If this has already been posted, my bad, my days are different.
What happened at DIA will happen, to varying extents, all throughout the DoD.
The dirty secret about commemorating all these things - they take up a lot of time and resources. As commanders throughout the military often do to make brownie points with their civilian masters, they would put on big assemblies, events, etc. Luckily I never had to help plan/participate in the events - had real jobs.
As a rule, the military/civilian employees who put these things on are generally of two types - the officers/enlisted/civilian employees who suck at their regular jobs and can easily be temporarily released for these 'special projects', and the officers/enlisted/civilian employees, nearly always minorities, who have reached their terminal level of incompetence and are in what we used to call the Social Actions Office until they leave/retire. Every once in a while you see useful people doing this shit but that's because it's their turn in the barrel for an additional duty. You attend to get out of the office for a while, maybe get some free eats, or you are up high enough that your absence would be noted.
The last one of these such mass gaggles I remember was a couple of years before I retired. Being of sufficient rank, needed to show up to some Black History Month thing. Went with another guy in the same boat.
Some members of an apparently prominent local black family were being recognized. Quickly keyed on one young man of that family. At that time very few had cell phones, pretty expensive. Guess this young man thought he would look cool on the cheap, or I guess he was poor. He was ostentatiously carrying a phone - a cordless phone. No way in hell was he going to be able to use it there. Pointed this out to my buddy, we had a quiet chuckle together.
Cutting out all these events will save a lot of resources needed for actually carrying out the mission. It should be quite enough to have the event noted on the base bulletin, or in the base newspaper, with a message from the appropriate commander. No duty time should be allowed for events, and people must not be pressured into showing up at or participating in these events.
As an aside, the DIA campus has some neat-looking buildings. Was never there but drove by it a few times on the freeway.
