Under Joe Biden, Air Force Academy brass decided cadets couldn't handle a hard conversation about DEI.
So the Pentagon paid a private tech company nearly six figures to build them a robot to practice on.
What that virtual reality machine actually taught young officers should make every taxpayer furious.
The Contract Nobody In Uniform Asked For
The Air Force Research Laboratory signed contract FA864922P1122 on July 20, 2022.
The price tag: $749,895.
The recipient was a small tech firm called Smarter Reality LLC.
Their product was called the "Conflict Resolution Simulator."
Strap on an Oculus headset, and a cadet found himself face to face with an AI-powered virtual companion – complete with natural language processing and voice recognition – built to rehearse "difficult conversations."
The Daily Caller obtained the contract records and laid out exactly what those conversations were about.
Leadership. Discipline. Honor. And diversity, equity and inclusion.
Then-Air Force Academy Superintendent Lt. Gen. Richard Clark put his name behind the project.
His justification, according to the contract paperwork: "Cadets and junior personnel struggle conducting difficult conversations related to honor, diversity and inclusion and leadership and discipline."
Translation – the Biden Pentagon believed the future officers who'd lead troops into combat couldn't be trusted to talk about race and gender without an AI avatar walking them through it first.
By February 9, 2023, an alpha version was already in cadets' hands at the Academy.
A Chatbot While China Builds Warships
This didn't happen in a vacuum.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn's office reported that under Biden, the military logged nearly 6 million man-hours on so-called "woke" training – man-hours that never went toward marksmanship, maintenance or mission readiness.
The Pentagon later admitted it couldn't even calculate the full cost of its diversity training programs because Congress had defunded the DEI offices that tracked the numbers.
That's not transparency – that's a bureaucracy that lost track of its own money while lecturing 19-year-old cadets about pronouns.
Meanwhile, China was launching aircraft carriers and Russia was testing hypersonic weapons, and the Biden Air Force was commissioning a talking hologram to teach virtue signaling.
Every dollar spent building a DEI chatbot is a dollar that didn't go toward jet fuel, ammunition or a single extra flight hour for a pilot who might one day face the People's Liberation Army in the sky.
Hegseth Is Cleaning Out the Closet
The good news – Pete Hegseth isn't playing along.
His Pentagon has already terminated $5.1 billion in consulting and "non-essential" contracts, with DEI programs squarely in the crosshairs.
A Government Accountability Office review found DEI programs vanishing from the military under the new administration.
Hegseth has told troops flatly that if they oppose his push to scrap woke policies and restore the military's "warrior ethos," they can resign.
He's said it plainly – the mission is lethality, not sensitivity training, and any contractor selling the Pentagon a virtual reality feelings coach should expect a call from his budget office.
Smarter Reality's own government filings show the company built its business model chasing federal contracts exactly like this one, and taxpayers deserve to know how many other agencies signed similar checks before anyone in Washington started asking whether readiness or ideology was driving the purchase orders.
USAspending.gov shows $0 in recorded outlays on the contract, which either means Smarter Reality never got its final payment or the Pentagon's own books are too sloppy to say for sure – and neither answer is reassuring.
What's certain is this – the same bureaucrats who told parents there was no money for military housing repairs or barracks upgrades found $749,895 to build a video game about diversity.
Sources:
- Ben Whedon, "Air Force Awarded Nearly $750,000 For AI-Powered DEI Training Tool Under Biden," The Daily Caller, August 26, 2026.
- Staff, "DEI programs vanish from military, reports GAO," The Washington Times, April 18, 2025.
- Staff, "Under Biden, Military Spent Nearly 6 Million Man-Hours On 'Woke' Training," Office of Sen. Marsha Blackburn, February 2022.
- Staff, "DEI Is Distracting Our Military From Its Primary Task," The Heritage Foundation.
- Staff, "Hegseth cuts $5.1B in spending on 'wasteful' Pentagon consulting contracts," UPI, April 12, 2025.
- Fox News Staff, "Hegseth Tells Troops to Resign if They Oppose His Plan to Scrap Woke Policies and Restore Warrior Ethos," Fox News, 2026.
