June is nationally recognized as Pride Month — a yearly celebration of the contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals to the rich tapestry of American history.
The Pentagon, however, under the leadership of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, is marking Pride Month by offering a one-finger salute to the LGBTQ community. It’s part of a larger effort to whitewash the accomplishments and, arguably, the humanity, of women and minorities in the U.S. military.
Hegseth’s move to erase the contributions of nonwhite, female members of the armed forces has been a recurrent theme since he took office.
Earlier this week, Military.com reported that Hegseth ordered the renaming of the USNS Harvey Milk. Milk was a gay rights trailblazer, the first openly gay man to win elected office in the United States. A year after winning a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, Milk and the city’s mayor, George Moscone, were murdered in City Hall by a disgruntled ex-supervisor.
Milk had previously served in the U.S. Navy and was commissioned as an officer in 1951, before receiving a “less than honorable” discharge in 1955 after questions were raised about his sexual orientation.
The timing of the announcement, during Pride Month, reports Military.com, was intentional — a punitive and mean-spirited slight at the estimated 80,000 LGBTQ+ service members in the U.S. military.
While refusing to confirm the renaming, Department of Defense spokesperson Sean Parnell issued a statement saying, “Secretary Hegseth is committed to ensuring that the names attached to all DOD installations and assets are reflective of the Commander-in-Chief’s priorities, our nation’s history, and the warrior ethos.”
It’s not hard to read between the lines here: “Gay service members can’t be warriors and aren’t tough enough to serve in the military.” It’s a broadside so juvenile and homophobic it’s something one might expect to hear in a fraternity house rather than the halls of the nation’s military.
Hegseth’s assaults on diversity are not limited to just the LGBTQ+ community. The USNS Harvey Milk is part of the Navy’s John Lewis-class of oiler ships, which are named for civil rights leaders and activists (Lewis, a former member of Congress, was, of course, a prominent civil rights activist).
According to CBS News, the Navy is also considering renaming other Lewis-class oilers — including the USNS Thurgood Marshall, USNS Ruth Bader Ginsburg and USNS Harriet Tubman. Marshall and Ginsburg were Supreme Court justices (Marshall was the first Black man to serve on the Supreme Court) and Tubman was a legendary Black abolitionist. There’s no word on whether two other Lewis-class ships, the USNS Earl Warren and USNS Robert F. Kennedy, will be renamed. But both men are white, so it seems unlikely.
Hegseth’s move to erase the contributions of nonwhite, female members of the armed forces has been a recurrent theme since he took office. Before Trump nominated the former “Fox & Friends Weekend” host to become the head of the Department of Defense, Hegseth waged rhetorical war against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs and what he termed military “wokeness.”
In his 2024 book, “The War on Warriors,” Hegseth railed against “feminism, genderism, safetyism, climate worship, manufactured ‘violent extremism,’ straight-up weirdo s—, and a grab bag of social justice causes that infect today’s fighting force.” They are, he argues, “anathema to everything the American military stands for.”
After taking office, Hegseth said, “The single dumbest phrase in military history is our diversity is our strength.”
Since then, he has reinstated a ban on transgender service members. He ended a program, signed into law by President Trump in 2017, to increase leadership roles for women in the military. He fired a host of female military leaders, including Admiral Linda Fagan, the first woman to lead the U.S. Coast Guard. His tenure also saw the dismissal of Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and the second Black man to hold the job. Considering Hegseth’s criticisms of DEI, the implication of these firings is that women and minorities who rose up the ranks did so because of racial preferences, not because of their accomplishments or years of service. After taking office, Hegseth said, ‘The single dumbest phrase in military history is our diversity is our strength.’ Another of Hegseth’s first moves as secretary was an order to remove any mention of diversity from the Pentagon’s website, which led to the embarrassing deletion of a webpage honoring former Army veteran Jackie Robinson, among others (the page was restored after a public backlash). In all, more than 26,000 images have been flagged for removal from the department’s website, and the total could reach as high as 100,000. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of those removed detail the accomplishments of women and minorities. Hegseth has also ordered the nation’s prestigious military academies to stop taking into account race, gender and ethnicity in their admissions practices, and has ordered the academies to purge educational materials focused on what he calls “divisive concepts.” Unless one believes that only white men are capable of serving with distinction, it’s difficult to see how any of this makes the military stronger or more lethal. In an era when America’s military advantages lie in information technology and virtual control of the modern battlefield, America needs a broad array of individuals to make up the military of the 21st century, not just Hegseth’s retrograde vision of interchangeable white male trigger-pullers. Hegseth’s message to a generation of future military leaders is that if you’re a woman (who make up 18% of active service members) or Black (also around 18% of the active force) or gay or a member of some other minority group, you are not welcome. Hegseth’s moves, while strategically misguided, also run counter to the core values of the institution he runs. For the past 75 years, the military has been a catalyst for racial equality in American society. In 1948, President Harry Truman ordered the integration of the military, well before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the discriminatory legal doctrine of “separate but equal.” Parnell, the spokesperson, has said that Hegseth’s goal is to create “a colorblind, merit-based culture” at the Pentagon. But acknowledging only the accomplishments of white, male service members and removing the names of gay, women and Black civil rights activists suggests that the Pentagon under Hegseth’s leadership only sees those who look like him.
Michael A. Cohen is a political writer and a fellow with the Eurasia Group Foundation. 
