Pentagon restores deleted websites

The United States is known to keep its war veterans in high honor. In some places, however, there was little to feel of appreciation in the past few weeks: the Ministry of Defense deleted some websites from its archive that praised women, blacks or relatives of minorities.

The background is the instructions of US President Donald Trump to terminate diversity programs. The deletions had triggered a lot of criticism, after all, they were part of war heroes and other soldiers who had risked their lives for their country. After the public pressure of the past few days, the Pentagon reacted and at least restored some of the deleted pages.

“In the rare cases in which content-whether intentionally or accidentally-is removed outside the clearly defined area of ​​scope of the directive, we indicate the departments to correct the content, so that our heroes are recognized for their committed service at the side of their American fellow citizens,” said a spokesman for the US Ministry of Defense. At the same time, the Pentagon made it clear that it was basically wanting to continue to hold on to the deletions.

Among other things, the case of the black war hero Charles Calvin Rogers caused a sensation. Rogers was awarded the Medal of Honor in 1970 for his commitment in the Vietnam War, the highest military award of the US government. Nevertheless, the website for its memory on the website of the Pentagon was no longer found. A note in the URL indicated that it had fallen victim to the processing of the diversity measures. In the meantime it is.

Information about the Navajo Code Talkers had also temporarily disappeared from the Ministry of Department. During the Second World War, the members of an indigenous tribe transmitted decisive military information with a unique code that could not be decrypted. As the AP news agency reports, some pages were not available on the subject, but were restored a day later. The White House said that a AI had sorted out all the content in which the word “Navajo” occurs.

The deleted content also included the first black baseball player in the US League MLB. The website is now available again. Robinson voluntarily reported to the army during the Second World War. However, his military career ended an abrupt end when he refused in the rear part of the bus intended for black people and was therefore put before a military court.

In total, thousands of pages were deleted by the Ministry of Defense. After taking office, Donald Trump had given everyone the instruction to end their diversity programs. These programs should originally promote diversity, equality and inclusion. The diversity programs would undermine the leadership as well as the cohesion of military associations and thus the “deadliness” and “willingness to fight” of the troop, Trump had declared.

The new US defense minister Pete Hegseth is also a decisive opponent of diversity and equality measures. “I think the sentence ‘Our diversity is our strength’ for the stupidest expression in military history,” Hegseth had explained.

Sources: ,,, news agency dpa