More pages honoring diversity in US military history have been removed from defense department websites as the Pentagon undergoes what appears to be a purge of content that it considered to be related to diversity, equity and inclusion – or DEI.
Articles about the Native American code talkers in the second world war appear to have been removed from military websites, with an error page being shown in place of the pages. Internet archive websites show some of the pages were still up in early March before being taken down. The removal of the pages was first reported by Axios.
Native Americans helped the US send messages in the first and second world wars in secret using their tribal language. The use of the Choctaw language in the first world war was so successful that Germany and Japan sent students to the US after the war to study Native American languages.
In the second world war, the military enlisted Navajo to communicate messages in their language, which is known to be one of the hardest languages to learn. To further encrypt messages, the Native American code talkers encoded the language with word substitutions. More than 400 Navajo were part of the code talkers program during the war.
In recent weeks, the Pentagon appears to have focused on removing any webpage that it deems to be “DEI”. The webpages that it has taken down mostly have to deal with women or decorated service members who were not white.
Often seen within the URLs of the removed webpages on the Native American code talkers are the letters “DEI”, suggesting that the department has been removing the webpages in accordance with Donald Trump’s presidential orders banning all DEI initiatives within the federal government.
After an outcry from the families of veterans, the Department of Defense restored a webpage celebrating the 442nd regimental combat team, a unit of Japanese American soldiers who fought for the US in the second world war and became the most decorated unit from that war.
Upon restoring the page, the Pentagon said in a statement that it was following guidance from Trump’s executive order and Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense.
“The 442nd Regimental Combat team holds an honored place in Army History, and we are pleased to republish an article that highlights the brave soldiers,” the Pentagon said in a statement to Hawaii News Now.
A similar pattern of events ensued after the Pentagon removed the webpage of Maj Gen Charles Calvin Rogers, a Black Medal of Honor recipient who had served in Vietnam. The defense department restored the webpage but took on a more defiant tone regarding the website purging project.
“I think the president and secretary have been very clear on this – that anybody that says in the Department of Defense that diversity is our strength is, frankly, incorrect,” department spokesperson Sean Parnell told the Guardian in a statement. The statement echoed a sentiment Hegseth voiced in February, when he said: “I think the single dumbest phrase in military history is ‘our diversity is our strength’.”
