Republicans are vowing to rid the military of "woke left-wing Democrats" in their newly approved platform that lays out their governing vision should they win in November's elections.
Delegates at the Republican National Convention formally adopted the 2024 party platform during the first session of the confab Monday afternoon in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
The 16-page document – the first formal GOP platform since a 2016 one that ran 66 pages and included an entire chapter on military and foreign policy – fully synchronizes the party with its presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump. The 2024 road map is light on detailed plans for the armed forces, but includes a paragraph on how Republicans hope to "modernize the military."
"Republicans will ensure our military is the most modern, lethal and powerful force in the world," the document says on its last page. "We will invest in cutting-edge research and advanced technologies, including an Iron Dome Missile Defense Shield, support our troops with higher pay, and get woke left-wing Democrats fired as soon as possible."
Republicans have bemoaned what they describe as a "woke" military since President Joe Biden took office and have been vowing to eradicate wokeness in the military for years. Republicans use the term to describe what they see as the creep of progressive and Democratic ideology into public institutions in recent years, and it has been applied to a wide array of federal government policies, from the now-defunct COVID-19 vaccine mandate to preparations for climate change.
When it comes to the military, “woke” is often applied to efforts to make the military more welcoming to historically marginalized groups such as minorities, women and LGBTQ+ people.
While the rhetoric in the GOP platform echoes calls that Republican lawmakers have made for years, experts on civil-military relations said it was alarming for an official party platform to advocate for what could amount to a political purge.
"The Republican base has convinced themselves that this is a big problem, and they just don't have any evidence to show that it is a big problem," said Peter Feaver, a civil-military relations expert at Duke University who was a White House adviser to former President George W. Bush. "So, for it to be elevated all the way to the platform, that's a sign that somebody who hadn't really thought deeply about national security had access to the platform, or at least hadn't thought deeply about the actual composition of the American military."
The platform does not specify exactly who could be fired. Political appointees, such as the defense secretary and service secretaries, change every administration, so switching them out would be normal. But efforts to target civil servants -- which Trump has vowed to do broadly across the federal government -- or uniformed military personnel could be both counterproductive and logistically unfeasible, Feaver said.
"What would be the grounds for getting rid of them? It's not a violation of the [Uniform Code of Military Justice] to be left wing," he said. "This would be doing the exact thing they claim is the problem with woke. That is to say, this would be injecting a political rather than a merit-based standard."
Republicans have blamed wokeness for the military's ongoing struggles with recruiting and the American public's declining trust in the armed forces.
Pentagon officials and military officers have sought to push back on that narrative, arguing that recruiting is hurting because of factors including a strong job market and a low percentage of young Americans even being eligible to enlist. If wokeness is a factor in the recruiting slump or public trust in the military, officials add, it's because of politicians pushing a false narrative.
"We are a ready Army, not a 'woke' Army," Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told reporters last year. "What I'm trying to talk about now is how that drip, drip, drip of criticism about a woke military is having some counterproductive effects on recruiting."
Diversity and inclusion efforts, many of which predate the Biden administration, are crucial to attracting a younger, more socially conscious generation, military officials add.
"What I will tell you is when people join our military, they want to look around and see somebody who looks like them. They want to be part of a team [and] feel like they're included," Gen. C.Q. Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Defense One in 2023 when he was chief of staff of the Air Force. "They don't want to join something that they feel like you're put as an outcast."
But the Republican criticism has persisted.
Similar to the GOP platform, Project 2025, a conservative think tank blueprint for a future Republican administration, proposes to "eliminate politicization, reestablish trust and accountability and restore faith to the force" in part by "eliminat[ing] Marxist indoctrination and divisive critical race theory programs and abolish newly established diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and staff."
Project 2025 also calls for instructing military officers to "understand their primary duty to be ensuring the readiness of the armed forces, not pursuing a social engineering agenda."
Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025. But the plan was written by people who served in his first administration and hope to serve in a second, including former acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, who wrote the section about the Defense Department.
While Trump tries to disavow Project 2025, the GOP platform was personally approved by him, the chairs of the Republican National Committee's platform committee -- Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and Rep. Michael Waltz, R-Fla. -- said Monday.
"Most of all, we will strengthen our depleted military and make it strong again," Waltz, a Green Beret veteran, said on stage at the convention Monday as delegates approved the platform.
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