Of all the branches and specialties in the US Army, the most important target for any ideologue bent on changing America’s armed forces is the Judge Advocate General’s Corps (JAGC). JAGs are the lawyers of the Army. Any soldier being court martialed will have a judge, prosecutor, and defense attorney from the JAGC. Every commander planning a mission or making a policy will have a legal adviser from the JAGC.
An ideology that takes control of JAGC will be able to impose itself on every level of the force. If you wanted to make the United States military so weak that it cannot function, putting lawyers in charge could do it. A risk-averse force made to worry about legal consequences for every combat decision will spend more time, energy, and resources on staying out of trouble than defeating the enemy.
For example, see the campaign by left-liberal governments in the Anglophone world to put their most elite warriors on trial for not letting the enemy kill them. Ben Roberts-Smith, the most decorated living former special forces soldier in Australia, was arrested in April and charged with five counts of murder as a war crime. UK Special Forces (UKSF) and members of the Special Air Service (SAS) also face scrutiny, referrals, and criminal investigations over their operations in Afghanistan and Syria.
Pacifists are cheering, for they imagine this blinkered campaign will make their countries more respected in the world, when in reality they are indulging the worst sort of navel-gazing self-regard. They cannot imagine a future in which their own countries are conquered by military forces that do not share their western legal traditions or empower pacifistic elements in their societies. They think the world would be more peaceful if we just handcuffed all the warfighters with legal oversight.
This is what happened in the United States military between 2016 and 2025, and reversing the trend has been a primary goal for Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. His enemies in the Democratic Party accuse Hegseth of politicizing the Department of War, but in fact both recent Democratic administrations inserted the politics that the current administration is undoing. This campaign, which began during the Obama era, even carried on during the first Trump administration, and Hegseth was determined to make the second Trump administration different.
The political war against American warfighters explains much of the hatred that is directed at Hegseth, and much of the internal opposition has come from within JAGC. When Operation Southern Spear began striking drug boats in the Pacific and Caribbean, an anonymous JAG officer went to The Washington Post with a specious tale of war crimes. Nearly forgotten now, almost one year later, this smear campaign utterly failed because striking a boat full of deadly cargo in the water is a legal act of war — and counter to what some people would have us believe, the laws of war do in fact allow warriors to, you know, actually kill the enemy.
The problems this kind of lawyering creates in combat are obvious. Soldiers who fear to kill the enemy will be less efficient at killing, whereas Hegseth’s approach to combat is maximum lethality.
However, the more insidious role that a politicized JAGC can play in the Pentagon is peacetime training that undermines good order and discipline and kills fighting spirit before the first shot is fired. During the decade of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives, a number of JAGC officers appear to have undertaken just such a campaign.
How to break the law with lawyers
“I was retired before I started noticing any of this”, says Mason Weiss. He left JAGC as a major in November of 2019 after a career in uniform spanning 30 years. No longer on active duty, Weiss began to hear rumors that JAGC had become the home of US Army DEI.
At first, “I couldn’t believe that this was happening in the Army Jag Corps and that this wasn’t some kind of a prank”, he told podcast host Sam Shoemate in February. Shoemate is a retired military intelligence chief warrant officer with his own saga as military whistleblower.
Weiss kept talking to JAG officers still in service, however, and what they told him was disturbing. Colorblind, merit-based promotions were out. Women, racial minorities, and sexual categories received unconstitutional and illegal preferences.
Compared to other jobs in the Army, “these [DEI positions] were stepping stones into coveted positions within the JAG corps.” Imposition of DEI principles across the force, affecting promotions in other branches, was the intended outcome.
Because promotions are a zero-sum game, DEI was already affecting who moved up in the ranks — and it was already clear that white men were the excluded group. “They’re the only people, from what I can tell, who are not included in DEI.”
Then the 2024 election happened, and Weiss noticed that DEI-related materials were being removed from JAGCNet, the central website for the JAGC. To preserve the evidence, Weiss sent a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) letter to the Department of the Army. He did not get a response back until one year later to the day, the maximum time allowed by law.
During the February podcast with Weiss, Shoemate cited “allegations that I trust that a high-ranking JAG officer ordered their subordinates to ignore the FOIA you sent up and to [allegedly] not report the FOIA to Maj. Gen. Christine”, who took command of JAGC in the middle of 2025. Weiss has submitted a second FOIA request for information on the processing of his first request.
Weiss emailed Christine twice, but received no response. He filed a complaint with Congress. When he finally got his FOIA documents, Weiss was astonished at the brazen prejudice he found among 7,000 pages of material. For while it was couched in the language of “inclusion” and “belonging”, the DEI Army (DEIA) had clearly selected one group to discriminate against.
“If someone is a white male, for lack of a better identifier, and they didn’t get promoted the last several years, based on what I see in these slides, I would have a serious concern that my race could have been a discriminatory factor.” This is poisonous to unit cohesion and trust between ranks, for “it makes you start to question whether the people who are getting promoted really got it for merit or not.”
“The first time anyone suggested that the military begin factoring in race or sex into its recruiting, promotions, or anything else should have been met with a hard and immediate No from military lawyers”, Weiss wrote on LinkedIn. Weiss told Shoemate that in the end, he was forced to conclude that JAGC officers had taken part in “an effort to degrade and destroy the fighting element that protects our Constitution against all all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
“Let’s Talk LGBTQIA+”
A slide from the FOIA response calls out “Microaggressions Against LGBTQIA+” as “subtle acts of exclusion”. Microaggressions are “interactions or behaviors that communicate some sort of bias toward historically marginalized groups”, which of course includes categories created just ten seconds ago, historically speaking. Incredibly, the JAGC had hired a civilian with the equivalent pay rank of colonel to do these trainings.
Potential microaggressions “include misgendering or using the wrong pronouns, using offensive language, excluding LGBTQ+ employees from social activities, assuming a status about their health”, or asking questions such as “Did you have the surgery?”
Anodyne statements like “Being gay is no big deal” are in fact microaggressions, the training says. “Someone making a surface level comment or action can either intentionally, or unintentionally cause harm and drives exclusion and disengagement.”
They might literally die from hearing words. In the Army.
Civilian considerations slip into what is supposed to be a military briefing. The US Army has one single battle dress uniform (BDU) that everyone wears, male or female, yet clothing preferences still bear mention: “One in five LGBTQ+ workers have been told or had coworkers imply that they should dress in a more feminine or masculine manner, even though they were dressed professionally.”
“Microaggressions have the potential of making people feel or believe that they are devalued”, the training says. “They have cumulative effects on one’s self-esteem and can breed chronic mistrust, compound the effects of past traumatic discriminatory situations, and be a risk factor to higher rates of mental health difficulties.” With so may ways to “harm” this “community”, it is little wonder that “62 percent [of them] reported being discriminated against in the past year”.
This is all derived from so-called minority stress theory, a highly-debated concept that blames poor mental health on social marginalization. Problematically for proponents of this theory, about two-thirds of mental health disparity between heterosexuals and people who identify as LGBTQ+ appear to be linked to family and genes instead of the environment. Contrary to the model, psychological or psychiatric distress very often precedes the onset of ‘gender identity’ or dysphoria rather than follows.
Anecdote becomes the only permissible data in these slides. “LGBTQIA+ individuals have been told for too long to internalize their stories as opposed to sharing them”, reads another slide from the FOIA response. Slides offer “resources” such as the Everyday Feminism website, social justice websites, the Human Rights Campaign, and academic critical theory. Soldiers do not learn anything from military or legal scholars in these slides. It is political indoctrination.
The material even pushes a specific, narrow political agenda. Worldwide, political transgenderism has focused on winning the right to ‘self-ID’, that is, to declare oneself the opposite sex without any qualifications or changes. According to the slides, a soldier may simply ask to change their “gender marker” in DEERS, the Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System, and then they can use all facilities intended for the opposite sex. In fact, they are required to do so, and every other soldier is also required to put up with it, according to the slide. It is self-ID for the Army.
Because “transgender Soldiers are not required or expected to modify or adjust their behavior on the fact that they do not ‘match’ other Soldiers”, any male soldier can simply ask for a paperwork change and then enter any female space. “Understand anyone may encounter individuals in barracks, bathrooms, and shower facilities with physical characteristics of the opposite sex despite having the same gender marker in DEERS”, the slide reads.
Weiss was shocked to see that DEIA was also being applied to soldiers’ children. A slide evinces concern for same-sex adoptive families moving “to new locations where maybe a transgender child may not have access to medical care” as an example of needed command support. “When I was doing military justice, a Soldier, much less a JAG officer who let their children take puberty blockers, cross sex hormones, get a double mastectomy, or even pee in the ‘right’ bathroom, would probably have gotten court-martialed for child abuse”, Weiss says.
Based on what Weiss could ascertain, he doubts that the Army Human Resources Command ever conducted a legal review of DEIA, or that the Pentagon-wide DEI initiative for the armed forces had a legal review beforehand. As far as he can tell, no one in HRC or the Pentagon challenged the blatantly illegal order to use racial and other preferences.
The FOIA response to Weiss left out 65 pages of internal legal reviews and opinions. While it is normal for the legal advice given to commanders to be withheld from FOIA responses, Weiss appealed that decision. He believes the public should see the legal reasoning that Army lawyers gave to other Army lawyers to implement DEI, given how seemingly unconstitutional it is at face value.
He also hoped it might show whatever convincing legal arguments that he and so many others missed. Weiss points to the Funded Legal Education Program (FLEP), which turns mere officers into JAGC lawyers. Why would Christine, a graduate of the FLEP program, participate in a scheme to impose DEI criteria in a key JAGC officer selection system? Weiss feels we are owed an answer.
“I cannot understand how educated men with decades of legal experience who served in a military that always strived to be based on merit and equal opportunity would then create, advance, and defend a program premised on a foundation of divisive racial and cultural grievances and an ideology of cultural Marxist nonsense”, Weiss wrote to Lt. Gen. Joseph Berger III, the JAGC commander, on 1 February 2025.
“I did this among other reasons because I know a lot of people still serving in the organization agreed with me but could not speak up or do anything about it,” Weiss tells Polemology.net. “It’s very disappointing to see an organization you love and were proud to serve in get something so wrong and then do nothing to rectify it afterwards or even try to defend or explain themselves.”
“As soldiers and especially military lawyers, we all make mistakes. I’ve certainly made them, but I’ve tried to learn from them and become better. I always looked up to the leaders of the Army JAG Corps and believed there were certain principles that were non-negotiable. Their handling of the DEI disaster really shook my faith.”
The Biden transgender surge
The US Army lists seven core values: Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless Service, Honor, Integrity, and Personal Courage. These values are based on individual moral accountability and merit-based conduct. Group ‘identity’ is not listed among these values.
In the Army, everyone is green, goes the motto.
President Joe Biden had other ideas. He issued Executive Order 13985 in January 2021, just after his inauguration, and then EO 14035 in June 2021 to implement DEI across the US armed forces.
Lt. Gen. Charles N. Pede, and then his successor Lt. Gen. Stuart Risch, both implemented the directives, turning JAGC into the single most influential DEI organization in the Army.
Executive Order 14004, issued on Jan. 25, 2021, revoked President Trump’s ban on transgender military service.
“‘Gender dysphoria’ patient counts jumped roughly 82% during President Joe Biden’s first year in office, according to internal Defense Health Agency (DHA) records”, The Daily Caller reported in August. “The documents identify 17,596 unique patients in a DHA gender dysphoria dataset from 2014 to 2022, including 3,807 patients under 18” (emphasis added).
“In total, 2,081 were 15 or younger, 833 were 16 and 893 were 17”, creating potential legal liability. Emails obtained by Daily Caller show that the Biden DoD would protect civilians or service members from any legal proceedings related to procedures performed on minor children, even paying any settlements or claims.
The surge in patients, both adults in uniform and minor dependents, shows that “this is just something at the top of their list that they prioritized from day one”, James Fitzpatrick, director of the Center to Advance Security in America, told Daily Caller. “They weren’t shy about it. They proudly wanted to push trans ideology and trans medical care in our military, and that includes to spouses and to children, and they were not shy about spending government resources.”
The second Trump administration restored the transgender service ban and started proceedings to remove an estimated 4,000 people from the ranks. This ‘Biden surge’ is crucial context for understanding why Trumpo has taken these actions, so of course it has been entirely elided from all the sympathetic mainstream media coverage.
For example, when The New York Times covered the separation boards in August, reporters Greg Jaffe and Dave Phillips lamented “the same process the military uses to determine whether it should kick out troops who abuse drugs, beat their spouses or steal” being used for soldier separation as if some other, nicer process for separation exists, somewhere.
“The Pentagon has treated the trans separation hearings with levels of security and silence usually reserved for state secrets”, they write, noting “the public is not allowed to attend.” Five paragraphs later, however, a civilian lawyer representing transgender clients in separation board proceedings complains that “It’s in a lot of ways a public humiliation ritual,” contradicting the complaint of secrecy.
Male soldiers required to appear before the board with male haircuts are presented in the article as victims of a cruel regime.
“The Trump administration’s ban targeted troops with gender dysphoria”, the NYT article notes. “Not all transgender people experience gender dysphoria” however, and the female trans-identifying captain at the center of the article even tells the separation board that she does not experience dysphoria even though she has been diagnosed.
In fact transgender identification is just as often the result of paraphilia, i.e. a sexual fetish, especially in males, a point the NYT reporters do not address, but which certainly adds important context to their story.
Underlying all the hoopla is a false assumption that anyone, of any description, has a ‘right’ to serve in the military. No such right exists in federal law or the United States Constitution. On the contrary, the Army excludes people with all sorts of conditions from service: food allergies, psoriasis, sleep apnea, and even ADHD can prevent someone from enlisting, or result in their separation from service.
When the Obama administration changed the rules in 2016, they excepted transgender medicalization from the long list of conditions that can bar any person from military service.
This exception is what Trump reversed, that Biden put back, that Trump has reversed again.
Separation panels for transgender service members are consistently reported by liberal media sources as a form of ‘targeting’ when they are in fact a case of special pleading being reversed.
Many observers worried, with justification, that some people were joining the Biden military specifically in order to access transgender medicalization for free. A study by the RAND Corporation, commissioned by the Obama administration, determined that a soldier starting surgical transition would be nondeployable for 34 weeks.
Biden specifically waived this convalescent leave, a consideration that has never been applied to any other medical condition at enlistment. Depending on the military occupational specialty (MOS), a soldier can potentially spend half or more of their contracted time in service training for their job and transitioning. The Army gets a raw deal with this plan.
The consequences of transgender medicalization can be severe: males who take estrogen frequently have lower bone density, brain shrinkage, gallstones, pancreatitis, and increased cardiac risk, to name just a few complications. Phalloplasty and vaginoplasty have extremely high rates of urinary complications and revision surgery. The more medicalized a soldier is, the less deployable they are.
A person on exogenous hormones after surgical removal of the gonads will be entirely dependent on continuous supply. Imagine a soldier in the jungle who has run out of estrogen. Imagine a POW in the hands of the enemy who needs regular hormone injections to survive. These are not unrealistic scenarios. Now imagine they wet themselves regularly. How much does that impact readiness?
There are not enough transgender people to make an army
However, the most damaging consequence of DEI and transgender ‘inclusion’ was a severe recruiting crisis. “The military cannot be organized like a Harvard fraternity, catering to ever-more-obscure constituencies”, Secretary Hegseth wrote in his book The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free. “Our key constituency is normal men, looking to be heroes and not victims.”
DEIA recruits and promotes marginal groups at the expense of the single largest demographic to serve. “There just aren’t enough lesbians from San Francisco who want to join the 82nd Airborne”, Hegseth writes. “Not only do the lesbians not join, but those very same ads turn off the young, patriotic, Christian men who have traditionally filled our ranks.”
Hegseth is hardly alone in his diagnosis. “By signaling that white men were less welcome, DEI initiatives pushed thousands of them away from military service”, Mike Gallagher and Kevin Wallsten wrote in a January op-ed at The Wall Street Journal. Military recruiting is intergenerational, meaning that veterans encourage young people in their families to join, but this traditional system broke down in the decade before Trump was reelected.
The percentage of white male veterans who said in a 2019 Pew study that they would advise a young family member to join the military was 81%. Only 63% said so in the 2024 Survey of Military Veterans, which also asked why. Far more white male respondents pointed to the military’s “DEI and other social policies” (66%) than to the “possibility of physical injury or death” (38%) or the “possibility of psychological problems” (35%).
The trend hit more than just white males, as evidenced by the instant rebound in all demographics after Trump was reelected in 2024. “Female recruitment is up from 16,725 in 2024 to 23,985 in 2025. Encouragement to enlist increased among blacks (9 points), Hispanics (14 points), and women under 55 (15 points) since 2023 in the Reagan National Defense Survey.”
This completely debunks the argument that armed forces need DEI to recruit women and minorities. Exactly the opposite is true: the DEI Army repels them.
DEI was blamed for the recruiting crisis even during the Biden administration. A 2023 House Oversight Committee hearing found that “the Biden Administration’s push for progressivism to be infused into the military has negatively affected military readiness and recruitment.”
Furthermore, DEI training “has taken priority over common sense military capability training, which demoralizes our men and women in the armed forces.” A unit can either devote an hour on the training schedule to DEI, or to combat readiness, but not both.
Examples abound. A Chinese PLA soldier who spends 20 percent of their training time on ‘Chairman Xi Jinping Thought’ will be less effective for it in any actual war. Giving precedence to progressive political indoctrination has the same effects on the readiness of the US Army.
For decades, the Army has prohibited racial and sex discrimination, enforcing that ban through Equal Opportunity regulations. This system worked fine, which undermines the entire case that DEI was ever needed in the first place. Instead, it was a purely political exercise that created problems where none had existed. With so little actual racism and sexism in the ranks, new racism and sexism had to be created to meet the demand of political progressives.
Transgender ‘inclusion’ was an added layer of complication that further deterred the average recruit from joining. After all, if everyone who is not like you will be favored for advancement, even if the difference is absurd, why bother to enlist? In this way, the effects of DEIA mirror the broader diminishment of white men in college acceptance, hiring, and career development in recent years.
JAGC takes over the mission
The US Army Human Resources Command Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Workforce Development was stood up in October of 2021. In October 2024, Lt. Gen. Berger hosted a podcast with Col. Shay Stinson, the head of the brand-new Office of Professional and Organizational Development (OPOD), to explain how OPOD would take over the DEIA mission from HR Command. The podcast was deleted a few weeks later, after Donald Trump was elected to his second term, but it was downloaded and archived on Instagram by a concerned citizen.
Despite Congress limiting all civilian DEI personnel to grades of GS-10 and below, equivalent to a captain, JAG Corps leadership “remains committed to DEIA principles,” Col. Stinson explained. OPOD had a strategic plan to “continue the work started by the team despite the current constraints”, infusing DEIA throughout the JAGC. Promotions, hiring, and firing decisions would still be made on the basis of progressive political priorities.
Berger ran afoul of the new Trump administration right away and lasted only eight months in his position. Shortly after Inauguration Day, he “was asked for his advice about the legality of using Texas National Guard soldiers for immigration enforcement”, according to CNN reporter Natasha Bertrand. Berger “was told by the department’s acting general counsel, Charlie Young, to stop meddling in state affairs” when he questioned the idea.
During February, “Berger and his team began asking questions of civilian leaders about the legality of firing huge swaths of probationary Defense Department employees, which was being pushed at the time by the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency” (emphasis added).
Supposedly, DOGE “could break the law and potentially harm the US military’s ability to fight.” Once again, the progressive pet project of DEI was being deliberately misrepresented as a readiness issue. Bertrand fails to provide important context: civilian hiring and firing is not in the wheelhouse of JAGC.
Berger was out of bounds, and he wanted to bring other JAG officers across the line with him. For “when officials in Berger’s office sought to discuss the legal basis of the mass purge — which they would likely have to defend in court — Young refused to speak to them altogether, making clear he would only speak to the Army’s top civilian lawyer at the time, the sources recalled” (emphasis added).
These officers were the JAGC DEI affinity group. The phrase “affinity groups” appears in the Weiss FOIA slides. Black soldiers, Hispanic soldiers, female soldiers, and of course the LGBTQ+ soldiers are each encouraged to form affinity groups. Ostensibly, this is for mentoring purposes, so that women will learn from women, Black from Black, lesbian from lesbian, and so on.
In practice, this form of organizing prevents effective mentorship between unlike soldiers, narrowing the utility of the mentoring. More to the point, however, it is an explicitly leftist organizing tactic.
What Berger appears to have tried to do here is called a struggle session. Developed by Chairman Mao, this tactic has developed into ‘cancel culture’ in western societies during the last decade. Progressive activists exert pressure from within organizations, transforming them in the process.
For example, in 2019 Maya Forstater was forced out of her job for alleged transphobia after an internal process. British choreographer Rosie Kay was forced out of her own dance company in 2021 over accusations of transphobia after a contentious meeting. In 2023, Dr. Sarah Redvers “was accused of transphobia, bullied and harassed out of her child protection job in the NHS” under similar circumstances.
Each organization was cleansed of a heretic. Within political transgenderism, “trans liberation is a class struggle”, i.e. a Marxist cause. The purpose of importing transgenderism into the military is to transform the institution and purge the heretics.
Berger was fired on 21 February 2025. Hegseth reduced the power of JAGC within the Department of War. “I see this as part of an overall strategy to reduce the role of lawyers in the armed forces and move them out of the way,” one source told Bertrand. “Decapitating those organizations”—the Army and Air Force JAG Corps—“was an easy way for Hegseth to send a strong message from the outset and put the entire JAG corps on notice,” said another.
It is highly likely these sources were people in Berger’s DEI affinity group. The absent context that Berger and JAGC have no legal role in oversight of civilian hiring and firing at the Pentagon makes Young seem like the villain when he was quite right to rely on the Pentagon’s top civilian lawyer, the General Counsel of the Department of Defense.
Berger was fired one week after his memorandum announcing his establishment of OPOD, and his appointment of Stinson, leaked on the LibsofTikTok X account. Mainstream media sources focused their reporting on the politics of Chaya Raichik, who runs the account, rather than the implications of the content. “This is an old memo”, the official US Army X account quote-tweeted. “DEI is dead at #USArmy”.
Or is it?
CONCLUSION
Berger and his DEI affinity group demanded to know the “legal basis” under which the Trump administration was about to “purge” transgender soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines. That “legal basis” is called the United States Constitution. The president is the commander-in-chief of the United States armed forces and gets to reverse political decisions by previous presidents. A new president can always reverse the ban in the future, on the same “legal basis”.
Berger had similarly challenged the authority of the governor of Texas to order the Texas National Guard to patrol the borders of Texas. Under America’s Constitutional framework, the governor of Texas is the commander-in-chief of the Texas National Guard. Yet press coverage of the controversy seldom acknowledged this, and in Natasha Bertrand’s CNN coverage it was slyly supposed to be an overreach of authority by President Trump.
When he replaced Joseph Berger, Secretary Hegseth passed over the deputy commander of JAGC, Maj. Gen. Robert A. Borcherding. Hegseth’s pick, Maj. Gen. Christine, is not a career JAG officer. Weiss has great respect for Christine, with whom he deployed in Iraq for 9 months. But he worries that the silence from Christine is an ominous sign something illegal happened inside JAGC. “If you did nothing wrong why don’t you write back?”
Armies need lawyers, but battle is not the place for lawyering. Armies serve politics, but battle is not the place for politics. The US Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps has been a scene of ideological contest for the last two decades, an internal struggle by lawyers and political actors.
Pete Hegseth came to the job with a hatred for JAG officers who throw their weight around in headquarters and prosecute warfighters for fighting wars. He serves a president with an aggressive strategy, a president who was elected with a popular mandate, for better or worse.
The campaign to frame them as insider threats to the American Constitutional system is a projection of the progressive political mind. DEIA was a pernicious and destructive insider threat to American national security.
And DEIA can always come back. Mason Weiss notes that the documents he uncovered were not deleted. “They archived them, which tells me they’re just waiting for a sympathetic administration to come back in and start this process back up, and they’re going to come back at it swinging hard.” They aim to change the military completely by changing its culture.
A recruiting crisis is just part of the progressive change theory; a good leftist never wastes a good crisis. Australia has started to address their recruiting crisis by spending more, and so has the UK, though the British Army is still struggling at historic lows. Democrats are wont to throw money at problems on any day of the week, and they can always bring immigrants to America to wear the uniform and carry guns, if they are hard-pressed enough for soldiers. See how that works?
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