School of War - Ep 57: Mike Gallagher on China and the U.S. Military

Episode Date: January 17, 2023

Congressman Mike Gallagher, U.S. representative for Wisconsin’s 8th district and chair of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, joins the show to discuss his time as a Marine in Iraq, the dangers posed by the CCP, from Tik-Tok to maritime threats, and the crisis confronting our military’s culture. ▪️ Times  • 01:26 Introduction • 02:11 The China Committee • 08:56 What’s the problem with Tik-Tok? • 13:12 A reverse Opium War  • 15:25 A Marine from Green Bay  • 21:16 On the ground in Iraq • 28:52 What’s the American interest in Taiwan? • 32:05 Consequences of Taiwan’s defeat • 38:21 Marine Corps force design • 41:42 The Navy’s fighting spirit • 46:31 Culture in the military

It's a new year in Washington, D.C., and a new Congress, and after some delay, a new Speaker of the House. And one of this Congress's first acts has been to establish a new select committee on China, to be chaired by Congressman Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin. Gallagher, a Marine Veteran of Iraq, joins us today to talk China, to talk about why we should care about Chinese ambitions, and about how to build a, quote, unquote, anti-Navy to deter and, if necessary, defeat the CCP. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state of.

We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining the School of War. Delighted to welcome to the show today, Congressman Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin's 8th District, where he has served since 2017. Mike's got a fascinating background. He's a United States Marine.

Somehow he is also a PhD, a graduate of Princeton University before that. He is well known for his work on a variety of national security issues. We're going to talk about all that today, especially China. Congressman Gallagher, thank you so much for joining the show. It's an honor to be with you. I subscribe to your podcast. That is not just me saying it. I have the receipts to prove it. Here I was listening to you, interview Tom Cotton and other people, and I just said,

I have to get on before it's too late. It's very kind of you to join. I'm looking forward to today's discussion. I have been for some time. There's all sorts of stuff that I want to tackle with you. I think what you've been in the news for recently, and you really are one of the smartest people in Congress working on these issues, so it's a great opportunity to be able to chat with you about it,

is this new China committee that is being stood up. Now that we have a speaker of the House and committee chairman and committees and all of that, took a little longer than maybe we were hoping. And by the way, you gave a floor speech that I encourage folks to check out in the midst of all that craziness a week ago. What is the China committee? This is a new thing. It's a select committee. It's not a sort of standing committee that the Congress typically has.

You're going to chair it. What's it going to do? Well, first of all, on that floor speech, I got a, I was getting a salad in the basement, cafeteria of Longworth, and this was the second day of the speaker debate, and the speaker called me saying, well, his consigniari called me and said, you need to get on the floor in three minutes and give a speech. So I was freaking out as I ran across and then realizing it was going to be on primetime TV. So I'm lucky I didn't just completely embarrass myself. But Speaker McCarthy has said his top two priorities, and he said this leading up to the campaign,

and it's really instantiated in the commitment to America that he put out there. is top two priorities are restoring fiscal sanity and confronting communist China. And so in order to elevate the issue of how we defend America from CCP aggression, he created a select committee on China. The official name is the select committee on the strategic competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. Though that is a mouthful, I asked for it to say Chinese Communist Party as opposed to China or even PRC, because I feel it's important for us to recognize that at heart our adversary is the party. And we need to make a distinction at every turn between the party and the Chinese people, with whom we have no quarrel, who are in many ways

the primary victim of CCP aggression and who ultimately, over the long term, we want to support. in the same way that Ronald Reagan found a way to communicate directly to the Russian people and, you know, quite cleverly and creatively used Russian literature and Russian culture and a lot of the speeches he gave, particularly a speech at Moscow State near the end of his presidency, which I sort of think is a masterwork of ideological warfare. So the committee is there to elevate the discussion of China in Congress, injected with a sense of urgency, and also, I would say coordinate across the many committees, all of whom have a piece of this, what I've called a new cold war. We want to make sure that good ideas for policy and legislation don't fall victim to intercommittee jurisdictional

turf battle. So that's the motivation behind it. And I'm excited next week we should get our members. And I know McCarthy wants to put serious, sober members on it. And so we're ready to get to work. It's a unique challenge, but also a very big opportunity for us to do some good work in a divided Congress. And there's so much that could go into taking a look at the strategic competition between us and the CCP. You know, obviously, you know, you serve on armed services. There are any number of committees that have pieces of the China problem before them. Like, how, how are you thinking about sort of sectioning off and distinguishing specifically what your committee is going to focus on? Are you, are you focused on defense issues or is that kind of still Sask's business? Are you

sharing it? Are you focused on Chinese influence in the United States, TikTok, things like that? Like, just give a little bit of the lay of the land. Well, defense is a great example. You know, I'm a member of the Armed Services Committee, and clearly Hask will continue to play the lead role when it comes to, let's say, near-term deterrence. And I think one of the themes you'll see in this year's National Defense Authorization Act process will be, how do we prevent Ukraine's present from becoming East Asia's future? How do we prevent a deterrence failure like that we saw in Ukraine from happening in in Taiwan. But also the House Foreign Affairs Committee controls a critical piece of that puzzle. They have jurisdiction over arms sales to Taiwan. And right

now, one of the thorniest parts or one of the weakest parts of our deterrent posture is the fact that we have $18 billion of FMS, foreign military sales items that have been approved, but not delivered to Taiwan. So that's a perfect example of an issue where we'll clearly be playing a supporting role, but I think we can help convince both of those committees to work together in order to do what we all want to do, which is arm Taiwan to the teeth before it's too late, turn Taiwan into a porcupine is the latest phrase of the moment. And so that's an area where though we don't have the clear legislative lead, we can play a productive role. And the second thing I'd say relative to Taiwan, we're thinking about how we can get more creative with field hearings,

hearings that aren't your typical, just kind of boring, you know, congressional hearings where people read from a script and then it's poorly attended, I think we can be the committee that not only talks about what we need to sell to Taiwan or, you know, the Ways and Means Committee we'd be talking about whether we should have a free trade agreement with Taiwan. We can be the committee that asked the question, why does Taiwan matter? Why should a Wisconsinite care about the defense of Taiwan? And that's when I talk about elevating issues in the U.S.-China competition. That's where we're going to play a role. And then there's sort of a separate bucket of issues, which is area where no committee right now is really doing anything,

niche issues that nobody really understands, and there are a few stand out. Okay, so right now we're having a big bruising debate about TikTok. I'm of the opinion that TikTok should be banned. TikTok is owned by ByteDance. ByteDance is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. You don't want the Chinese Communist Party to be the most powerful media company in America. We can go into that.

But that's bound up in this bigger issue, which is when it comes to cross-border data flows, it's the Wild West right now. There's no real coherent regulatory framework. There's something called the ICTS process. It's in its infancy. That's an issue I can see us running with. Obviously, we got to work well with the committees of jurisdiction, and that's my sort of leadership challenge as the committee chair. I got to make sure I don't step on all my colleagues' toe, and I got to make sure I prove that we're a value ad. But that's an area nobody's paying attention to we can run with. I think the area where we can really raise awareness and that there might be legislation that flows from that awareness is on this question of Chinese Communist Party United Front Work.

There's this thing called the United Front Work Department. It's way bigger than our State Department. United Front Work goes back to the earliest days of the Chinese Communist Party. It's a combination of espionage and influence operations. There's no real analog for an agency like this in America. But it is, or as Xi Jinping has referred to it, it's the CCP. CCP's magic weapon. Getting our colleagues to understand what United Front Work is, why it matters and why their targets for it, and why and how the CCP uses United Front Work to co-op key domestic American institutions such as higher ed, Hollywood, the NBA, and in some cases, even Wall Street, I think is going to be a core function of our committee. So that being said,

you know, this has never existed before. So we're open to ideas from the great Aaron McLean. ask you, I mean, there's a lot in there that I want to come back to. But what's your problem with TikTok, Congressman? I mean, you got some, you got funny videos, you know, you got people dancing, you cat's doing stuff. I don't know, I'm not on it personally, but like, what's the big deal? I might be like, so what if the Chinese own it, you know, what, who cares? I might be like the oldest young member of Congress. It strikes me like, I'm the guy yelling, get off my lawn. Get off the social media's kids. There's a few problems. And it really ultimately, though, does come back to the basic ownership structure. And I think one of the big ideas that's

emerging for me, I don't know if you ever worked for General Petraeus when you're in uniform, but I did for a bit. And one of his things that I've subsequently adopted is that for strategic leaders, you really have to get the big ideas right and then constantly and relentlessly communicate those through the organization. So we've been spending some time thinking through, like, what are the big ideas we could advance on this committee? And one is, I would submit, is that there was really no such thing as a private company in China. And that concept doesn't exist in the same way that it does in America. And so the ownership structure is key.

I mean, if you have a company that not only is subject to any request from the Chinese Communist Party and all of their data and records have to be forfeit at any moment, but has CCP cells embedded in their corporate governance structure and has its executive saying they promise that all new product lines will follow appropriate political direction, I think that raises unique concerns about the ownership structure. that aren't the same as an American company having ownership. That's why my bill, which is a ban of TikTok, would also allow for a for sale to an American company.

So that's one thing. The other thing is the fact that the app has the ability to track your location. And TikTok executives said, well, we're not using that. You know, we never would. That's now been proven to be false. That's a lie. There's a recent, I think, Forbes report that shows that they were actually trying to track journalists locations because these journalists have sources inside TikTok

that are feeding information about the way in which they're using their algorithm, which leads to another thing. Because so many young people get their news from TikTok, if you give the CCP the ability to tweak the algorithm such that it elevates certain narratives, undermine others, and reporting suggests that anything having to do with voting or voter engagement was deprioritized in the TikTok algorithm, if we want to talk about interference in our election, that becomes a problem. It's as if, and I've said this before, in around 1958,

we would have allowed the KGB and Pravda to buy the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, and that probably understates the problem. And then there's a, the related problem of how addictive it is and how it's destroying kids' minds. Now, I grant that's not unique to TikTok, but TikTok seems to be uniquely addictive. It's why FCC commissioner, Brennan Carr, has called it digital fentanyl in the sense that it's both highly addictive, deadly, and ultimately can be traced back to China in the same way that the precursors for fentanyl can be traced back to China. So for that and many other reasons, I think it's bad to give the CCP this level of

control over our daily lives. I confess, I'm lucky right now my daughters are too young to have any knowledge of social media, but this is something that really worries me as a new parent. How do you manage that your kids access to these devices? It's impossible to screen them out entirely, and I think it's something that parents of our generation are going to be struggling with for a long time. Yeah, I've got young kids as well, and I know exactly the concern. and, you know, like you, I'm skeptical of the social value of social media all in, but there was a series in, I think it was the Wall Street Journal, was it not, about TikTok and TikTok's malign effects on kids specifically. And as I was reading it, it sounds conspiratorial to say this, but you and I both spend a fair amount of time of thinking about, you know, authoritarian, totalitarian regimes. It's hard to imagine that there wasn't a meeting at some point, you know, in Beijing, and there's a slide up, as it were. And it was like, item one, fentanyl. Item two, TikTok slash social,

media, you know, about, you know, how to weaken the United States from it. And it's, even as I say it aloud, it's like, it's, who's taking the crazy pills now, kind of a thing to say. And yet, if you look at the effects of fentanyl on the one hand of digital fentanyl, as you say, and TikTok on the other, and you look at what it's actually doing and you ask yourself the question, well, if I were the Chinese and I had, if I were the CCP and I had malign intent towards the United States, what would I do differently? You know, it's kind of a hard question to answer. Yeah, you know, I can't prove that it's intentional, but it's, you know, it's, you know, It certainly seems like this is a form of a reverse opium war that's been waged against us

quite effectively. So whether intentional or accidental. And then add on to that the fact that a pandemic that sure looks like it came from a lab in Wuhan, China just wreaked havoc on the global economy and killed anywhere between six to 20 million people depending on the estimates. And while I guess reasonable people can disagree about whether it came from a wet market or a lab, there's no question that the CCP covered it up. They knew that it was airborne, you know, as early as November, and it cost us time.

It costs us thousands of lives. So, and I do think, I've sort of been persuaded by two things. There's a young genius in Australia named Alex Jawski, who probably knows more about United Front Work than anybody besides, say, Peter Mattis. He wrote a book recently called Spies and Lies, where he basically convincingly makes the case that the whole peaceful rise narrative was a deliberate espionage and covert action campaign, perpetrated by the CCP to convince us that we had nothing to fear from them and that they could sort of hide their strength and bide their time. So it's certainly within their modus operandi

to do things like this. And then Ian Easton's book recently, I think, also convincingly makes the case that when they talk about the triumph of world socialism with Chinese characteristics, so I forget the phrase of the moment, that we should take them seriously. And that, you know, even in Xi Jinping's own speeches, he talks about, you know, defeating the capitalizing, led order led by the United States and rendering us a second-tier country or irrelevant on the world stage. And if the mechanism for doing that is getting us to destroy ourselves, you know, political warfare done quite effectively, then it's something we need to understand and pay attention to. I don't think it's conspiratorial to talk about that. So taking a step back for a minute

before you, before you were in Congress, before you started to work on these issues at a level of high policy, you were a Marine. I don't know if all of our listeners, will know your story, kind of know how you came to be involved in the world of national security and public service more generally. Maybe just tell us a bit about yourself, you know, how you grew up and, you know, what about the Marines drew you there? They may not know it because it's boring. Whenever like someone, one of these politicians publishes a biography, I'm like, man, I can never do that. My life is my life is so boring. I kind of joined the Marine Corps thinking I'd have this like kind of Hollywood-esque action chapter. And that didn't emerge. I became an intel weeny

editing reports in a combat zone, but, you know, well behind, you know, the wire. Well, you true infantry grunts were doing all the hard work. So I hold my manhood cheap next to yours, Aaron. I am from Green Bay, Wisconsin, come from a family of physicians. My grandpa started the trend. He worked for the state prison system, then went back to medical school, became an OB. My dad's an OB. My uncles are obese. My sister OB. Everyone delivers babies. My dad also started a pizza restaurant in Green Bay when I was young called Gallagher's pizza, an Irish name for Italian food. Italian food, Irish spirit is a tagline.

So whether delivering babies or pizza, we always deliver in the Gallagher family. That's the motto. I then went to high school in California. My mom got remarried to an LA County firefighter, kind of grew up in both places, two very different places, and I always kind of wanted, was always interested in the world outside of America as a young kid. I wanted to get out of both Wisconsin and California, and so went to Princeton and Didn't know what I wanted to do.

I think I was originally a Latin American studies major, which was an excuse to get a scholarship to go live in Mexico south of Cancun the summer after my freshman year, which is the biggest racket I ever pulled in my life. It was awesome. And then I, the summer after my sophomore year, I swear I'll get to a point here. I was studying abroad in England. I was working for a think tank, the RAND Corporation. And I got assigned to this project studying terrorist targeting methods.

And I was doing the lowest, low-level research possible. like filling a spreadsheet with random data. But I became fascinated by what was happening in the Middle East, by the threat of Salafi jihadist terrorism in general. And we had invaded Iraq the year prior. And even though 9-11 had happened when I was a senior in high school, I didn't rush out to the recruiter's office. It seemed like a distant problem.

So here I was for the first time of my life kind of thinking through, wait, why are we at war? What's going on here? Why do people want to kill us? And I just became fascinated by that, came back to school, changed my major to Arabic and Near Eastern studies effectively. And through that, I started to think, okay, what do you do with that? I had no desire to go to Wall Street, which is what everybody at Princeton did.

I mean, that's great. I mean, whatever, they went and made a lot of money. That's cool. I have nothing wrong with that. But I just wanted to get out there, have some adventures. And, you know, didn't know anything about the military. You don't come from a military family. But the Marine Corps, as you know, is the greatest propaganda organization in human history.

So whether it was the lava monster commercial or just the, like, how the, dressed blues looked or the sword, I was like, I got to be a Marine. And I really thought, one, on a practical level, this would be a way I could use these language and regional skills I'm developing. Two, you know, I feel like I need to serve my country. My country's at war. I can question why it's at war, but I got to step up. I had a pretty good life, and I feel like I owe that debt to my country. And three, I don't know if you felt this when you joined. There's kind of like a, how do I describe it? It's like just you want to test yourself, you want to get out there and have an adventure.

There's a, the phrase I always keep coming back to is, I think a Melville phrase when he says, as for me, I've had an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coast. And it's that impulse to just get out there and like land on barbarous coast, which I wanted to scratch, test myself not only academically but also physically and in terms of leadership that led me to the Marine Corps. So did that seven years, loved it. I was a human intelligence, countertelling officer, two deployments to Iraq, worked on the hill for two years as a Middle East geek and then wound up back in Wisconsin, ran for Congress, yada, yada, yada, here I am. Yeah, for me, it was the recruiter, the officer selection officer giving me the classic hard sell where I'd actually talk to, to the Army and the agency. And I told him, you know, I was sort of exploring, you know, exploring my options. And he just looks at me and says, young man, I'm not going to start a single piece of paperwork on you until you tell me that you are 100 committed to being a United States Marine officer and leading Marines. I was so taken aback by it because all the other guys were telling me about the college benefits and this and that and the other thing. And this goes like, yeah, I don't even care about you kid.

I don't need you. And of course, I mean, that's like Sales 101, like classic technique. And it absolutely worked. Absolutely. So for me, you know, I grew up playing basketball and golf, but I was not a good athlete at all. And I never lifted. So for me, I could do the running. I was a decent runner because my older stepbrother was a really good runner and I idolized him growing up.

but like when it came to doing pull-ups and probably the first thing you do if you want to be a marine officer's you get on a pull-up bar you got to do when i was going off to can't school you pretty much had to do at least 16 to survive and you really should be pulling 20 now the standards are even higher i i did three i think the first time i got on a pull-bar and i'm like what wait so how do i lift weights what i do i mean that was like i almost didn't join the marine corps because i was afraid of doing the pull-ups and now i'm obsessed with doing pull-ups it is an interesting like thought experiment, how many, like, probably pretty good leaders and potential battlefield commanders has the Marine Corps have turned themselves away from the Marine Corps because of the obstacle of the dead hang pull-up? I am sure the answer is not like zero. And the most demoralizing part of that is when you are doing pull-ups and you don't get credit for one because you didn't do the full extension on the dead hang. And it just takes the wind out of yourself. It still took you like 98% of the effort at least to do the crappy pull-up. So it still affects the rest of the exercise. Well, You're very self-deprecating and modest across the board.

I do want to ask you one question about your tours in Iraq, though. I mean, what did you, you know, as we know, you've gone onto this career in life as a policy leader. What did you see on the ground in Iraq as an intelligence officer that informs how you think about issues today? A couple things. One, I did see the Serge work. I mean, it was pretty remarkable from my first deployment to my second, how it just went from, I mean, there was, you know, still stuff popping off here and there. And my first day in the country, I think there was this group of al-Qaeda in Iraq fighters who crossed the border from Syria dressed and stole in Iraqi army uniforms and they killed about 50 people in the local village. And that was, there was a period of calm that had preceded that.

But that kind of upended things and made us think, oh, my gosh, we still have a lot of work to do. But then by the end of my second deployment, I mean, we were, we were mostly rolling up or arresting oil smugglers and dealing with kind of economic issues as opposed to hardcore kinetic terrorist issues. So that was one thing, and that's remarkable. I mean, to be able, by the end of the second deployment, to be able to walk down the streets without my helmet on, I mean, that's like crazy. And then to think about the Marines that were in Al-Qaim, you know, two years before I were, where things were just,

I mean, that was one of the bloodiest parts of the country. And I experienced nothing, nothing, nothing like that. It's crazy. So that was a powerful experience. And then to see kind of the strong horse hypothesis play out where once the local Iraqi tribal leaders realized that we were there to stay, they Finlandized in our direction. I mean, that was a powerful thing to behold.

You know, the second thing I learned, I was a human intelligence officer. So, like, all I did, you know, my team, I had a team of about 10 Marines that were more seniors, so sergeants, staff sergeants above. We were attached to an infantry battalion, and we basically did two things. We did interrogations, and we did source operations. So think about source operations as like a less sexy version of what the CIA does, you know, in like a combat environment, kind of. So we just develop sources and we cultivate them and we get information.

information than we do kind of operations with the infantry unit. We did this thing called Aeroscow where he flew around and kind of did aeroborne landings and try to find bad guys and things like that. But, you know, honestly, like I sort of realized, at least when it comes to human intelligence, I used to say it's, it's an area fire weapon. I mean, it's very difficult to adduce precision from, from human sources. And I remember probably our biggest success was finding this, he was a high value individual. I forget what number he was. You remember they kind of ranked all these HVI, one, two, three, four. He was in the top 15, at least, in the country, I think.

We found this guy, and the previous units couldn't find him. And we kind of, like, got lucky through talking to the people that were on site at the location, talking to our significant colleagues, talking to one of our local sources. And this guy was hiding inside of a couch, and multiple units had come and just turned the whole place over and couldn't find him. And there he was inside a couch. And so to me, the lesson was that, you know, even at the pointy end of the spear, things can be pretty confusing.

And so I try to remind myself of that when I'm making policy in DC. That seems simple to me. When filtered down to the people that have to execute it, I think things can get pretty complex. And friction takes hold pretty quickly. So I don't know if that makes sense. But I do fundamentally believe in, like, things get really powerful when you start to combine multiple forms of intelligence. And I don't know if this was your experience as an infantry guy.

Like, one of the things we did effectively is the human team was separate on the opposite side of the base from the SIGA team, which made no sense. So once we actually started to like live and work in the same places and talk every day, we became 100% more effective. So I sort of came to believe in that collaborative multiple int model, if that makes sense at all. No, it makes total sense. And when you have like a dedicated intelligence or team of intelligent people who really are committed to like cutting. through the noise and who understand that there is noise, you can achieve a lot. But I, you know, I absolutely had the experience as a, you know, a company-grade infantry officer of seeing the things that we were seeing and reporting just garbled through a ridiculous game of telephone

as they went through upper echelons. I mean, the clearest example, it was a weird, like, a weird reprise of like the sort of old Vietnam body count stuff, except, of course we weren't doing body counts in Afghanistan. But it's a similar kind of issue where we were in Central Holman Province in 2010 in Marja. And I became a weird. where several weeks into the operation that there was this slide that was going around at sort of the regimental and above headquarters in the battalion was feeding information into it and all the sub-districts where we were were color-coded, red, yellow, or green. Red meant you were in clear phase, yellow meant you were in hold phase, and green meant

you were in build phase. And I looked at all this color coding of places that I walk through like every day or at least every week. And I was like, that doesn't make any sense. Those colors don't make any sense. I don't understand why people are coloring in these holes. the way they are. And the longer I looked at the slide, I eventually realized, oh, I see what's going on. If I walk there and I get shot at every day, it's red. If I only get shot at every week or so, it's yellow.

And if I haven't been shot at in a while, it's green now. And that was it. Like, that was like, that was the only logic that I could, like, back place into the slide. So I get it. I get it completely. I would also just say one other thing. I don't know if you had to, did you just, did you do Iraq and? Afghanistan? Just one in Afghanistan for me. So I never did Afghanistan. Well, funny, funny enough,

my, you know, you're a young second lieutenant. And even as a human guy, you know, I thought I would get, you know, I'd get the cool human stuff and I'd still get to like kick indoors and kind of be an infantryish guy. That's not exactly what happened. But I had a buddy who was a prior Air Force enlisted guy whose, whose mission in life was to get as jacked as humanly possible. And he was jack. I mean, this guy just loved working out and like he just wanted he wanted an MOS that would facilitate him having access to the best gyms. Well, that didn't, yeah, that didn't mean like being in the field necessarily. So he picked air intelligence and he thought he'd all be in the wing hanging out with the pilots.

I can do two a days, three a days, I can have my NOx. Smart guy. Yeah, I can eat my weight protein afterwards. But then he, of course, so this was 2007, we all get sent to Iraq because everyone was going to Iraq and we all thought we were going to be like chesty puller. in the desert, he gets sent on a military transition team to Afghanistan. And everyone's like Afghanistan, because this was before the surge in Afghanistan. So he's there with like six Marines and 200 Afghan National Army guys.

And he's getting in like fire fights every single day. And also having to deal with like friendly fire from the Afghan counterparts. And like just so he he's got like a row of medals like a Soviet Army general. They're my fault. So I guess one of the other lessons is like in those types. of wars. I mean, the front line was such an amorphous concept. You got logisticians who, like, you know, we're getting blown up every day. I mean, it's just such a fascinating and time-struggling challenge. Now, but the rule of thumb, as you know, in the Marines is, you know, the more jacked

the marine, the more like toned the muscles, the more body mass. Like, I mean, something like approaching a hundred percent chance that that Marine is not in an operational infantry unit, in a in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a ground combat arms, MOS, almost 100 percent uncertainty. Hey, let me ask you a really big picture question about China again in Taiwan. You gave this great speech at the Heritage Foundation in October. I think it was turned into a Wall Street Journal op-ed, if I'm not mistaken, about deterrence for Taiwan, how to think about deterrence in the Pacific. And we'll get into that. But like, the premise of what you said was we ought to defend Taiwan. And I want to give you a chance to kind of address that directly. Like, why should we care?

Why should, you raised this earlier, why should your constituents in Green Bay care about an island that is thousands and thousands of miles away that is historically part of China? What's the deal? What's the American interest here? I think in the first instance, we should care because Las Vegas rules don't apply. What happens in Taiwan won't stay in Taiwan. And then particularly if China is able to dominate the world semiconductor, the world semiconductor manufacturing capacity, And I get there's arguments about if they had to invade, you know, would the Taiwanese, you know, blow up TSM? And it'd be highly unlikely that they could just keep it intact and keep it running the next day. I get that.

But effectively, that would allow them to hold the rest of the world economically hostage. So think of everything that drives you crazy when the NBA pulls punches because they don't want to offend China because they want access to the Chinese market. When Hollywood does the same, when major American industries, Apple's under fire right now for, potentially meddling with airdrop functionality to help the CCP muzzle the recent protests. It would be that on steroids. They would be able to hold the rest of the world economically hostage and subservient in a way where they're able to coerce a lot of countries in their own neighborhood right now. The other thing I would say is I would render our treaty commitments to countries like

Japan unfulfillable. And I would go further and say that it would render us severely weakened, if not wholly unable to exercise our traditional role as a leader of the free world going forward. And finally, I might say, I know there's been a lot of debate about, you know, recent wars. And I get it. We've had two very financially ruinous and inconclusive wars in the Middle East. And at times, these wars were portrayed as wars for democratization or attempts to remake countries in our own image as the Jeffersonian democracy, although that's a bit of a caricature. I think there's something fundamentally different about that, and I think there was a sufficient amount of reckless mission

creep that hampered our efforts in both Iraq and Afghanistan, built on naive assumptions, there's something different about that and defending an existing vibrant democracy from totalitarian aggression. Put differently, ours is a defensive strategy. We're not seeking to upend the status quo. We're not trying to remake a country in our image. We're just trying to tell the CCP, don't do it because you will fail. And maybe that's the final thing I'd say. I think it's doable. I think with the right investment in asymmetric resources, we can actually convince them that this is not an achievable goal within the decade. It's not going to be free, but I think it is going to be a very valuable investment of defense resources, which leads to, I keep saying

the final thing. I swear this is the final thing. Ultimately, for me at least, this is about deterrence. It's about preventing World War III. And I would prefer that we don't get dragged into a massive conventional conflict for which we are ill-prepared on someone else's terms. So I think with a sense of urgency and the right concept of operations, over the next five years, we can prevent World War III. And I think that's a good investment. So you talk about the fall of Taiwan rendering our treaty commitments unfulfillable. What specifically do you mean by this? And this gets into, you know, I want you to talk a little bit, if you would, about the kind of strategic architecture of the Pacific and these concentric rings of defenses that you spoke about in heritage. But what's what, what militarily is the consequence of the fall of Taiwan?

Well, if you read the sort of the PLA textbooks for mid-level military officers, they explicitly talk about taking Taiwan as a way to disrupt Japan's sea lines of communications and economic supply lines and basically render Japan subservient. Japan is a treaty allies of ours, as is the Philippines right now, and then the Aussies, of course. So I think that that's primarily what I'm talking about. As for the Rings of Fire approach, I should note that in my heritage speech, although I didn't, I'm not sure, I don't remember if I said it. I think I gave them credit. I at least footnoted in the written version a great report by CSBA called Rings of Fire, which I stole a lot of my ideas from. But the basic idea is that, particularly now since we're no longer bound by the INF Treaty, the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, we have the ability to field relatively low-cost missile systems in order to target the PLA Navy

in the way that they use their rocket force to target us. And that's really the genius thing they've done in recent years. Yes, they now have the largest Navy in the world, at least by ship numbers, and the numbers at which their building ships are stunning relative to the problems our own shipbuilding industrial base has. But the real innovation has been the anti-Navy they've built. It's their rocket force that they're using to target our ships and keep them out of the weapons engagement zone, keep them out of the fight, and it puts us on the wrong side of the cost group. Well, now we have the ability to flip that script and do that to them. So the inner part of the ring or the bull's eye of the rings is Taiwan itself.

We've had a lot of happy talk about arming Taiwan to the teeth, turning Taiwan into a porcupine. We haven't actually done it. We have an $18 billion backlog of foreign military sales equipment items that we need to deliver to Taiwan. I may have mentioned that before. That's something we can do, using loitering munitions to defend Taiwan, taking the harpoon missiles that are scheduled to be demiled and potentially giving them to the Taiwan. There are creative ways where we can arm Taiwan over the next two to five years that make them a very hard, target. And remember, the very same thing that makes Taiwan hard to conquer militarily,

make it very difficult to resupply. And that's something we're learning in Ukraine. There's no Poland next door that we can just send, you know, missiles from or things like that. So you really have to stockpile munitions on Taiwan itself and throughout the first island chain before the shooting start. Then you sort of zoom out to the second ring or the inner ring, if you're thinking of Taiwan as the bull's eye. You're talking about the southern Japanese islands and the Northern Philippine Islands, where the commandant of the Marine Corps, and we can debate, I don't know which side of this debate you're on, but I think he's directionally right,

wants to put small teams of Marines, potentially on autonomous, joint-like tactical vehicles with the naval strike missile that are able to target Chinese ships that are crossing the straight in an attempt to take Taiwan by force. We just got a massive win in the form of a basing and access agreement with Japan, and what the Japanese are doing in terms of ramping up to 2% of GDP for defense spending, taking them from, I think, ninth in the world in defense spending to third behind us in China is a massive, massive geopolitical shift and a good one.

And then you zoom out to the third ring, and this is where I think you can really get creative. We could develop an intermediate range, like a longer range intermediate ground launch weapon with advanced energetic materials that we could station in our own territory, in Alaska, for example, or in Australia's northern territory, if we gave them some form of sovereign control, that could really cause the PLA to get nervous on a day-to-day basis. So this is just an example of, you know, my basic idea in the speech was even in the best case scenario, where you have a better president who is good on defense issues, who's a navalist, and wants to empower a smart secretary of defense to bend the Pentagon bureaucracy to his or her will,

it's going to take a long time to get a bigger Navy and a bigger Air Force. So the question is, how do we get creative in the window of maximum danger? Within the next five years, how do we restore deterrence by denial so that we don't have a deterrence failure like that, which we saw in Ukraine? And the first part of the speech, I talked about why deterrence failed in Ukraine. And my basic theories is built on naive utopian assumptions, but we can get into that if you'd like. Sorry to go on. Not at all. Not all. Well, look, you brought it up. So let's get into it. There has been this enormous kind of unusual fight over the Marine Corps' modernization and the force structure plans in the last couple years now here in D.C. I'm with you.

Directionally sound sounds right to me. I mean, I wouldn't necessarily, I'm not as enthusiastic about some parts of the plan as others and I have a couple. In general, the Corps and the Commandant, they seem to me to concede a lot in advance about, you know, the future shape of our budget. And what they see as a genuflection before political reality, I kind of wish they could just keep some capabilities and add others. That all said, I've been impressed from the start by the Commandant's boldness, you know, actually sort of thinking through, like, making thoughtful, bold bets about what the war that the Marine Corps will be called upon the fight in is going to look like and moving in that direction. And there's a sort of, there's a sense of energy and creativity to it that, you know, whether or not you agree with every aspect of it is certainly impressive. And I have been just struck by so much the fact that there's dissent. There's always going to be dissent, you know, maybe even vigorous dissent when you are making such bold changes in an institution as large and important as the Marine Corps and with as much history and sense of self.

But the nature of it, you know, these sort of retired general officers, the PR campaigns, the PR firms, it's kind of as a Marine, I have to say, this is my view. I'm curious to know yours. It's kind of embarrassing. the way in which the style in which the fight has occurred. I agree with that. Well, first, you hit on something at the beginning. I actually think the most legitimate criticism of the commonon is that, yeah, perhaps you shouldn't preemptively surrender on the budget issue.

I guess the flip would be, well, he's smart just to recognize the reality rather than fighting, you know, taking that rock up the hill constantly in a chaotic budget process in Congress. But I tend to agree with you on that. The one criticism, I think, is not legitimate, is the one. that Jim Webb made in the Wall Street Journal. And I mean, I think like every Marine, I really respect Jim Webb. Jim Webb, I think, once wrote an article in, I don't know, is it foreign affairs or something

where he talked about how Congress has just surrendered its foreign policy authorities under the Constitution. And it's one of the best things I've ever read and I agree with most of it. And obviously he wrote a great book, Field of Fire, you know, great combat record. But he basically made the argument in the Wall Street Journal that, you know, Berger did a complete end run around Congress and kind of just surprised us with this plan and foisted it upon us. That at least is not my perspective as a member of the Armed Services Committee for the last six years, basically from the start of this. The commonot, I think, was unusually forward-leaning in reaching out to us, encouraging debate in places like War on the Rocks. I mean, he had a ton of junior officers

debating this. He seemed to welcome that. So I don't think that's a legitimate criticism. So, and I think sort of the big bet he's making, which is that a force designed to solve our most stressing defense problem, i.e. China, is going to be able, if called upon, to solve our, like, slightly less stressing problems, i.e., you know, if we find ourselves in a war with Iran. Now, reasonable people can argue about what the perfect T.O. of an infantry battalion is, what role tanks are going to play in future warfare. And honestly, I think the most controversial aspects for the future of the Marine Corps

are actually not talked about in the Commandant's plan. And that's the cost of Marine Corps aviation. I mean, the cost of, like, our entitlement problem is both personnel costs and actual entitlements and the cost of CH 53 and F-35. That's the real iceberg ahead that we don't have a good answer for. And this gets to where I think,

though he didn't talk about cutting those assets, the commonwealth's on to something that I think is interesting. And that's, and that I do think is part of the changing character of warfare, though the nature of warfare remains unchanged. And that's sort of the democratization of air power. I think you're seeing that play out in Ukraine. I think some of these assets, switchblades, various forms of loitering munitions are going to change the game. And if we can use those effectively in the defense of Taiwan, or if we can have small teams of Marines using those and throughout the first island chain, I don't know. That's an investment I want to make.

Yeah, well, look, if you want to get really futurist and we'll move kind of into the late-night speculative phase of the conversation, you know, if you take the logic that you just talked about with air power and talk about naval power, I mean, your speech is about building an anti-Navy, right? Well, as everyone's anti-navies become really effective, you know, what room is there really for navies traditionally conceived? There is, of course, tremendous room, but maybe less for some of the platforms and some of the systems that we have grown dependent upon and used to relying on for American security.

or at least a sense of American security in recent generations. I don't think our undersea asymmetric advantage is anything we want to surrender anytime soon. And we have various extreme challenges in our submarine industrial base right now. We can't, you know, we have upwards of 50. We need high 60s. And now we have this additional requirement where we've pledged to help the Aussies build nuclear submarines. And we're struggling. You know, we're buying about two Virginias a year, fielding 1.2.

We can't do that on the current path. So there are certain ships that we are going to have to build much more of. I'm a big fan of the small surface combatant that we're building here in Wisconsin because really the unique role of the Navy. And actually in this last year's National Defense Authorization Act, got to, I changed the mission of the Navy in law, which I didn't know I could do. I sort of messed with sort of like the source code of the Matrix.

To account for like the day-to-day peacetime deterrence that the Navy does, and I think is a sort of unique role of the Navy. and it's one of the reasons why the Constitution sort of mandates that we shall have a Navy, but we may raise armies. So I don't know. But, you know, again, there's, I think, productive debates to be had about how many carriers do we need? Do we need to move to a lightning carrier concept? Do we need to buy a carrier every six years as opposed to every four and plow those savings into building more Virginia subs and Columbia class subs? So I think you get creative with the Navy, too. But it's going to really, you know what the biggest hurdle right now to ramping up?

Well, there's two things. One, we don't have a good demand signal for. from the administration because we haven't seen a coherent shipbuilding plan in recent history. And two, it's workforce. We can't find the human beings we need to build these ships. I mean, that's the biggest thing I've heard for six years as a congressman. Going to every business in my district doesn't matter what the industry is. It's we need more human beings. Our workforce challenge is in many ways our biggest national security challenge.

Yeah. I want to be respectful of your time. So one more big question for you, though. Before I ask it, let me just say I personally owe Jim Webb a great deal. My mother lived in the same condo building in northern Virginia as Jim Webb for some time, and I was a young lieutenant, and I got on the elevator, and there he was. There was Senator Webb on his way down to use the gym. And at this time in my young life, I was considering Congressman getting an Eagle Globe and anchor tattoo, as many of my peers were doing, as is the thing that second lieutenants sometimes do. And my brief conversation with Senator Webb cured me of this desire, because as we were chit chatting, he was very polite, very nice. He was very nice. He was a very nice. He was a thing. wearing this cutoff t-shirt and he was going down in the gym in the basement and on his shoulder and he was in his late 60s I think at time he looked he was he was in good as shape as I would ever hope to be in my late 60s and he had an old EGA tattoo on his shoulder and over the decades

it had just sort of elongated on the y axis was it was it was just dramatically dramatically dramatically stretched and in that moment looking at that tattoo I thought you know I'm I'm good so thank you thank you you've gotten it there Is that where you were thinking about place? Either there or on the chest. But the point is that time is not kind. Time is not kind. And for all of his contributions to the nation, which are significant, I am grateful to

Jim Lipp for that. You owe him big time. I have a great picture of all my idiot buddies from TBS who immediately went out and got ridiculous tattoos somewhere like, we're talking massive Celtic crosses on their thighs with Marine Corps. My buddy, Ryan Light got, I think he got on his rib cage. He got tattooed. the strength of the wolf is in the pack.

That one, I guarantee you, did not age well. So I, too, resisted the temptation. I'm thankful for it. Daddy, Daddy, what is, what's, what's a pack? Yeah. So last big question for you. And we can start with the Navy, but I want to ask about culture, military culture, it was fighting spirit.

When I left the Marines in 2014, I mean, Marines, Marines are given to complain and I could complain about this or that. And maybe I could complain about more today. But if you'd ask me if my, my battalion, first battalion, six Marines, could fight and win, I would have, unequivocally said, yes. Do we need to adjust for this or that threat? Sure. But yes. I mean, there is there is a spirit to win here. You amongst some of your colleagues in Congress and in the Senate, to include my former boss, Senator Cotton Commission report on the Navy a couple years ago,

focused in particular on the Surface Navy, which anti-Navy is notwithstanding is going to play a big role, of course, in any kind of fight with China. And this report raised some pretty serious questions about the health and culture of the Surface Navy specifically. So I just want to ask you, a couple years on from that. What's your view specifically of the fighting, it's a loaded way I'm phrasing this question. What's your, what's your view specifically about the fighting spirit of the Navy and the surface component in particular? And just stepping out more broadly, you know, what is the role of culture in the military? How do you think about it? You've spoken about what you see as some of the threats to it in terms of some of the focuses of the Biden DOD. Talk to us about that.

Well, for that report specifically, some of the big takeaways were, one, I would say, when it comes of the surface Navy, you get what you pay for. And if you just compare the level of training, your average SWO gets relative to a pilot or a submariner, it's just not where it needs to be. And then add on to that a second thing, which is we in recent years moved to what's called swass in a box where you basically all the basic instructions for your brand new service warfare officer, you just kind of ship them a bunch of outdated, you know, compact discs or DVDs or blue rays or whatever, and then you expect them to kind of learn it on their own. That's just an ineffective education model. And so what we found is that basic brilliance in the basic when it

comes to basic seamanship was neglected, and that played a strong part in some of the tragic and deadly accidents that we've seen in recent years. Perhaps that's bound up in a third and bigger issue, which is just the general bureaucratization of the force. And we all saw it, right? I mean, I imagine even in an infantry unit you had to do your, you know, your annual PowerPoint that nobody pays attention to. And it's, you know, but these things that seem like a mild annoyance at the time add up when they get layered on top of each other. And they do eat away the time that you need to do basic training and just refine your

warfighting skills. Now, this, that report, if memory serves, didn't talk as much about the new glitch in the matrix, which is the growth of the diversity, equity and including. bureaucracy in the Pentagon and throughout the operating forces. So the wokeism that is infecting the military. And I'll confess, I was tempted to ignore this early on as just like a, you know, Biden administration comes in and they have to sort of genuflect at the DEI alter, but they don't really believe in it. Well, there's too much evidence now. I mean, whether it's the senior DEI advisor that, that Secretary Austin appointed, whether it's the 60-day stand-down, that he ordered,

whether it's every major service academy, adopting crazy woke curricula, the Air Force. Academy instructing, you know, kids not to use gender pronoun or used problematic language like mom or dad. The Air Force Academy now offers a minor in diversity and inclusion. And if you read the curriculum in that minor, it's absolutely absurd and it's unbalanced. Now we've been persuaded that the same sort of woke mind virus that's destroyed civilian higher education risked destroying the culture in the military. And it's incredibly divisive. And the final thing I'd say about it and what I tried to get at in this piece I wrote for National Review in a speech I did at Hillsdale was it's all based on garbage social science that doesn't even pass the

basic Polysi 101 methodological sniff test. So the Navy goes out there and in a report called Task Force One Navy, they make these wild claims that diversity is our strength, diversity equals lethality, that diverse teams are X percent more likely to accurately assess a situation and get results. And then you look at the footnotes, and they cite these studies that have been completely discredited. There's a 2015 study that's just an absurd experiment where they took people mostly outside of America that had some background in finance. They had them interact, diverse groups interact in a room for like five seconds and non-diverse

groups, you know, say to themselves, and then they make fake stock trades in a cubicle by themselves, and they try and derive some conclusions and quantify the idea that the diverse groups outperform the non-diverse groups. There's a 2015 study from McKinsey called Diversity Matters, which is ridiculous in terms of its methodology and has an absurd way of quantifying the racial and gender diversity of boards. And that gets to the final thing. You sort of talk about diversity in the abstract, and then you define diversity exclusively in racial and gender terms. And the way in which that is enforced has a negative impact on the, I think, the one type of diversity that everyone is seeking in a meritocratic military at times, which is intellectual

diversity. And actually, this is the final thing. I think there's something fundamentally different about the military. This is a unique enterprise where you're asking young men and women to kill or be killed for their country. Must be a colorblind meritocratic exercise. And we must guard it against the sort of worst excesses that we're seeing in higher education and increasingly in corporate boardrooms. So for that and many other reasons,

I actually think the creeping DEI cottage industry represents a threat to warfighting culture. For no other reason, then it takes time away from the specific business of preparing to fight wars and fighting wars. Congressman Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, thank you so much for joining. I'm glad you're out there working on these issues. Thank you. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.