The Art of War, the Science of Bias: DEI is a Warfighting Necessity
Dear Secretary Hegseth,
You have inflicted tangible harm to American national security by interfering with our military’s ability to assess our adversaries objectively. I’m not talking about anything that’s happened at the Defense Intelligence Agency, but rather DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). History’s greatest military failures weren’t just the result of poor strategy or bad luck – they were rooted in prejudice, in systemic mischaracterization of the enemy that has cost countless lives and toppled entire empires. And yet, with your order to eliminate all DEI programs in the military, you’ve made sure that America’s war planners and warfighters will enter the battlefields of the future with the very same self-inflicted handicap.
The two worst military downfalls in history, those of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, were both the result of wars their leaders opted into, confident that the ethno-racial qualities of their adversaries guaranteed victory. Adolf Hitler wrote at length about the inferiority of the Slavic people (the untermenschen) and promised the swift conquest of the Soviet Union. Five million German soldiers died in the ensuing war, and in the end it was Germany that was conquered.
On the other side of the globe, Japanese war planners assumed that Americans didn’t have the spiritual fortitude to fight a prolonged war like their own people, and that a decisive blow such as Pearl Harbor would be followed by a quick U.S. exit from the war. Yet we stayed in the fight through the bleakest days of the Pacific War, went the distance with the Japanese Empire, and in due course prevailed over it.
If the Japanese truly knew the American character, they would have had every reason to foresee this. They would have known that Americans don’t back down: we’re the ones who fought to the last man at the Alamo; who rebelled against the most powerful empire in the world in 1775—and then had the audacity to go back for a rematch in 1812. But the Japanese Empire stereotyped and underestimated American society, sowing the seeds of its own demise.
We as Americans are far from immune to making these same mistakes ourselves. A pervasive atmosphere of racially-tinged skepticism that a unified Vietnam could maintain political autonomy from the Soviet Union accelerated Washington’s escalation of the Vietnam War. On the ground, the dehumanization of the Vietnamese as “mere gooks” disinhibited American G.I.s from civilian massacres like My Lai, each crime of war causing more and more Vietnamese to turn against the U.S. and towards North Vietnam and the Viet Cong. By striking DEI programs from the military, you’ve set us up to repeat the failures of the past.
We need a military of diverse backgrounds and mindsets; we need cultural competency training; we need to root stereotypes and biases out of the heads of our warfighters and our war planners as meticulously as we would clear a minefield. Neither you nor I believe that a typical service member consciously holds racist beliefs. But everyone is liable to have unconscious biases, and unconscious biases are an equal if not greater liability – because without countermeasures, we’re blind to the very fact we have them.
As just one example, East Asians in the United States are consistently perceived as less creative than people of other ethnicities. It’s not a belief founded in fact, but it is an enduring one, and our warfighters and war planners are as susceptible to it as anybody—in the absence of DEI measures like the unconscious bias trainings you’ve terminated. Our greatest rival in the decades to come will be an East Asian state: the People’s Republic of China. How will a military that systematically underestimates the creative thinking of its adversaries fare in battle against them? Certainly not as well as one that heads into conflict with a clear and objective assessment of its enemies.
For the sake of our nation and our soldiers, I ask you: restore the military’s DEI programs immediately.
See you at the reunion,
Dan Wang
(Editor’s Note: Small Wars Journal always prioritizes the publication of counterpoints to open letters. At Small Wars Journal we value discourse at the speed of relevance.)
