The Supreme Court’s recent decision restricting race-conscious admissions has a notable carve-out for US military academies like West Point, which will be allowed to continue making admission decisions with the aim of creating a racially diverse student body. Many have pointed out the obvious inconsistency here, arguing that if affirmative action is good for the US military, it is good for civilian colleges as well. In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “The majority recognizes the compelling need for diversity in the military and the national security implications at stake . . . but it ends race-conscious college admissions at civilian universities implicating those interests anyway.” Peter Dreier, writing in the Nation, expressed a sentiment common among liberals on social media: “If racial diversity is good for the leadership of the nation’s military, why isn’t it also good for the country’s other core institutions, including health care, business, education, law, science, the media, and the arts?”

But it is worth asking why the US military supports affirmative action, and what it means for the cause of racial justice. The Department of Defense’s (DOD) support for affirmative action is hypocritical and self-serving — and far from promoting racial justice, it helps perpetuate racial inequality and oppression both in the United States and abroad.

The amicus brief submitted by the US government in Students for Fair Admission v Harvard lays out the military’s case for affirmative action. First, the military cares about race in college admission decisions because it needs a diverse officer corps to command a racially diverse force of enlisted service members. Diversity has long been framed by the military as a “force multiplier,” meaning that it provides competitive efficiencies through the additional cultural and language skills of racially diverse military workers. Yet this force-multiplying diversity is confined to the lower ranks: according to the 2020 DOD Diversity and Inclusion Report, the enlisted are 18 percent black and 19 percent Hispanic, while only 8 percent of officers are black and 8 percent are Hispanic.