(ReclaimingAmerica.net) – The US Air Force attempted and abandoned an experiment to boost graduation rates for minority pilots after its initiative failed to achieve the wanted results while discriminating against white males, a report reveals.
US military documents obtained by The Daily Caller revealed that minority and women pilots were clustered into a single class called “America’s Class,” a 2021 initiative as part of the Air Force’s diversity push following the 2020 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
The 19th Air Force Command experiment near San Antonio, Texas, sought to determine whether bundling student pilots based on race and sex would boost their graduation rates – even at the cost of violating anti-discrimination policies.
“However, not only did the effort fail to boost minority and women candidates’ success rates, but officers involved say they were ordered to engage in potentially unlawful discrimination by excluding white males from the class, documents show,” The Daily Caller reports.
The report quotes a rated strategy document about “America’s Class” – officially known as “SUPT Class 21-15” – reflecting the new Air Force goal of “diversity.”
A release from the Air Education and Training Command revealed that the “clustered” class graduated on September 10, 2021, with 22 out of 29 student pilots completing it.
In comparison, the class before it graduated 23 out of 26 students on August 20, 2021. On October 1, 2021, the following class graduated only 17 out of 30 students.
Besides the race- and sex-based experiment’s poor results, the Air Force project “raised red flags” for a pilot instructor on active duty who remained anonymous “due to fear of reprisal.”
“When other priorities, like gender or race, are introduced as a metric of assignment and advancement, the foundations of performance-based competition are sacrificed and the emphasis on safety takes a backseat,” said the US Air Force instructor, who is also a former trainer for Undergraduate Pilot Training.
A spokesperson for Air Education and Training Command (AETC) confirmed that Specialized Undergraduate Pilot Training (SUPT) class 21-15 clustered pilots based on race and “gender.”
According to a demographic breakdown of the pilot classes from 2020-2023, “America’s Class” comprised at least 62% underrepresented groups, not including males declining to specify their ethnicity and choosing the option “other.”
The paperwork shows that all other classes for 2020 and 2021 had less than one-third of their students from “underrepresented” groups.
A 2020 memo signed by two 19th Air Force officers raised concerns that the selection criteria for the pilot class amounted to “unlawful discrimination.”
“We have been verbally ordered through the chain of command by the 19AF/CC [19th Air Force commander] to purposefully restructure the students assigned to [SUPT] class 21-15 to meet specific racial and gender demographics,” the memo reads.
It reveals the class was initially supposed to mimic the race and “gender” makeup of the broader US population, but the demographics of the incoming cohort prevented that.
“The order was changed by verbal order of the 47 OG/CC to restructure the class with ‘anybody non-white,'” the two officers wrote on August 1, 2020.
Are you surprised the experiment failed? Why or why not? Please share your opinion about what took place by emailing [email protected]. Thank you.
