Over the past two decades, the military has made major progress in achieving a fully integrated, highly qualified officer corps. It cannot maintain the diversity it now enjoys without the ability to recruit and educate a diverse officer corps. The primary sources for the nation's officer corps are the ROTC and our service academies. The academies use limited race-conscious recruiting and admissions policies. The pool of minority candidates at any given ROTC member institution is limited by the number of minority students admitted. A cohesive military requires a diverse officer corps, and it requires that our officers be educated and trained in diverse educational settings.

To resolve this threat to combat readiness, the armed services moved aggressively to diversify the officer corps and, equally important, to train all officers in diverse educational environments. In full accord with Bakke and the Defense Department's affirmative action program, the academies and the ROTC have set goals for minority officer candidates, and they work hard to achieve those goals. They use financial and tutorial assistance as well as recruiting programs to expand the pool of highly qualified minority candidates in a variety of explicitly race-conscious ways. They also employ race as a factor in recruiting and admissions policies and decisions.