Pentagon tries to stay out of Congress’ culture wars feud

Pentagon officials are attempting to stay on the sidelines of an intensifying feud over annual defense legislation that has highlighted the military’s vulnerability to being pulled into America’s most divisive social issues.

House lawmakers passed the National Defense Authorization Act on Friday in a narrowly won, mostly party-line vote, setting up a clash with the Senate, which has its own version of the $886 billion legislation. In years past, the NDAA has been one of the few pieces of major legislation that can reliably secure both parties’ backing in an era of extreme partisan polarization.

But this year the bill, which sets military spending limits and dictates Pentagon policy on a wide range of issues, has generated an unusual political brawl due to the inclusion of measures in the House’s version of the legislation that Republican lawmakers say are needed to push back against “the radical woke ideology being forced on our servicemen and women.”

Democrats have decried those proposals — which would do away with Pentagon offices dedicated to increasing diversity, equity and inclusion, known as DEI; reinstate troops forced out for refusing the coronavirus vaccine; and deny abortion support to service members — as a dangerous attempt to use the military to advance Republicans’ “culture wars” priorities.

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While Pentagon officials are reluctant to publicly weigh in on a bill that hasn’t been finalized, some officials privately voiced concerns about a measure that would also ban the teaching of critical race theory, eliminate a working group established to counter extremism in the ranks and limit troops’ access to specialized health care for transgender personnel.

One defense official said some of the contents of the House bill represented “an unprecedented reach” into issues that have typically been left to the military hierarchy.

“If their goal is to depoliticize, they have fully inserted politics directly into pending public law,” the official said, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss pending legislation.

Pentagon officials said they were watching closely for signs of how the debate will shape the department’s activities and its management of an active-duty force of more than 1 million.

“The NDAA usually moves through Congress in a bipartisan way without divisive issues, focused on the centerpiece of our national security interest and not on societal-political arguments,” a U.S. official said.

Some at the Pentagon are hoping the Democratic-controlled Senate, when it takes up its version of the bill as early as next week, will decline to adopt the most controversial measures from the House bill. Even if that occurs, the outcome of the subsequent reconciliation process between the two chambers is unclear.

Peter Feaver, an expert on civil-military relations at Duke University, said the political tug-of-war was damaging to the military and to public confidence in the institution. “Both sides should agree to give the uniformed military noncombatant immunity status in the culture wars,” he said.

He noted that the military had been already forced to adjust to repeated changes on issues including rules governing transgender troops over the last decade as Republican and Democratic administrations have seesawed on military policy.

“Arguing over policies and changing those policies when the executive branch changes hands is just part of ordinary politics,” said Feaver, author of a new book on public views on the military. “Targeting the uniformed military and undermining public confidence in this key institution crosses the line into a different kind of dysfunction.”

The Pentagon’s desire to avoid wading into the controversy was visible this week when Biden’s nominee to become the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr, faced questions during his confirmation hearing about what Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) said was the Biden administration’s “obsession with sort of race-based politics being interjected into our military.”

Schmitt cited a 2022 Air Force memo that laid out racial and ethnic goals for applicants to the service’s officer corps, which he said appeared to be an effort to reduce the number of White officers.

“This administration has infused abortion politics into our military, COVID politics into our military, DEI politics into our military, and it is a cancer on the best military in the history of the world,” he said, referencing a military policy passed after the overturning of Roe vs. Wade that reimburses service members for travel expenses if they must to go to a different state to seek an abortion.

Brown did not address Schmitt’s characterizations but said the purpose of Air Force metrics, based on U.S. demographics, was to “broaden the pool” of officers rather than narrow opportunities for any one group. “We do not have quotas.”

Officials noted that the political showdown over the NDAA comes as the Pentagon seeks to address a serious crisis in recruiting. Both parties have linked the other side’s social policies to shortfalls in recruitment and warned that heated public debates will worsen the challenges that military recruiters now face.

“Plans to remove reasonable efforts by the department to treat all those qualified to serve with equity seems a perverse measure as we continue to face recruiting challenges,” the defense official said.

As Pentagon officials await a final bill, the Biden administration has spoken out about a related controversy in which Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) has held up the promotion of more than 250 senior military officers over an objection to the Pentagon’s reimbursement policy related to abortion.

Tuberville’s block has left the Marine Corps without a commandant and plunged hundreds of families into uncertainty as they wait on new assignments.

President Biden said the hold undermined Americans’ security. “The idea that we’re injecting into fundamental foreign policy decisions what, in fact, is a domestic social debate on social issues is bizarre,” he said this week. “And it’s just totally irresponsible.”

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spoke with Tuberville on Thursday in an attempt to find a way ahead, but the senator appeared undeterred on Friday, saying that Democratic policies instead were responsible for deterring recruiting efforts.

“If the left completes its long march through our institutions and succeeds in taking over our military, then we stand to lose not only our security, but also the rules-based global order along with it,” he said in an opinion piece published by Fox News.

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The Washington Post’s Abigail Hauslohner contributed to this report.