The Pernicious Effects of DEI

A program that only serves its sponsors

When you are being told to look in a certain direction, it’s a good idea to question why that is. What should I not look at? During the Biden years, these were called distractions. The same applies under the new sheriff, too, which brings us to the avalanche of conjecture, speculation, and finger-pointing that followed last week’s mid-air collision above the Potomac River.

There is an undo amount of attention – and a serious helping of blame – being foisted upon the Blackhawk pilot, 28-year-old Rebecca Lobach. People don’t know a damn thing about Ms. Lobach other than she had about 500 hours of flight time, did a turn as a military social aide during the Biden years, and was a woman. That last point has somehow become the most critical one. For that, we can thank the social engineers for, predictably, doing more to harm their intended beneficiaries than help them.

Was Lobach a DEI hire? It does not appear so. For starters, her 500 hours in the saddle is said to be normal for Army pilots of similar tenure. By contrast, the male instructor in the next seat had more than 1,000 hours but was also 11 years older. She was on the upper end of the scale among ROTC cadets while attending the University of North Carolina, so it is not credible to suggest that standards were fudged to her benefit. Lastly, the first female Army aviator was christened in 1974 and 1,700 women are in cockpits across all branches today, so Lobach is hardly a pioneer.

Accusations that Lobach was a quota pilot shove far more obvious questions into the background. We’ll get to some of those questions shortly, but the DEI angle demands scrutiny it seldom gets. The various combinations of altered standards, reduced qualifications, or eliminated tests are not just demeaning to those who benefit. They are especially harmful to the people who are qualified and who can demonstrate subject matter mastery.

This nasty system robs them of the opportunity to demonstrate that they are amply capable of performing whatever role is involved. I don’t know if minorities are unaware of this condescension towards them, don’t care so long as they benefit, or accept it as how things are done, but it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to start a new assignment with a massive cloud of doubt floating above their head.

Imagine your co-workers’ first question being not whether you’re up to the job but whether you are there due to skin color, sex, or some other marker of the grievance-industrial complex. Like it or not, you are seen first as “less than” and probably lose some of the benefit of the doubt that newbies are typically afforded as they become acclimated. The first mistake becomes magnified, triggering a negative feedback loop that warps the learning curve – “Of course, so-and-so got it wrong,” as if the rest of us were perfect on our first day and only improved from there.

The DEI distraction, in this case, takes away from reasonable questions such as, were the Blackhawk’s collision avoidance systems operational, what was the instructor doing, and who failed to notice the helicopter’s altitude problem? It is impossible to imagine no alarms screaming for corrective action or that such avionics would be turned off in relatively crowded airspace at night. But that’s just me. I like for things to make sense and very little of this does.

It's also hard to see what purpose was served by withholding Lobach’s identity while releasing the names of the two men aboard. Again, it smacks of an attempt to deflect public attention toward the pilot, attention that no one can credibly say is warranted in the first place. This is hardly the military’s first fatal crash; it’s not even the deadliest involving service members. But people were less likely to stand atop dead bodies back then for the sake of politics.

This is a case where we’d probably be better served by conspiracy theories than personal attacks. Two come to mind though they blend into one: the collision was intentional, and the target was someone aboard the plane whose name very few people outside of certain circles would recognize. The second plotline has come up in spy novels from time to time; yes, people in that world will take out an entire planeload for the sake of killing one person. I am not saying either has merit, just that it’s unusual to have so little tinfoil hattery following such an incident.

The investigation that is underway will yield a conclusion at some point in time, though it’s even odds whether the public believes what it is told. In civilian flights, the blame falls on the pilot or air crew nearly 90% of the time. One report put the rate for military flight accidents at a bit more than 40%. The January 29^th collision came on the heels of what was the worst in a series of bad years for Army aviation, with several officials pointing to training issues that demand resolution.

As fate would have it, Rebecca Lobach’s last flight was a training mission, a routine nighttime qual exercise in airspace that sees no shortage of military activity. In mastering the obvious, NBC tells us “What happened inside the Army Black Hawk helicopter in the moments before the fatal crash is key to unraveling the disaster, experts say.” No kidding. Right now, it looks like one aircraft was where it should have been and the other was not, but who knows what the flight recorders will reveal or what parts of that information will be revealed to us.

In the meantime, perhaps DEI proponents could use this time not to gloat that the collision does not appear to have been a case of identity gone wild, but rather to look at how real lives are affected by programs that blatantly violate every non-discrimination law in existence. People are not done any favors by being given unearned opportunities, nor are those who must co-exist with the beneficiaries. And in this case, it looks a bit like a young lady’s memory is being unfairly tarnished for a policy that had no bearing on her.