You won’t find this picture of the Enola Gay in its old place on an Air Force website anymore. The B-29 Superfortress is an important part of American history. The aircraft carried the nuclear weapons that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But many photographs of the nuclear bomber have been scrubbed from DoD websites as part of a broader purge of “woke” photographs on Pentagon websites.
This picture of the Enola Gay isn’t the only image to vanish from Pentagon archives in recent weeks. A team of journalists at the Associated Press has archived and counted 26,000 separate pieces of media that the DoD has disappeared from its history. The AP said the list was incomplete, that there are probably more, and that the purge is ongoing.
The photo purge is the result of Donald Trump’s executive order ordering the end of “radical and wasteful government DEI programs.” After Trump signed the order, the Pentagon announced the purge of woke images from its databases and started removing stuff from the internet. The goal, it said, was to take down all DEI-related imagery and articles on its various websites as part of a “digital content refresh” that more closely aligns with the Trump administration and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseht’s views of the American military.
Content was removed to align with the President’s executive orders and DoD priorities in accordance with DoD instruction 5400.17, “Official Use of Social Media for Public Affairs Purposes.” pic.twitter.com/XkszFOFfXQ
— U.S. Navy (@USNavy) February 27, 2025
The purge has been slipshod and imprecise. It’s unclear why this picture of The Enola Gay was removed from an Air Force page, but I would guess it’s because the URL ends in “deiatomic-exposure” and triggered an automatic system looking for the letters “DEI.” This specific picture of the bomber is still present in another Pentagon database.
The Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (DVIDS), a DoD repository of images and videos, also contains several photos of the bomber. DVIDS also still has photos and videos of multiple service members with the last name “Gay” so that likely wasn’t a trigger word for however the Pentagon did its purge. Yet other innocuous photos of the Enola Gay have been removed. As with so many other things in the Trump administration, the facts are slippery and seem to change moment to moment.
But the Pentagon has still removed a lot of content, mostly related to Black and female servicemembers and various diversity and inclusion initiatives. A 15-year-old article on the Air Force website about an all-female crew of AF support staff is gone. A lecture from a Tuskegee Airman about integration is gone. Photos of a multicultural celebration at a Marine Corps base are gone. The disappeared content is overwhelmingly stuff that featured women and non-white service members.
The AP’s database is searchable and includes the URLs, keywords, and titles the original photos were uploaded under. It’s a boon to archivists looking to preserve bits of history the Trump administration is seeking to destroy and the Soldiers, Marines, Airmen, and Sailors who were highlighted in these photos.
A “content refresh” means a change of messaging. Hegseth has made much of the idea that the U.S. military needs to focus on lethality only. For him, the Pentagon is a group of killers meant only to destroy things. Under his leadership, the DoD has emphasized that idea in its public communications.
On March 1, the U.S. Central Command posted a video on X of a Hellfire R-9X striking a target in Syria. When a R-9X strikes, it doesn’t explode. Instead, six blades pop out of it to cut up its target. Other military accounts reposted the video and added pithy bits of glee. “Anytime, Anywhere means the ability to kill the driver and mentally traumatize a passenger for life, without killing them, from 20K feet,” said the Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force.
Much of the world, including U.S. citizens, view the American military as a group of bullies and thugs. The Pentagon has worked hard to shift that perception. The images and videos it is scrubbing from the internet are part of a concerted campaign to show America and the world that it was more than just killers.
Trump and Hegseth have decided that’s all the Pentagon is and all it can ever be.
Read the full article here
