Hello,
I hope everyone is doing well. I am a US citizen of indian origin who is seriously considering a future career in the U.S. military, potentially in combat units. I wanted to ask for an honest perspective based on your experience—what is the environment like for Indians or other ethnic minorities in the military?
Specifically, how prevalent is racism in day-to-day service and within high-performance units, and does it meaningfully affect career progression or unit cohesion? I’m looking for a realistic, firsthand assessment rather than assumptions.
Thank you for your time, and I appreciate the work you do in sharing insight into the military community.
I served in a number of units that some might consider "high-performance:" 101st Airborne, 5th SF Group, 160th SOAR, JSOC, faculty at West Point.
The kind of racism you describe is so vanishingly rare in those organizations, especially the latter ones, as to be almost non-existent. To the contrary, the type of institutional discrimination I saw most during my Army career was directed towards men in general and straight white men in particular, in the form of quotas, preferential treatment on boards, DEI, differing physical fitness standards, etc.
The worst part of the whole thing was, the people who were being "protected" or advantaged through these discriminatory policies didn't need them. They were fully capable of performing at the same level on their own. It was my deep honor to serve with so many different types of people throughout my military career, who didn't need a thumb on the scale of their performance or aptitude. Racism--against ANY group--is bad for ANY organization.
That said, the Army is a very large organization and it's full of people. Some people carry biases based on race, gender, ethnicity, national origin... take your pick. I won't pretend it doesn't happen from time to time, although I never saw it in any of the high performing units I was in. I'll add that anytime you're looking for something, you're going to find more of it. So if you come into the military looking for "muh raciszms!!" you're going to find a whole bunch of it, even where it doesn't exist.
If you're worried about some kind of institutional bias against Indians... don't. It's not there. The US military, especially in elite units, is VERY pragmatic. Can you do the job, and would you be a good fit? If the answer is "yes," you'll have a long an rewarding career. If the answer is "no," is probably not because of where your ancestors were born.
For me personally, the limited times that I've worked with Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi soldiers/colleagues in our military, they were great and everyone liked them--not because they were from those places, but because they were good at their jobs and were good people. That's a sample size of N=1 from an anonymous guy on the Internet, but you asked...
