Hey Pete, What Happened to Military Reform?
With a President who hates bureaucracy and both a Vice President and a Secretary of Defense who fought in wars we lost, it seemed reasonable to expect a revival of military reform from the Trump administration. Instead, so far at least, all we’ve heard has been the usual cries to increase the defense budget. We did not lose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because our opponents outspent us. If we want to start winning, we have to take on problems in our armed forces that have little or nothing to do with money.
The military reform movement of the 1980s, in which I played a role, said that to win wars, we have to look at people, ideas, and hardware, in that order of importance. At present, our military personnel policies are so bad they would be little different if our worst enemy had designed them. Vital reforms include:
-Dismissing almost all the vast army of civil servants and contractors who generate nothing but bureaucracy and are an obstacle to any reforms.
-Replacing the constant churn of people with policies that create unit cohesion.
-Vastly reduce the size of the officer corps above the company grades.
-Change the type of people we promote. At present, few if any combat leaders become general officers. The upper ranks are filled with bureaucratic managers whose expertise is budget and promotion politics. Until that changes, we will keep on losing wars.
When it comes to ideas, both the Army and the Marine Corps still follow the Second Generation, French-derived doctrine that failed so dramatically when it hit Third Generation, german maneuver warfare in 1940. The Marines adopted maneuver warfare as doctrine in the early 1990s, but they don’t follow their own doctrine. The Air Force continues to loath the mission of supporting soldiers or Marines on the ground, which is where air power can achieve the most. The Navy still revolves around its eleven big aircraft carriers, which are submarine, missile, and drone bait. The net result of the failure of all our armed services in the battle of ideas is that we are spending almost a trillion dollars a year on four clubs for World War II re-enactors. The Army even has the uniforms!
When it comes to hardware, we have forgotten the wise words of Field Marshal von Hindenburg: “That which succeeds in war is simple.” In Ukraine, our big, expensive drones proved easy to knock out while the cheap, simple drones built in Ukrainians’ garages have been highly effective. Portugal is way ahead of us in warship design with its new purpose-built drone carrier that costs about 1/100th as much as a Ford-class aircraft carrier. Our R&D and procurement system is so dysfunctional it cannot produce a good product.
The military reform movement of the 1980s identified all these problems and more and proposed solutions. That work remains available and relevant; there is no need for a new reform effort to re-invent the wheel. A Secretary of Defense and a Vice President who are serious about avoiding more failed wars like those they fought in could hit the ground running.
So how about it, Pete? Are you going to take on the real reasons for our lousy won-loss record or just piss more money down a hole funding what doesn’t work? A lot depends on your answer.