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Trump Jr.’s claim of 6 million military hours spent on a ‘woke’ agenda

TU Curmudgeon

B.A. (Sarc), LLb. (Lex Sarcasus), PhD (Sarc.)
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From The Washington Post


“Our generals, the great woke leaders of our military that spent 6 million man-hours training our troops about wokeness — not fighting, not killing bad guys. They wanted to learn about White rage, a term none of us had heard of prior to him [Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff] testifying, right?”

— Donald Trump Jr., in remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Feb. 27
The former president’s son, addressing the conservative faithful, often spoke in shorthand that would only make sense if you were a regular viewer of Fox News or Newsmax. His reference to “6 million man-hours” was echoed by some other speakers. So let’s dive in and explain what’s going on here.

Not surprisingly, it’s a number lacking significant context.

The Facts​

A spokesman for Trump did not respond to a request for comment, but we quickly traced the source of the 6 million figure. Somewhat unique to Trumpworld, it was not a number invented out of whole cloth.

The figure comes from a letter sent by Milley to Sen. James M. Inhofe (Okla.), the top-ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Inhofe had requested how much time was spent on three items required by the Defense Department — an extremism “stand-down” related to the Jan. 6 attacks on the Capitol, a climate change plan and a new diversity, equity and inclusion training program.

The biggest chunk of time was devoted to the extremism stand-down — nearly 5.4 million hours. Since nearly 2.5 million members of the military participated, that means about two hours per person, which Milley noted is “comparable to other Joint Force periodic training requirements.” The climate change plan (1,059 hours) and diversity training (529,711 hours) brought the total up to 5.9 million hours. But you can see that more than 90 percent of the total related to the extremism course.

To put this big number in perspective, if every service member did just four hours of physical training a week — and the figure probably is higher — that would mean 10 million hours a week and more than 500 million hours a year. So 6 million hours for a discussion on extremism in the ranks is just a drop in the bucket.

COMMENT:-
The "woke" part of that 5,900,000 hours works out to around 530,770 hours and that works out to around 14 minutes and 37.62 seconds per person in the US military.​
 
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