Woke Warriors

By Mike Gallagher

Thursday, April 28, 2022

 

Wolf Warrior II, released in 2017, is the second-highest-grossing Chinese film of all time. Early in the movie, the hero, a former People’s Liberation Army special-ops soldier named Leng Feng, sums up the film’s main message: “The Americans are good for nothing.” Posters promoting the movie featured the tagline “Anyone who offends China, no matter how remote, must be exterminated.” In the climactic scene, an American mercenary named “Big Daddy” is about to kill Leng Feng. As Big Daddy attempts to jam a knife into Leng Feng’s throat, he gloats: “People like you will always be inferior to people like me. Get used to it. Get f***ing used to it.” Spoiler alert: Leng Feng improbably turns the tables, brutally stabbing Big Daddy to death with a bullet he wears as a necklace, the same bullet that Big Daddy used years before to kill Leng Feng’s fiancée.

 

The movie’s message may be familiar territory for those who have watched the diplomatic corps of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) operate over the past few years. Responding to the call of General Secretary Xi Jinping to display more “fighting spirit” — and inspired by Leng Feng’s on-screen heroics — CCP officials have adopted a posture known as “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy. CCP Wolf Warriors aggressively confront and criticize China’s competitors abroad and promote CCP propaganda on American social-media platforms (to which Chinese citizens don’t have access). Both the Wolf Warriors and the Wolf Warrior movies are part of a broader effort to discredit democratic and liberal values globally and to demonstrate the superiority of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

 

Towards that end, the Wolf Warriors have blamed the U.S. Army for the Covid-19 pandemic, threatened nuclear strikes on U.S. allies Australia and Japan, and whitewashed the genocide of Muslim and other racial and ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. But their favorite pastime is painting America as an imperialist, racist hellscape responsible for almost all the world’s troubles. For example, last year Zhao Lijian, the spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry, tweeted to his million followers that America “is the worst among developed countries in labor rights abuses, which can be traced back to its history of trafficking & abusing black slaves that spans hundreds of years.” During protests throughout America in the summer of 2020, the Wolf Warriors seized on American division by hijacking “Black Lives Matter” and similar slogans. During the recent U.S.-hosted Summit for Democracy, the Wolf Warriors posted on Twitter political cartoons criticizing “US democracy” and depicting police officers choking the Statue of Liberty.

 

Wolf Warriors were on the prowl in Alaska in March 2021, during the first meeting between CCP and Biden-administration officials. Yang Jiechi, the Chinese director of the Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs, launched into a 16-minute diatribe, claiming that America wields force and financial hegemony to smear China, topple foreign regimes, and “massacre people of other countries.” Yang argued that America has no authority to criticize China’s human-rights record because “many people within the United States actually have little confidence in the democracy of the United States. . . . There are many problems within the United States regarding human rights, which is admitted by the U.S. itself as well . . . such as Black Lives Matter.”

 

Driving this propaganda is the CCP’s all-consuming insecurity over its legitimacy, both domestic and international. It can be tempting to dismiss Wolf Warriors as paranoid propagandists overplaying their hands and producing unintentionally comical scenes. That would be a mistake, not only because Wolf Warriors are playing to a receptive audience in China but also because they are weaponizing the worst beliefs held by the woke Left in America. The message of Wolf Warriors and wokesters is nearly identical: America is a systemically racist, imperialist bully that is a force for evil in the world. Taking its cues from critical race theory, the woke Left seeks to transform America and its allegedly racist institutions in the name of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI).

 

Like a virus escaping from a laboratory, this radical ideology, once confined to college campuses, has infected the general population. No American institution is immune — not even the U.S. military. Consider that, in his first week on the job, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered every military unit within 60 days to spend a full day conducting a “stand-down” to confront “extremism in the ranks.” As part of a PowerPoint presentation prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, service members were forced to watch a TED Talk asking, “What is up with us white people?” and claiming that systemic racism is embedded in every American institution. Austin also created a new position, “senior adviser for human capital, diversity, equity, and inclusion.” He hired a man named Bishop Garrison for the position and to run his “countering extremism working group.” And though Austin could not define extremism when questioned by the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) five months later, Garrison can. Rather than focusing on violent or illegal behavior, his past tweets brand all those who voted for former president Donald Trump as extremists and racists.

 

The U.S. Military Academy at West Point likewise required cadets to attend a seminar on DEI and promoted presentations titled “White Power at West Point” and “Understanding Whiteness and White Rage.” When questioned by HASC members last year, General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he was offended by the accusation that the military is woke. He then defended DEI instruction, saying: “I want to understand white rage, and I’m white, and I want to understand it. . . . I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist.”

 

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We read Mao and Lenin to understand our enemies and their tactics. We do not read them for ideas of how to better run our military. Yet that is how some military leaders are approaching woke texts: as useful tools to help better run the Pentagon. For example, Admiral Mike Gilday, the chief of Naval Operations, included Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist in his “professional reading program,” which is supposed to help sailors “outthink our competitors.” But rather than take aim at our competitors, Kendi takes aim at a core tenet of American civil-rights law — opposition to racial discrimination: As Kendi puts it in his book, “the only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination.”

 

By defending DEI, these military leaders are not simply pointing out that America’s E pluribus unum melting pot is an asset for U.S. military recruitment and that we should be proud that we live in a diverse nation with a diverse military, a military that should not discriminate on the basis of anything except merit and ability to accomplish the mission. Nor are they making the narrower argument that, as the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan illustrate, a dearth of specialized linguistic and cultural skills can cause death on the battlefield. Milley and Gilday instead are asking the Armed Forces to embrace a brand of identity politics according to which people are judged by the color of their skin rather than on their merits as individuals.

 

They are also making specific and dubious claims, based on bad social science, about racial and gender diversity. Consider recent comments by Vice Admiral John Nowell Jr., the chief of Navy Personnel, who suggested that we need to reinstate photos for selection boards so that skin color can be factored into promotion decisions. “We know that diverse teams that are led inclusively will perform better,” Nowell asserted. Vice Admiral Roy Kitchener, the commander of Naval Surface Forces, recently made the same claim at the Navy’s first-ever Surface Force DEI Symposium: “It’s a proven fact that the more diverse you are, you’re going to be a better and more high-performing organization. But I just see it simply from the warfare perspective, where being able to have a team that can think with that kind of agility against an opponent that probably doesn’t have that agility is a huge advantage.”

 

Here Navy leaders talk about diverse thought as essential to warfighting success but then define diversity purely in terms of race and gender, which implies that race and gender determine perspectives. They even quantify the claim that “diversity is our strength,” in a report called “Task Force One Navy” (TF1N). Though TF1N concedes that the Navy is more diverse than the U.S. population, it offers approximately 60 DEI recommendations.

 

TF1N asserts that “diverse teams are 58 percent more likely than non-diverse teams to accurately assess a situation.” Here TF1N cites a scholarly article about price bubbles in experimental markets. Experimenters used 180 strangers “trained in business or finance” whose exposure to “diversity” meant briefly seating white traders in a waiting room with other traders of whom “at least one” was “an ethnic minority.” The test subjects, alone in their “separate cubicles,” then made fake stock trades through a computer terminal. According to the study’s authors, the benefit in market-price assessments emerged because “ethnic diversity facilitates friction. This friction can increase conflict in some group settings, whether a work team, a community, or a region.”

 

Contrary to TF1N’s portrayal, the study says nothing about teams (decisions are made alone by individuals), nothing about assessing military “situations” (it is about pricing and purchasing decisions), and nothing about how much diversity is required to receive any potential benefits (the “diversity” of the study involved including as little as a single member of an ethnic minority).

 

TF1N also asserts that “gender-diverse organizations are 15 percent more likely to outperform other organizations” and that “diverse organizations are 35 percent more likely to outperform their non-diverse counterparts.” Those claims are inconsistent with the extant literature on gender, since recent meta-analyses have found either no effect or a negative one.

 

TF1N selectively cites “Diversity Matters,” a study from McKinsey in 2015. The McKinsey researchers used a formula such that a company with one white, one Native American, one Latino, and seven black members would score as less diverse than a board with six white and four black members. The report also lumps data on 366 public companies into quartiles, comparing only the bottom quartile to the top quartile and thereby conveniently omitting half the data set.

 

It should alarm us that the same military leaders we trust to train our sons and daughters for war are building their DEI agenda upon a foundation of fringe history and shoddy social science. Their underlying assumption that we can apply (questionable) general findings from academia and the private sector to the specific business of asking young men and women to kill and be killed for their country assaults common sense. Those who view DEI as harmless ignore recent evidence demonstrating that initiatives such as training to recognize and counter implicit bias are ineffective or even intensify intergroup hostility.

 

DEI is driving important policy changes that harm readiness by tying up commanders, units, and the military legal system in subjective investigations into alleged thought crimes. Last December, drawing on the work of Garrison’s group on countering extremism, Secretary Austin changed the DOD’s policy to include the prohibition of “likes” and retweets of social-media content deemed to promote “extremist activities.” Such content might include opposition to vaccine mandates and wokeness training. Though the services are still trying to figure out how to implement the policy, commanding officers will now have to spend time policing social-media use.

 

Here again, bad social science lurks in the background. The DOD’s understanding of extremism was largely informed by a civilian database, the Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States (PIRUS), that publicly reports information on “extremists” between 1948 and 2018. The researchers who maintain PIRUS do not provide access to the years of data (2019 through 2021) that are apparently informing the DOD’s current thinking, and they have warned that their data may not be representative because their measure of extremism mostly “reflects news reporting trends over time,” as it is “easier to identify individuals who are associated with the groups that are under intense media scrutiny.”

 

The Center for Naval Analyses, a federally funded think tank, also produced a report on racial extremism in the military. The “most critical” recommendation of the report is “recognition that the problem of racial extremism is not one of ‘a few bad apples,’ but is in fact a more pervasive challenge.” The only evidence offered for that sweeping claim is a footnote citing an article, from the New Republic, referencing the opinion of a professor of Middle Eastern studies who was affiliated with a progressive think tank.

 

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With such a poor empirical and methodological foundation, at best DEI will waste service members’ time and taxpayers’ money. At worst, it will undermine the foundation of our modern, all-volunteer force. We want that force to consist of the best and the brightest. The military is an elite and meritocratic organization where only the most fit, disciplined, and lethal individuals should thrive, regardless of gender, race, or socioeconomic status. To that end, the military obsessively measures pull-ups, marksmanship, and a general ability to endure pain. Diversity may be a strength for America, but it cannot be an organizing principle for the Pentagon.

 

DEI initiatives risk sapping the strength of our armed forces. By co-opting the woke Left’s obsession with racial and gender diversity, the Pentagon’s DEI evangelists are ironically stifling the very type of diversity that might improve military performance: intellectual diversity. The growing DEI bureaucracy inside the military is the same woke commissariat that has put an ideological straitjacket on America’s educational institutions. The DEI agenda promotes a culture of conformity that elevates the mindless repetition of dogmas over a true exchange of ideas.

 

Such an environment risks further politicization of the officer corps. That could sap morale, sow division between officers and enlisted servicemen, and damage civil–military relations. A November 2021 poll from the Reagan Institute indicates that the number of Americans with “a great deal” of trust and confidence in the military has declined from 70 percent in 2018 to 45 percent today, with confidence lower among young Americans than any other cohort. If trust continues to drop, it will become difficult to recruit and retain talented warfighters. If the DEI agenda sends the signal that, to get promoted, one must affirm progressive dogmas or spend more time on inclusivity training rather than training for war, the services will attract fewer warfighters and more risk-averse political drones.

 

Warfighting, not DEI, must be the North Star of our military. As Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1, Warfighting, reminds us, the military has two basic functions: “waging war and preparing for war.” Further, “any military activities that do not contribute to the conduct of a present war are justifiable only if they contribute to preparedness for a possible future one.” By distracting from warfighting, and alienating current and prospective warfighters, DEI risks undermining readiness at a time when the DOD is struggling with preventable peacetime accidents that are killing more service members than combat is.

 

For example, in 2017 the USS Fitzgerald and the USS McCain collided with merchant vessels in separate incidents, killing 17 sailors. According to the official Navy investigation, which cited complacency, substandard training, and a lack of basic seamanship skills, the accidents were “avoidable.” A recently released investigation of the burning of the USS Bonhomme Richard found multiple leadership failures, “a pattern of failed drills, minimal crew participation, an absence of basic knowledge.” A separate investigation into the culture of the surface Navy after these accidents identified “an insufficient focus on warfighting skills, the perception of a zero-defect mentality accompanied by a culture of micromanagement, and over-sensitivity and responsiveness to modern media culture.”

 

Then there is the fiasco of our humiliating surrender and botched withdrawal in Afghanistan. Chairman Milley tried to spin it as a “logistical success.” CCP Wolf Warriors immediately exploited the situation to send a message to Taiwan that America could not be counted on in a crisis. Legitimate criticism of operational failures like those in Afghanistan helps the military learn, but embracing DEI disinformation merely validates the propaganda of our primary adversary. Moreover, while Pentagon leaders say that “diversity is our strength,” they do not apply these metrics to our enemies. They do not deduct accuracy from Chinese missiles in Taiwan war games because those missiles are not fired by inclusive, diverse teams.

 

This matters because, while the People’s Liberation Army prepares for war over Taiwan, CCP Wolf Warriors have launched a preemptive ideological strike designed to weaken America’s will to fight, poisoning many of our citizens against our nation. The stakes of this ideological competition between two incompatible systems of government include values such as human rights, freedom of conscience, and the principle that objective truth is knowable and independent of political dogma. If we give in to the Wolf Warrior fiction that America is a racist country whose military is rife with white supremacists, we will have disarmed ourselves in this ideological combat. If we succumb to the delusion that America is irredeemably racist, we will have given up one of our most potent ideological weapons: the idea that America is a free, multiethnic society, whereas the CCP is a profoundly racist and chauvinist entity, enslaving a million Uyghur and Kazakh Muslims in pursuit of the destruction of non–Han Chinese languages and cultures.

 

The Battle at Lake Changjin, a three-hour film set in the Korean War, recently surpassed Wolf Warrior II as the highest-grossing Chinese movie of all time. It stars the same actor who plays Leng Feng in Wolf Warrior. The movie was financed as part of the CCP’s massive propaganda campaign leading up to the 100th anniversary of the party’s founding. It depicts the 17-day battle of Chosin Reservoir, at which 120,000 Chinese troops surprised and encircled the 30,000 U.N. Command troops, forcing a fighting retreat from Chosin to the port of Hungnam. The CCP-run Global Times praised the movie, which portrays Chinese troops winning against impossible odds, for pushing “the patriotic sentiment of people across the country to a peak amid the tense China-US competition and China’s effective control of the epidemic.” The message was clear: China is ready for war, and the Americans can be beaten.

 

In its Wolf Warrior fervor, the CCP missed, however, the point of the battle that Marines today know as “Frozen Chosin.” There, 8,000 Marines fought their way through those twelve Chinese divisions, not only surviving hand-to-hand combat and subzero temperatures but also inflicting disproportionate casualties on the enemy. They fought as fire teams, squads, and platoons that had recently been integrated. “The politicians had slashed military budgets so deep that many units were less than half strength,” wrote First Lieutenant Joseph Owen, commander of the Baker-One-Seven mortar platoon, in his memoir Colder Than Hell. “We could use all the men we could get. The overriding thought was that,” white or black, “a Marine was a Marine.” These “Chosin Few” held the line against communism. With faith in the goodness of our nation, we must do so again.