By promoting diversity over fighting ability the Army is alienating its warriors

The Australian Army’s social engineering program threatens its ability to do what it’s designed to do: fight wars, writes Miranda Devine.

The `diversity revolution’, ushered in by then Chief of Army Lt. General David Morrison threatens our war fighting capability. (Pic: News Corp)

THE “diversity” revolution that Lieutenant General David Morrison inflicted on the Australian Army now threatens to diminish our war fighting capability.

Five years after the former Army chief and former Sex Discrimination Commissioner Liz Broderick launched a social engineering experiment aimed at stamping out the male “Anglo Saxon” warrior culture, the troops are unimpressed.

The top brass might have drunk the feminist Koolaid of “Pathway to Change” and its mutant offshoots, but most of the people they command are sceptical about gender fluidity, appeasement of radical Islam, and promotion by chromosome as payback for 116 years of military patriarchy.

“People just think it’s crap,” said one young officer.

To overcome such common sense thinking, diversity experts have designed a $30,000 program effectively to brainwash young leaders in the Army to become “champions of change” and stamp out the “white Anglo-Saxon male” culture they are told no longer has a place in the military.

In October, a handpicked group was taken to Sydney and Canberra for the “Junior Leaders Shaping Future Army”, and subjected to five-days of diversity indoctrination.

On day one was a three-hour session from an imam explaining his “Islamic conversion testimony” and proselytising the benefits of Islam, according to one participant who took detailed notes.

The lecture went down so badly that a planned mosque visit on the schedule the next day was cancelled without explanation.

Gender diversity expert Professor Robert Wood introduced the latest politically correct inanity, “unconscious bias”, and criticised the predominance of “Anglo-Saxon males” and the “banter culture” of the Army.

The next day Qantas diversity and inclusion manager Zak Hammer spruiked the airline’s same sex marriage campaign and LGBTI network for staff.

“Gender diversity no longer refers to male and female, because there are people within our community now who don’t identify with these,” one presenter told them.

In one exercise they were asked how they would “inclusively” manage a diversity scenario in which a digger under their command converts to Islam, requiring him to pray five times a day, eat halal food and fast at Ramadan.

“I felt like I was sitting in a North Korean indoctrination camp,” recalls one insider.

“Concepts such as bias and unconscious bias have been constantly harped on to try and change the way we think and speak. The soldiers are hating it.”

“It was an extreme politically correct environment for people who are dead set into war fighting,” said another participant.

A psychologist classified the students as “champions” or “skeptics”. However, in the Army, “champ” is an insult. “It’s the worst thing you can call someone. It means you’re a d---head.”

The ADF’s diversity orthodoxy decries a military comprising mainly “males of Anglo-Australian background”, Christians and “third-generation-plus” Australian.

“Such a demographic profile is no longer desirable or sustainable”, says one of the ludicrous diversity reports which now clog the minds and in-trays of generals.

Former Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick. (Pic: Supplied)

“The typical Defence hero is a hero in uniform from an Anglo-Australian background who performs acts of bravery in battle and models the values of courage and sacrifice... This type of hero is unnecessarily exclusive and works against the desire for Defence ‘to represent the community it serves’,” writes education academic Dr Elizabeth Thomson in her 2014 report: “Battling with words”.

“Casual conversation in Defence is dominated by the kind of talk characteristic of the Aussie bloke... “Humour, banter, practical jokes and nicknaming are language practices (which) marginalise and exclude people (and must be) controlled”

If all this sounds frighteningly Orwellian, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Defence Force Recruiting is where crackpot theory first meets reality and Army chief Lt Gen Angus Campbell is frustrated with the slow progress to achieve his goal of doubling the proportion of women from 12 to 25 per cent.

In a speech to recruitment officers last August he criticised an unnamed dissident who had informed Defence Force Chief Mark Binskin’s “Gender Adviser”, Julie McKay, that he would resist diversity targets because he “needed to protect the Army from Canberra”.

“You need to understand that I will have no humour if my directions are ignored,” Campbell told the recruiters. “The number one priority I have with respect to recruitment is increasing our diversity.”

Since Campbell’s rocket, Defence Force Recruiting has pulled out all stops to entice women into the Army. One whistleblower says they run “female only information sessions, female only fitness assessments, female only job assessment days, have a dedicated female Specialist Recruitment Team... (and) free fitness training.”

Female recruits can ask to be posted with friends and to a location of their choice, and are offered reduced periods of service — one year while men have to serve at least four.

“Defence Force Recruiting has stopped males joining particular jobs which are open only to females,” he says. “Infantry, artillery, key jobs. Where does it stop?”

There is a new program at Kapooka for female recruits too out of shape to pass basic fitness requirements of eight push ups, 45 sit ups, and 7.5 on the Beep test. The Army Pre-Conditioning Program for unfit women offers seven weeks of intensive physical training, yet by the end almost half still flunk the entry test.

Women comprise 12 per cent of the Army, yet Broderick’s goal is 35 per cent of senior positions to be filled by women, so females have a three times better chance of promotion.

Army hasn’t met recruitment goals for ten years, and the exodus of men disillusioned about their promotion prospects won’t help.

At a time when our Army is being called on to step up the war against Islamic State, the deleterious effect of social engineering is clear.

As one former soldier puts it: “They’re messing with our war-fighting DNA”