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The Baizuocracy At War

It's beginning to look like turning the US military into Social Justice Warriors was a bad idea
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That’s an official US Marine Corps graphic, celebrating LGBT pride. Here’s a clip from the Talent Management 2030 document the Marine Corps commandant just released, talking about how they’re going to change the way they deal with personnel. Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity has come to the USMC:

The reader who sent it to me is a veteran. He said this document (he sent the entire USMC paper) could have been taken from any generic multinational corporation. He adds:

My comment is that the priority should be to put together a skilled, cohesive and highly trained military force that can be exceedingly lethal when necessary. The line that diversity provides us a competitive warfighting advantage over our adversaries is entirely absurd.

The beauty of the military I grew up in was the oneness of the soldiers, airmen and sailors and singular commitment to the mission whatever that may be. When that uniform went on, there was no differences or diversity. In times of battle, the cohesion and commitment to each soldier to his brother is what gets them through.

The baizuocracy (my term for institutionalized wokeness, based on the Chinese slur word for “white leftists”), whether in the military or corporate America, loves to proclaim the dogma that Diversity Is Our Strength™. Maybe it is, in some ways, depending on the context. But that’s not how they mean it. They mean it in a dogmatic way. I was once part of a work team that was temporary demoralized by this lie, until the employee who was hired under a diversity initiative, but who could not do the work (forcing the rest of us on the team to take on extra duties to compensate for this incompetent person), moved on. But the senior military brass who promulgate these policies will be well set to go to work for a Woke Capitalist firm once they leave the armed forces.

James Hasson has written that President Obama introduced wokeness to the US military. Excerpt:

Radical changes imposed on our military by progressives, begun in earnest during the Obama administration, are negatively impacting our combat readiness and jeopardizing the lives of our men and women in uniform and, ultimately, our national security.  In Stand Down:  How Social Justice Warriors Are Sabotaging America’s Military, author James Hasson elucidates how Barack Obama fundamentally changed military culture to make our nation less secure. Hasson, a former Army captain, Army Ranger School graduate, and Afghanistan veteran, argues that military readiness was sacrificed for identity politics and progressive rhetoric. He lists examples such as policies that established “safe spaces,” prohibited “micro-aggressions,” denigrated “hyper-masculine” traits, implemented unwise “green” standards and injected “social justice” guidelines in military operations.

In his revealing book, Captain Hasson describes how Obama’s military appointees, mainly progressive ideologues lacking military experience and hailing from academic, political, and the private sectors, were placed in charge of seasoned combat generals with decades of combat experience.  The priorities, experience, and philosophies of the officers and appointees couldn’t have been more disparate.

Many senior military staff members suffered in silence at Obama’s attempt to use the military as a “laboratory for progressive social engineering,” according to Hasson.  Exemplifying this shift was the naming of Navy ships after Leftist political heroes. Socialist labor-activist Cesar Chavez and slain gay-rights advocate Harvey Milk — who left the Navy for being gay — were among those who Ray Mabus, Obama’s secretary of the Navy, announced would have ships named after them.  This practice flew in the face of the hallowed Navy tradition of naming ships after presidents and war heroes.

Obama, who, Hasson says, took pride in his lack of military knowledge and experience, made widespread changes to personnel policy, budgetary expenditures and resource allocations that harmed readiness, training and troop safety.  Obama’s transgender policy of “mixed genitalia in the bathrooms,” took precedence over established military culture.  Soldiers were judged by the gender they wished to be rather than their biological sex.  Obama essentially used the military to lead social change in American society rather than preserving time-honored traditions that emphasized troop cohesiveness and readiness.

Where does that leave the rest of us? Well, there was this exciting news this week:

Royal Marines have forced US troops to surrender just days into a training exercise after eliminating almost the entire unit.

The British commandos “dominated” US forces during a training exercise in California, using a new battle structure.

The Telegraph understands the US forces asked for a “reset” half way into the five-day war fighting exercise, having suffered significant simulated casualties.

At one point in the battle, the commandos’ “kill board”, an intelligence assessment of the level of damage inflicted upon enemy equipment and units, had a tick against almost every American asset, indicating it had been deemed destroyed or rendered inoperable.

… The Royal Marines’ success was achieved by targeting the US headquarters and valuable equipment, paralysing counter-attacks from the Americans.

The USMC denies the story. I don’t believe them. A friend who is in a position to understand what happened says that the Royal Marines won by targeting the USMC’s command and control capabilities. This is a repeat of that last US-China wargame, in which China beat us quickly because it disable the US’s cloud capability. My source says that this is what happens when lower-level leadership are too afraid to take independent actions, because they are afraid what will happen to them if they do. This is why the Red Army collapsed so quickly in Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion. Stalin’s purges had earlier cashiered competent commanders and replaced them with politically loyal yes-men. Friend says that aside from wokeness, the US military leadership culture has been conditioned to lie — witness the Afghanistan Papers, which revealed that senior US military officials knew for years that the Afghan war was unwinnable, but hid this from the public. 

Who has been punished for this? Now we are supposed to believe that the Royal Marines didn’t kick the collective ass of the diverse, equitable, and inclusive US Marine Corps, on the say-so of the USMC?

As I mentioned in this space earlier this week, a frustrated and demoralized active-duty armed forces member told me in a face to face conversation the other day that the military leadership is more interested in winning the culture war over unwoke personnel than in winning actual wars against foreign adversaries. Seems to me like the Senate Armed Forces Committee should want to know what wokeness and corruption in the military leadership is doing to our war-fighting capabilities. Or does nobody in command care anymore? At the NatCon conference this week in Orlando, an active-duty service member stood and said that they didn’t really know what they were fighting for anymore.

UPDATE: From a reader:

Veteran here. The problem is bigger and deeper than what “pet” group is cause celibre for the moment. When the leaders of a society–and I mean this in a cultural sense more than anything else, e.g. the heroes, celebrities, talking heads and influencers of our day that are put forward as respectable, admirable and emulable–are loud and almost unanimous in their obsession with picking at the sins of America and putting those forth as explanatory of the entire ‘American experiment’, it should come as no surprise whatsoever that the military is weakened. In fact, if this is surprising to you, I have to question your faculty of reasoning.

A people might volunteer at risk of their own lives to defend, fight and even die for a nation whose ideals are held in high esteem and seen as worth preserving. But, as I have asked myself time and again lately, why the hell would anyone fight for a country they are told is fundamentally evil, racist, inferior, and not worth defending? The very people who serve in the government of this country speak of the need to radically tear down our institutions, and this isn’t just lip service–they seem to be doing a fine job at corrupting everything they touch. Well, the Chinese (feel free to substitute whatever other foe) can do that just as well as we can, so why fight and die for something that is horrible and needs to be destroyed anyway?

To believe we can politicize everything, leverage our institutions for corrupt purposes, demonize even the founding principles of our country, and yet still maintain a hot-to-trot fighting force merely by throwing trillions of dollars at it without regard for the strength and character of the individual soldier is absurd. Ours is a volunteer force made up of the citizens of the United States. Don’t expect the average character of that force to long remain above that of the “role models” put forth by our society on your social media feeds and television screens.

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