The head of recruitment for the United Kingdom's Royal Air Force, a senior female officer, has reportedly resigned in protest of a diversity policy critics say has set "impossible" targets and jeopardized U.K. national security.
White male applicants are being excluded from job offers in the RAF under diversity guidelines set by Air Chief Marshal Sir Mike Wigston, Sky News reported. Sources who spoke to the outlet complained that diversity targets set by air force leadership have led to hiring restrictions that are threatening military preparedness, comparing the situation to the pre-World War II era.
"Then you look at the head of the RAF and he's prepared to break the operational requirement of the air force just to meet diversity [targets]," one source said.
Defense leadership in the United Kingdom has set a target to increase the ratio of female recruits joining the armed forces to 30% by 2030. In the RAF, officials aim to have 40% of all recruits be women by the end of the decade, which is more than double the current level, according to Sky News.
A similar target has been set for ethnic minorities, with the Ministry of Defense aiming to have 20% of all air force recruits be non-whites in the same time frame, Sky News reports.
[The UK is 87% white but dropping fast]
They are smart, but they also suffer from that old Mark Twain saying: "It ain't you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so".
It's all a bunch of managers and MBAs who truly think they can plug whoever they want into various parts of the organization, and it'll keep functioning. Because that largely is the way things work at large organizations for managers and MBAs. But that's not the way it works in a lot of other parts of the organization. And so far it's held true because they haven't quite knocked down enough of the structure for the whole thing to collapse. But that doesn't mean that the thing will keep standing if they keep hacking at it.
See this all the time in software: "Oh we'll just offshore it! They're programmers too, right? Same as you! Except cheaper!" Have had front-row seats to how well that works out.
It's a modification of the Gell-Mann effect: if I see managers making such a foolish assumption in my own area of expertise, why wouldn't I assume they aren't making the same foolish assumption everywhere else?
Military is different, since soldiers have to be interchangeable.