In organizations as large and complex as the U.S. Air Force, it can be easy for the right wing not to know what the left wing is doing.

When officials at the U.S. Air Force Academy met this month, several expressed opposition to a proposed revision in the Pentagon’s directives to service academies concerning affirmative action. They protested that their efforts to help diversify the Air Force’s officer corps would be greatly hampered if the Pentagon went ahead with plans to cease telling the service academies to favor minority and female applicants in determining admissions to their “academy preparatory schools,” which provide a year of preliminary instruction and training to people not quite ready for the academies themselves. The Air Force Academy’s leaders argued that someone at the Defense Department was poised to make a big mistake.

Last week, however, Air Force Academy officials learned that the proposed change in military policy was not the Defense Department’s idea, but instead came out of the U.S. Air Force itself. The Air Force’s lawyers had decided that the federal courts might look askance at the current policy, which, according to a statement issued by senior Air Force officials, “directs preferential treatment without having demonstrated the existence of an academic need.”

The policy revision remains opposed by the Air Force Academy, but the academy’s dispute now appears to be with the Air Force’s leaders rather than the Pentagon. A Defense Department spokesman, Maj. Stewart Upton, said the Air Force was welcome to retract its request for the Pentagon affirmative-action directive to be changed. —Peter Schmidt