43% of troops are black. Leadership should reflect that or at least be in the 30% range. The discrepancy between the leadership and rank and file point to a institutional race problem.
It was also armed forces policy to be racist and a lot of the same mindsets still apply.
"The reasons there are so few people of color at the top lie deep in the history and culture of the United States military.
A 1925 guidance for Army officers stated that black service members were a class “from which we cannot expect to draw leadership material.”
"Interviews with more than three dozen white, black and Hispanic service members and officers depict an entrenched and clubby system with near
cement ceilings for minority groups."
"In December, West Point announced that its Black Knights football team had removed from its flag the initials G.F.B.D., for “God Forgives, Brothers Don’t,” after learning that it was
a slogan demanding loyalty by the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, a white supremacist prison gang.
The small sniper community in the Marine Corps has often used a Nazi symbol, the lightning bolt insignia of Hitler’s SS units, as a stand-in for “Scout Sniper.” Although the Marine Corps leadership moved quickly to stamp out the symbol after a photo of a unit posing with an SS flag surfaced in Afghanistan in 2012, it still persists, Marines say, much like a secret handshake.
All my ex military friends told me this a long time ago. Everyone knows about the racism in the military.
