Black Ops Military - "You would have thought it was 1950," said Lt. Col. Walter J. Smiley Jr., who is African-American and fought in Iraq and Afghanistan before retiring last year after 25 years in the Army. Dana Pittard, a retired major general, also African-American, was equally frustrated.
"It's America's military," he said. "Why doesn't this photo look like America?" One of the biggest problems, service members say, is that white men in the top ranks don't see the problem. In July, Gen. John E. Hyten, the second-highest officer in the military, told a Senate committee that racism in the military was a thing of the past compared with the issue of sexism.
Black Ops Military
Colonel Smiley thought he was on the right track until 2011, when "the story changes," he said in an interview. His evaluation from his time in Afghanistan, in 2009 and 2010, had been stellar, he said.
A Lack Of Mentors
But after returning home, he received a second evaluation that was mediocre. And that was it for his chances of being promoted from lieutenant colonel to full colonel, let alone to general. In the Army's promotion system, one mediocre evaluation is enough to kill your chance for advancement.
Colonel Smiley did not know. Almost a decade later, he still does not know, although he said he thought race played a part. He left the Army in September as a lieutenant colonel. "I would have stayed if I had made 06," he said, in reference to the rank of colonel.
Many African-Americans saw military service not as a career but as a way to help pay for education or to help compete later in the civilian job market. By contrast, many white service members with long family histories of service sign up for what they call the “warrior culture,” because that is what is expected, and it is what their fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers did.
In interviews, African-American, Asian and Hispanic officers and enlisted service members described a feeling of not being accepted that was sometimes so intangible that many grew frustrated trying to describe it. In ways large and small, they said, they felt constantly challenged over their right to be in elite units, let alone lead them.
‘It Undermines You’
Graduates from black colleges who had successful military careers typically specialized in logistics and transportation, like moving supplies or driving trucks, and not in combat arms specialties like infantry or artillery. Logistics and transportation are an outgrowth of the segregated military, when many black troops were quartermasters and truck drivers.
But it is the combat postings, particularly during the nearly two decades of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, that lead to the top leadership jobs. And yet African-Americans have a history of combat, from the Buffalo Soldiers who served on the Western frontier after the Civil War to the Tuskegee Airmen in World War II to the black soldiers who fought in Vietnam.
They were all fighting for a country, African-Americans have pointed out, that has a long legacy of not treating them as equal citizens. The elite Special Operations forces — Navy SEALs, Army Green Berets, Rangers and Delta Force commandos — tend to be as white as the military's top ranks.
"I remember sitting in a review of a Ranger regiment," General Chiarelli said. “I was blown away, looking at six to seven hundred young men, and I was straining to see if I could find a single person of color.”
Although he made it to the rank of major general, he never got that third or fourth star, and he left the Marines in 2004. Five years later, President Obama appointed him the head of NASA.
"Something else is happening," said Reuben E. Brigety, a former Navy submarine officer who is now the dean of George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. "Unless you presume that ethnic minorities are just not as good as their white male counterparts, there has to be another reason."
General Garrett said the lack of minority leadership at the top ranks was "something I spend a lot of time thinking about. There are no perfect answers.” To get ahead, he said, African-Americans must move away from support areas and into combat.
Mr. Powell, who became President George W. Bush's first secretary of state, declined to be interviewed about his military service for this article. But in a 1995 article for The New Yorker, he spoke about the subtle racism he had experienced.
"When I was a young lieutenant, I would have commanders come up to me and say, 'Powell, you're doing great — goddamn, you're the best black lieutenant I've ever seen,'" Mr. Powell told Henry Louis Gates Jr., a Harvard professor and the author of the article.
"And I'd say, 'Thank you.' Just file it away." Rising to the top of the military means enduring a four-decade career of often being the only minority service member in the room, platoon or meeting. "If I had to go to work every day, for 38 years, where I was the only person of color in the room — wow," General Chiarelli said.
"I don't know how I would feel about that." Like many operator units, they wear the same Army fatigues as regular soldiers (you can read more about the current and past Army uniforms here), but there are three ways in which you can distinguish them.
In December, West Point announced that its Black Knights football team had removed from its flag the initials G.F.B.D., for “God Forgives, Brothers Don't,” after learning that it was a slogan demanding loyalty by the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, a white
supremacist prison gang. "If I'm a C.E.O., I can go outside to look for a person if I don't have one internally in my organization," he said. The Army, he said, can choose from only the colonels before them.
"I can't go on the street and hire somebody." Lt. Gen. Ronald L. Bailey could not do it either. The first black man to command the First Marine Division, from 2011 to 2013, General Bailey retired in 2017 after 40 years in the Marines, one star short of breaking the four-star barrier.
Other black men in the military offer similar accounts of terrified mothers battered by years of trying to protect their sons from a society in which being young, black and male can be a death sentence.
In this view, combat arms in the military was yet another threat. The reasons there are so few people of color at the top lie deep in the history and culture of the United States military.
A 1925 guidance for Army officers stated that black service members were a class "from which we cannot expect to draw leadership material." The armed forces were not fully integrated until after World War II, a legacy that has left African-Americans without the same history of generations of family service shared by so many white enlistees.
"The Marine Corps actually has given this a great deal of thought because we have struggled," said Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., the Marine who is head of the United States Central Command. "We've struggled to do it with minorities.
We've struggled to do it with women. It is a continuing problem for us.” The history of some of the military's most storied combat units — the soldiers who landed on Omaha Beach or the Marines who stormed Iwo Jima — has largely excised the black and brown troops who fought alongside the white men.
This casting of military history heightens the sense among African-Americans, they say, that they are still not welcome in such units. Both units have the most sophisticated equipment and are highly trained in Close Quarters Combat (CQB), hostage rescue, high-value-target extraction, and other specialized operations.
The difference is the extensive training SEALs receive in specialized maritime operations, given their naval heritage. "The Army in particular is a pretty bubba-oriented system," said Derek Chollet, a former assistant secretary of defense. "It's about who's going to take care of you.
So if you don’t have senior leadership that makes fixing this a priority, it’s very hard to see it happening.” If you enter the Pentagon at the Potomac River entrance, where foreign dignitaries are greeted by the defense secretary, you will walk down the E Ring hall with its portraits of the men who have led the United States armed forces for the past century.
Two nearly one, the African-American service members interviewed for this article said they paused when they walked by the painting of Gen. Colin L. Powell, the first and only black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
His portrait, they said, came as both a relief — that he was there at all — and a reminder that no one else with their skin color had made it. The “nonswimmer” name, meant as a slur, refers to the age-old trope that black people cannot swim.
Like any trope, there is just enough of a glimmer of truth to make it hard to shake. General Pittard, who made it as far as the commander of land forces for the American-led coalition battling the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in 2014, said that when he entered West Point in 1977, fewer than 10 out of 100 black freshmen knew
how to swim. To graduate, they had to learn. "When I came into the military, I came in from Alabama, and racism was a huge problem in the military — overt racism," said General Hyten, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
"I watched commander after commander after commander take charge, own that, and any time they saw it, eliminated it from the formation." Gen. Paul M. Nakasone, whose father is second-generation Japanese-American, leads the United States Cyber Command.
The Army has sometimes counted Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, the head of Africa Command and the son of a German mother and an Afghan father, as a minority commander. There is only one woman in the group: Gen.
Maryanne Miller, the chief of the Air Force's Air Mobility Command, who is white. The Trump presidency, minority service members said, has only magnified the sense of isolation they have long felt in a stratified system.
"You had the feeling with Obama, that people were looking up" and trying to impress the country's first black president, General Pittard said, adding that similar sentiments existed under Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
That pressure, he said, has disappeared with Mr. Trump. "There's not somebody pushing it," he said. Racism within the military appears to be on the rise. A survey last fall of 1,630 active-duty subscribers to Military Times found that 36 percent of those polled and 53 percent of minority service members said they had seen examples of white nationalism or ideologically driven racism among their fellow troops.
The numbers were up significantly from the same poll conducted in 2018, when 22 percent of all respondents reported personally witnessing white nationalism. Wed Feb. 21, 2010, when Colonel Benton was the commander of the unit, his group was involved in an episode in Afghanistan in which American warplanes struck three vehicles full of Afghan civilians in Uruzgan Province, killing 21 people, including children.
Colonel Benton, who took part in approving the strikes, received a career-ending letter of reprimand. In the unit, he had often talked about his black college fraternity and was viewed as an outlier in the largely white Green Beret world.
He retired from the military in 2014. The top Army officers — Gen. James C. McConville, the Army chief of staff; Gen. John M. Murray, the head of the Army's Futures Command; and Gen. Paul E. Funk II, the head of the Army's Training and Doctrine Command — are all white and were all mentored by the same man, Gen.
Peter Chiarelli, a former Army vice chief of staff. "We always overlook things," said Tiffeny Young, a friend of Colonel Barr, who was at the ceremony. "But even if it wasn't meant to be racist, it undermines the seriousness of the situation.
He's telling people 'this is your new boss,' and he's not being respectful of her. When a white dude is behind you doing stuff like that, it undermines you.” There are people at top levels of the Pentagon who would like to see a military leadership that is more reflective of America.
Ryan McCarthy, the secretary of the Army and a former Army Ranger, is one of those who is trying to increase the number of minority leaders in the Army's top ranks. Last summer he traveled to Philadelphia for the annual convention of the black fraternity Kappa Alpha Psi, stumping for more African-Americans to join the Army's officer corps.
Consisting of about 500 airmen, these "highly trained experts perform rescues in every type of terrain and participate in every part of the mission, from search and rescue, to combat support to providing emergency medical treatment, in order to ensure that every mission is a
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