An informative but sad article. Hackworth wrote the same sort of thing, with lots of examples, about our worthless military leadership in Viet Nam.
I understand this article author’s anguished desire to make things better, but he is failing to see the forest for all the trees.
Think about how fast our communications are now compared to WW2. Think how hard it was for the Pentagon or the equivalent War Department to get communications to all the millions of soldiers, sailors, and Marines. And look at how tiny our instantly in touch military forces are today in comparison to WW2.
Then explain why we have more general officers and admirals today than we did in WW2. I’ll wait.
The first thing that needs to be done is to eliminate at least 2/3s of all senior officers. There is absolutely no justification for the bloated load of brass in military and naval offices. Get rid of them! They make staff work and complicate decision making to justify their existence.
At least reduce to the officer to enlisted ration of WW2. Easy to justify, right? It’s the last war we won.
Officer to enlisted ratio.
Way too easy. Military people want to advance in rank. Organizing the military to have more high ranking officers gives more officers chances to obtain high rank.
People work to promote their own interests.
Super simple.
May interest you. Downloadable as a PDF file, the book: The Things They Carried
https://lessonbank.kyae.ky.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/TTTC_Full_Text.pdf
Shortly after George C Marshall became the Army’s Chief of Staff in 1939, he realized that during the inter war years that the army had become too reliant on an unofficial good old boy network of West point graduates who greased too many undeserved promotional skids.
Therefore, he instituted a series of southern state pre war maneuvers, (The most prominent being the Louisiana Maneuvers, which bought George S Patton to preeminence) which were intended to professionalize the Army, but most importantly, to winnow the chaff from the officer corp. Over a thousand officers in the Louisiana show alone were accordingly reassigned or cashiered, including 31 of 42 corps and division commanders. Marshall was keenly concerned about the cauldron that his Army was about to be hurled into, and he wanted to ensure it’s eventual victory in battle, with the least cost in human life.
The objective then was to, as best as could be achieved, promote the elevation of meritocracy and competence over most other considerations.
Today, the goal seems to be to worship the corrupt cultural Marxist notion of diversity, equity, and inclusion, to elevate the otherwise unqualified largely on the basis of certain immutable characteristics, which is sure to destroy combat efficiency and shatter morale.
Could that really be the point of it?