This may be a factor in why we're up to our eyeballs in threats to our security

Ridiculously and pathetically skewed priorities much?

The Central Intelligence Agency is once again mired in crisis. CIA Director John Brennan finds himself “deeply concerned.” The spy agency he runs suffers from an affliction that he says has “persisted despite repeated efforts by Agency leaders to address it.” 

What is ailing this vital guardian of national security? The CIA’s upper echelon, Mr. Brennan said on Tuesday, does “not reflect the diversity of the Agency workforce or of the nation.”

Mr. Brennan was commenting on the “Director’s Diversity in Leadership Study,” an unclassified report released that day. The study comes to the “unequivocal conclusion,” he said in a statement, that there has been a major failure at the agency in the “crucial” area of diversity and inclusiveness.

Yes, indeed, there is no more important qualification for being responsible for being on top of threats to post-America than having a physical handicap or an unconventional sex life:

The report is unsparing. Senior positions at the “highest levels of the CIA” are “consistently occupied by white male career officers.” While minority officers make up 23.9% of the CIA workforce, the higher echelons of the CIA don’t come close to that number. For example, the Senior Intelligence Service, the crème de la crème of the spy agency’s personnel, manages only a 10.8% minority composition. Spies with disabilities and LGBT spies, according to the report, are no better represented in the CIA’s upper leadership, though women are generally faring well.

What accounts for this state of inequity? Pulling no punches, and using words that must sting Mr. Brennan if not also President Obama, the report finds that “the senior leadership of the Agency is not committed to diversity.” The CIA has suffered from a “failure of leadership,” which has led to a “general lack of accountability in promoting diversity” and “the absence of an inclusive culture.”

And the nation's spies will get their minds right immediately:

Changing the CIA’s culture in this way may take some time, perhaps several years. Yet an urgent crisis demands urgent action: “Immediate steps” must therefore be taken to fill senior leadership positions with minority officers, the study says. The steps would include a “series of conspicuous appointments at the highest levels of the CIA.” The goal—both “necessary and achievable”—should be a quota of “at least 30% minority representation at the GS-13 level and above.” Such measures will make it clear that “the Agency has entered a new era and is committed to a leadership structure that truly ‘looks like America.’ ”

At a time when global terrorism is resurgent, when the Middle East is burning, when Russian boots are marching, when China is ramping up its military and Iran is on the verge of going nuclear, is it really a good idea to ask the CIA to concentrate on achieving a 30% minority quota in the agency’s leadership ranks? 

Mr. Brennan evidently thinks so. In his statement accompanying the study’s release, the CIA director said he has ordered that beginning Oct. 1 every member of his senior leadership team will be required “to attend diversity and inclusion training.” 

It is so very late in the day.