of allowing biological men to shower with women by arguing that “we’re focused on building cohesive teams.” This isn’t “cohesion” or “team” as past soldiers would understand it: it’s “cohesion” and “team” as used by H.R. departments to promote a mandate from management. In fact, as Matthew Lohmeier has reported extensively, DEI has done the opposite of making units more cohesive. Instead, it has influenced rank-and-file soldiers to identify not by mission or flag but by race, gender, and sexuality. This is the reality masked by Wormuth’s language games.
The Climate Boondoggle
Finally, there is Wormuth’s pursuit of another of her main objectives, “to continue our efforts to be resilient in the face of climate change.” In the name of this goal, she released, in early 2022, the “Army Climate Strategy.” As Defense One noted, it “includes plans for an all-electric vehicle fleet and calls for microgrids on all of its 130 installations, but no estimates for what everything will cost.”
According to the acting assistant secretary for Army installations, energy, and environment “the funding will continue to be a ‘moving target’” as “technologies ‘mature and develop.’” This swiss-cheese strategy was followed, late in the year and in conjunction with the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Installations, Energy and Environment, by the “Climate Strategy Implementation Plan.” This plan also failed to include funding details. That in turn was followed by reassuring updates from Wormuth about climate “progress.” One bragged of the Army having “the largest floating solar array in the Southeast United States…one of many examples of how our Army #LeadsFromTheFront in climate innovation and adaptation.”
Exactly what these kinds of new technologies will cost to “mature and develop” in the name of “innovation and adaptation” is not the only question. The other is who will be selling them to the Army. As the last Restoration News report makes clear, defense and technology contractors have come close to dominating Washington thanks to the revolving door between bureaucrats and the private sector. And, as its next report will show, Christine Wormuth is one of those revolving operators—and she is deeply invested in the climate agenda.
The Underlying Reforms the Army Needs . . .
The bottom line—as a Heritage Foundation critique of the Armed Forces under Biden said of Wormuth, her “priorities do not address warfighting proficiency.” Some of the solutions to this are straightforward, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is already addressing them: Abolish DEI and Climate programs and related personnel, even if they change the names of their positions.
Some go deeper, like re-assessing the Command Assessment Program with an eye to replacing or abolishing it. There will be pushback in the name of the program’s supposed relationship to “blind” selection of “merited” soldiers who are “well-rounded,” versed in “analytics,” and display non-“toxic” behaviors. This kind of talk has the possibility of appealing to those versed in corporate management. Secretary Hegseth should ignore such talk, and the 50 psychologists or psychiatrists advising the program should have their jobs or contracts terminated. As past Restoration News reports have shown and soldier testimony supports, the Army is not a corporation and never will be. It is an organization of lethally trained soldiers disciplined by difficult training into a cohesive force to defend our nation.
A final reform has to do with overhauling recruitment. The Army should not pay for programs to get recruits up to snuff, or pay more to recruit in colleges among white-collar aspirants trained in Wormuth’s “analytics” and psychology. It should target the working class warriors who have always wanted to serve. The strategy should be to improve the culture so that it serves the troops. After a quarter century of declining conditions, real reforms should mean the recruitment will take care of itself.
. . . and the Deeper Fight at Hand
But there are also deeper changes to be made—not limited to the Army but indicated by Wormuth’s record. Examining that record shows that Wormuth’s policies point back to her biography—those think tank, academic and corporate players whose interests she serves, whose “unwarranted influence” has to be limited for the Armed Services to protect Americans.
Secretary Hegseth, in his Senate confirmation hearings, alluded to soldiers with dust on their boots as the ideal for leadership. That attitude should permeate from his leadership throughout all levels of the new American military.