Posted on 09/30/2022 7:25:42 PM PDT by AndyJackson
The next administration’s top priority must be a dramatic reduction in the four-star overhead
Reflecting on the Battle of the Bulge during December 1944 and January 1945, Troy Middleton, former VIII Corps commander, said, “Patton’s principal worth was that he kept things moving. He kept everybody else moving—not only his juniors but his seniors. Otherwise, during the Battle of the Bulge, there would have been a tendency to play Montgomery—to dress up the lines instead of getting in there and hitting the Germans hard.”
Middleton’s observations are sound, but in 1939, the Army’s senior leaders had already selected the unpopular and irascible Patton for retirement and obscurity. Patton was not the only one. In the 1920s, the Army’s senior leaders sidelined Colonel Billy Mitchell and Brigadier General Adna Chaffee. Mitchell wanted to develop air power. Chaffee wanted to build the armored force. Thanks to the outbreak of wars in Poland and Western Europe, the ideas survived, and Patton survived, but only barely in time to be used in World War II.
Today, the potential for high intensity conventional warfare between great powers looms large. The next president and his administration must recognize that high intensity conventional warfare demands much more character and competence than they will find in another cohort of three- and four-star “Yes Men” with brush cuts, and bright eyes wearing a uniform from the distant past (minus its gold buttons).
Adding more money to an already bloated defense budget will also not fix the problem. Still finding new senior officers who are focused more on service than promotion; senior military leaders with minds receptive to fundamental change in warfare is easier said than done. To understand why change must be imposed from above, Alfred G. Meyer developed a typology of leadership that explains the progressive evolution of leaders in a large military, political or industrial establishment from creative revolutionaries to plodding bureaucrats that maintain the institution.
For the current generation of system maintainers, a fundamentally new military system with new organizations for a new kind of war is not only inconceivable; the idea is offensive. And therein lies the problem.
n conflicts like those in Iraq and Afghanistan where the application of overwhelming American firepower substitutes for tactics and strategy because there are no enemy armies, air forces or air defenses to fight, the historic outcome is a collection of enormous headquarters manned with far too many generals or admirals. Even worse, the headquarters tend to fill up with weak, untested, but politically savvy senior officers or “Power Point Rangers,” as the saying goes.
The numbers of four-star generals and admirals currently in the U.S. Armed Forces illustrates the problem. For a force of 1.1 million active-duty Service Members, the current U.S. Armed Forces are commanded by 40 four-star generals and admirals.
or readers who may think this command overhead is normal, they should know that for most of World War II when there were 12.2 million Americans in uniform, the nation relied on 7 Four Stars to command the Armed Forces: Marshall, MacArthur, Eisenhower and Arnold for Army Ground and Air Forces; King, Nimitz, and Leahy for U.S. Naval Forces. Admiral Leahy, a former Chief of Naval Operations, served as President Roosevelt’s senior Military Advisor who interpreted FDR’s strategic guidance, but held no designated command.
Marshall deliberately kept the numbers of four stars to a minimum saying, “I don’t have time to argue.” More than 77 years after WW 2 it’s time to reinstate Marshall’s wise policy. The growth of numerous agencies, technical support organizations, and high cost logistical and acquisition programs have driven the rank and experience required to command operational fighting forces into a very small corner.
Marshall’s insistence on streamlined command and control, on simplicity of orders, and on unity of command is more relevant than ever. Instantaneous, redundant space-based communications, surveillance, reconnaissance, intelligence, and missile technologies have wrought profound change in the way military operations can be conducted. The next administration must revisit the 1947 National Security Act and The 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act.
The 1947 National Security Act resulted from the victory in the Second World War. It was designed to harmonize all the U.S. Armed Forces’ capabilities. Instead, it fostered bitter budget fights, single-service thinking, and dug deeper ruts for senior officers to follow. Goldwater-Nichols subsequently created a command structure that is no longer suited to the new multipolar international system.
The Services expect, get, and spend a predetermined piece of the funding pie, fostering waste and redundancy. Too much force structure remains wedded to the WWII designs modified in 1947. New force designs and new technologies that could be exploited to streamline command and control and make operations more effective are excluded from consideration.
Other problems are caused by secretaries of Defense whose priorities were too often been driven by the politics of apportioning money and technology to the “right people,” or social engineering, and far less to the ruthless pursuit of building forces that can fight. The Biden administration’s divisive, racially charged policies and “woke” LGBT agenda may be the worst of these given their impact on military morale, discipline, readiness, and recruiting.
These points notwithstanding, the next administration’s top priority must be a dramatic reduction in the four-star overhead and a commensurate reduction in the numbers of regional unified and functional commands. System maintainers can’t do the job.
America’s military future must be shaped by two kinds of generals and admirals: System creators and builders; those who can theorize and design, and those who can harness people and technology with the ability to lead and inspire. These are the desired attributes that transcend the drill field, the parachute jump, or the routine exercise. Once the overhead is substantially reduced, these are the leaders the civilians-in-charge that populate the next Administration must identify and appoint. In a word, Alfred Thayer Mahan’s advice to the Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt remains valid: “No Service can or should be expected to reform itself.”
That’s an old saying, but true. What’s not part of that is a lot of stuff the military has been doing for years, like being a social experiment, nation building, peace keeping for others, humanitarian aid, and world cop.
Our nation and it’s people would benefit from some major league focus. Doing singular things with excellence. That is good for people at work. It’s good for schools. It’s good for government. Like, why in the hell does the federal government have over a dozen intelligence agencies? I know the reason, it’s to spy on and control American citizens and has zero to do with our nation’s defense.
Quite honestly, no one in Washington really cares about our nation’s defense and safety. We are protecting Ukraines border but doing nothing to protect our own while there is an invasion that kills 100,000+ Americans each year.
It would seem to me that the war in Ukraine demands a completely new appraisal of modern warfare. Tanks seem an easy target. Low cost drones can be used effectively against infantry, artillery and tracked vehicles. Counter-artillery fire leaves first-fire artillery at risk. Ships at sea are prey to missiles fired from distant shores. Jets are still being brought down by hand-fired missiles. It seems silly now, but the massive loss of life points to a new warfare, that will have to be undertaken by robots in the same way that airwar is being fought by drones.
Real wars tend to clarify this. We had real enemies in the Vietnam War that never suffered death and whose things remained unbroken. This was a betrayal of our troops who died in the conflict.
in some ways yes, I would start with his
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=victor+davis+hanson+generals
A RIF for a REMF.
I like the alliteration.
5.56mm
How many of the JCS resigned after the Afghanistan withdrawal fiasco?
If the means & methods of the withdrawal were WH orders. They should have threatened mass resignation? Never heard a peep about about any push back saying “ That’s a terrible plan WH! You do this we resign in protest!!”.
I don’t remember anything to that effect!
That should tell you everything about our current top brass!
We are all REMFs
Ping.
If the riot was truly put down, there would have been antifa and blm bodies stacked shoulder high along the streets.
Instead the antifa/blm terrorists were allowed to melt back into the shadows unscathed.
“Pentagon (not meant to be so) implies lots of “brass”. Have to have plenty to justify a building that big.”
At the beginning of WW2, the War Department was spread out in numerous buildings across Washington, D.C., as well as Maryland and Virginia.
Back when it was built, they needed the size for all of the clerk-typists that made up the secretarial pool who typed all the memos, orders, field manuals, etc, etc.
With the advent of computers, the secretarial pool was cut in half. Unfortunately the void was filled with additional brass that popped up like mushrooms in a dung pile.
True.
Until one day you ain’t.
Pray that day doesn’t come.
5.56mm
“Counter-artillery fire leaves first-fire artillery at risk.”
Yes and no.
If it’s towed artillery such as the Msta-B, D-30, M198, or M777 you’re pretty much screwed because of the slower displacement times involved.
If you’re on something like the Pzh2000, Paladin, HIMARS or MLRS you can fire multiple rounds and be on the move before the first round even hits the target.
Russian counter-battery fire isn’t as fast as ours, even our ancient AN/TPQ-37 could plot locations before enemy rounds reached their apogee, and the info sent to our firing batteries before impact.
I was thinking of artillery used in combination with drones used as spotters. Which brings me to another thought. Much work will have to be done in the next decade to combat the influence of drones, while drones themselves become smaller and deadlier. Next, in thirty years the infantryman will be obsolete, his task taken over by robots. Finally, as we can see by Black Sea incidents some thinking will have to take place regarding ships at sea. Now, they seem to be nothing more than moving foxholes, dreadnaughts if you will, that attract attention.
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