On the menu today: A small but significant reversal of woke ideology permeating the culture of the U.S. military offers a good example of why you should be reading every issue of National Review; Vladimir Putin does the unthinkable and effectively fires his old employer, Russia’s biggest intelligence agency, the FSB, from its role as the primary spy agency for the war in Ukraine and replaces it with a heavily militarized branch of military intelligence, the GRU; bad new inflation numbers for April, and May isn’t looking good, either; and today, the Three Martini Lunch podcast welcomes its third-ever guest.
What You’re Missing If You Aren’t Subscribing to National Review
Yesterday, Brent Sadler, a senior fellow for naval warfare and advanced technology at the Heritage Foundation, examined the new U.S. Navy recommended-reading list from Admiral Mike Gilday, the chief of Naval Operations, and observed that, “The absence of the social ‘warrior’ books is welcome and hopefully there will not be repeats as seen in last year’s reading list, which was unnecessarily divisive.” (I can recommend Ashley’s War, an in-depth profile of the women serving on the U.S. Army’s Cultural Support Teams, a secret pilot program that had women serving alongside Special Operations soldiers conducting raids in Afghanistan. Women soldiers could interact with Afghan women in and near raid targets in ways that would be less culturally disruptive than male soldiers.)
The CNO Professional Reading Program consists of twelve books and is a mix of writing genres including fiction, non-fiction, military strategy, management, and technology, among others; last year’s list featured Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, and Jason Pierceson’s Sexual Minorities and Politics.
What made this year’s shift back to an apolitical, military-focused list particularly intriguing is that the most recent print edition of National Review — probably still available at your local Barnes and Noble or other well-stocked newsstand — focused on the impact of woke politics on the U.S. military. The cover story is written by Representative Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, the ranking member of the Military Personnel Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee and a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He contended that with the previous reading list, Gilday, the chief of Naval Operations, asked “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.”
Unless you’re a subscriber, you probably didn’t know about Gallagher’s piece. A ranking member of two key House committees — who is likely to be in the majority in January 2023, and perhaps chairing a subcommittee or two — called out the U.S. Navy for a woke, politics-heavy recommended-reading list on the cover of our magazine . . . and the Navy promptly ordered a full reverse, so to speak. The print edition may not have the biggest readership of any magazine, but it has a particularly influential one.
If you want to be in the loop — to know what’s coming down the pike and what’s going on beyond the headlines — you ought to subscribed to NR. The issue before Gallagher’s cover story, our Charlie Cooke laid out why Disney was destined to lose the fight over adding gender ideology to the K–3 curriculum in Florida. The issue before that, you saw the rare time a Democratic strategist — Ruy Teixeira — wrote the cover piece, declaring that “the current Democratic brand suffers from several deficiencies that make it somewhere between uncompelling and toxic to many American voters who might otherwise be the party’s allies. I locate these deficiencies in three key areas: culture, economics, and patriotism.”
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And now, on to the rest of the news . . .
The New Version of the KGB Gets Fired
Just call it the “FSBeaten.”
For decades, the FSB, the successor to the old Soviet KGB, has enjoyed a fearsome reputation. Its methods are ruthless and unscrupulous, and its ability to penetrate Western institutions is insidious and terrifying.
And now, as the Russian invasion debacle worsens, apparently Vladimir Putin has effectively fired the FSB.
Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov are senior fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog reporting on Russian secret-service activities. They write:
Vladimir Putin has removed Russia’s biggest intelligence agency, the FSB, from its role as the primary spy agency for the war in Ukraine and handed responsibility to a heavily militarized branch of military intelligence, the GRU.
The new lead officer, Vladimir Alekseyev, the first deputy head of the GRU, is heavily implicated in several of Putin’s most serious attacks on the West over the past decade. He is accused by the UK and the European Union of overseeing the chemical weapons attack in Salisbury in 2018. An experienced special forces officer, he is also sanctioned by the US for direct cyber interference in the US 2016 election.
The pair point to a state-run television program that recently identified Alekseyev as the top general for intelligence on Ukraine for the first time:
The news marked a significant shift. Until now, Ukraine had been the responsibility of the Fifth Service of the FSB, the department which provided Putin with intelligence on Ukraine before the invasion. The disastrous start to the war, clouded by the pre-emptive publication by Western intelligence of highly secret plans as yet unrealized, and by the complete absence of popular uprisings by Russian speakers (which Putin was told would occur) cast a dark shadow over the department. Its boss, FSB general Sergei Beseda, was initially arrested and held in the notorious Lefortovo prison.
They also write that the enraged Putin jailed Beseda, then realized how having the country’s top spymaster imprisoned contradicted his regime’s message that the invasion was going swimmingly and everything was under control and on schedule. So Beseda was released, but he and his organization are effectively sidelined; Putin no longer trusts the information he gets from Russia’s primary spy agency.
Every spy agency gets some decisions wrong. Sometimes defectors lie, and sometimes regimes lie to themselves. But Putin will never see the FSB the same way again, and Putin’s successors will likely never be quite so confident in the assessments of Russian intelligence — particularly if the intelligence aims to assure a Russian leader that resistance to aggression will be light and short-lived. From an American perspective, this is a good thing.
Don’t Let Anyone Spin You; This Is Another Bad Inflation Number
You and I knew, heading into this morning, that the inflation numbers for April were going to be bad. President Biden knew as well, which is why he spent Tuesday insisting runaway inflation was the fault of everyone in the world except for him, his administration, and his policies.
The numbers were on the worse end of the estimates — “over the last 12 months, the all items index increased 8.3 percent before seasonal adjustment”; banks had expected anywhere from 7.9 percent to 8.3 percent. Core inflation, which excludes energy and food, was expected to decline to from 6.5 percent to 6.1 or 6 percent, but it only went down to 6.2 percent.
“Inflation took a breather” does not strike me as the most clarifying or accurate way to describe this update.
The numbers for May are probably going to be awful, too. On Tuesday, AAA announced that the national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline had reached an all-time high of $4.37.
This morning, the price is up to $4.40.
ADDENDUM: Tune in to today’s Three Martini Lunch, with (barring some last-minute snafu) our third-ever special guest. A couple listeners guessed the guest based upon my hint that our guest’s surname appeared in the movie The Naked Gun 2 ½.
That is our guest’s surname, not our guest. Greg and I are not interviewing O. J. Simpson.