The benefit and logic lie at the opposite pole.

The advantage of open records is that the swamp of rumors, legends, and allegations of nepotism, alumni cabals, secret societies, conspiracies, mentor interference, coded messages from the ruling clique to their agents and similar skullduggery drains away. With a secret ballot the cloud of retribution by the above vs maverick members of the board falls away. The result is strengthening the service members faith in the validity of the selection process, especially for high rank. Not to mention protecting the validity of the process. I didn’t invent the above foolishness, nor do I embrace it. But it’s out there…

Even specifying all but Chaplains would be beneficial.

“Make all records of the boards public except the officers’ records (or summaries/extracts thereof), make all votes by secret ballot, and present all officers considered to the board in order of date of birth, oldest first. Have licensed and bonded civilians provided by a different service than that holding the promotion board redact all seemingly extraneous marks, folds,small tears and cuts, and annotations from the records presented to the board. PUBLISH all instructions to the board two weeks prior to convening the board. Sunlight, the best disinfectant.”

Not that I would disagree with you, Sir, but there has been at least one countervening, legal precedent for promotion board secrecy:

WASHINGTON, Jul 27, 2004 (United Press International via COMTEX) — An appeals court in Washington Tuesday ruled Navy chaplain promotion boards must keep their proceedings secret.

Roger that. I was trying out my “bitter irony”. Guess it needs work.

Two white male Middies being replaced because of their lack of pigment qualifies as racism.

PERMDUINS: http://blog.usni.org/?p=4926

That said, the fact that people are willing to come to this conclusion does illustrate some of the problems with how “diversity” is conceptualized and practiced. These are everyone’s problems.

There IS personal and structural racism in the military because there IS racism in the nation. This is a fact. We should not deny that. I won’t.

The challenge is how to address it. I agree with much of what Cdr. S argues regarding diversity in the Navy. Specifically, there is a diversity industry motivated at least in part by organizational and bureaucratic survival and growth. Also, that having an honest written conversation about race has become extremely difficult (the diversity bullies part but also see overreaction above).

Simply put, the way diversity is practiced today is wrong. Racism is racism, no matter which direction it goes. The plusses and minuses don’t cancel out, it’s all minuses. To set aside quotas or “representative” spots perpetuates the problems two ways, it deeply embitters those not in the preferred group (specifically against the preferred group I might add) and it hamstrings those (of any group) who could compete on their merit. How does this help things?

Even more corrosive though is the message that it sends that the appearance of diversity is more important than addressing the real racism. Before we get to post-racial and don’t care, we have to address these things. The appearance of diversity is a phenomenal enabler (in the AA sense of the word) that allows us not to face this problem. Again, how does this help?

You might consider bouncing over to CDR Salamander’s blog and getting some background on this, or taking a look here http://blog.usni.org/?p=4926.

It beats having one’s head in the sand….