[USATODAY] Many of the Pentagon's elite commando units -- including the Navy SEALs -- are overwhelmingly led and manned by white officers and enlisted troops, a concern at the highest levels of the military where officials have stressed the need to create more diverse forces to handle future threats.Precisely why? What do skin color and language disparity have to do with tracking down bad guyz and hanging them with their own guts?
Black officers and enlisted troops are scarce in some special operations units in highest demand, according to data provided by the Pentagon to USA TODAY. For instance, eight of 753 SEAL officers are black, or 1%.
What's the actual rate of application for the jobs filtered by rate of successful completion of the course?
An expert at the Pentagon on the diversity of commando forces said the lack of minorities robs the military of skills it needs to win.Which skills are those? It's not hard to figure how to set fire to a CVS or to threaten a witness, but it's a lot harder to learn to speak, read, and write Uzbek.
"We don't know where we will find ourselves in the future," said Army Col. Michael Copenhaver, who has published a paper on diversity in special operating forces. "One thing is for sure: We will find ourselves around the globe. And around the globe you have different cultural backgrounds everywhere. Having that kind of a diverse force can only increase your operational capability."
U.S. Special Operations forces have gotten along well with everyone from South Vietnamese to Pashtuns. The fact is, there were damned few ethnic Vietnamese or Pashtuns included on teams. But the guys who were on the teams were willing to a.) go through training that has a horrendously high dropout rate and b.) immerse themselves in the culture of the people they were supporting, whether it meant eating grasshoppers on the wing outside Pleiku or playing buzkashi outside Sar-e-Pul. The training de-emphasizes the troops' color and culture, overlaying it with that of the target area. It's guaranteed that selecting a guy because of his skin color--or worse, an entire team--isn't going to give them a head start in rural Cameroon or Angola. Adding women to a team in Qalat or al-Hit complicates OPSEC and seldom does anything to enhance a mission revolving around strangling wires and knives to the kidney.