by Navy Capt. (Ret.) Pete O’Brien, Distinguished Fellow and Chairman, Project Sentinel
Pete Hegseth, soon to be the Secretary of Defense (one hopes), believes the uniformed services are populated by admirals and generals who have been rewarded for failure. I submit that he understates the problem.
The services used to be comfortable with winning. After WW I (actually some of this started before WWI, thanks to President Theodore Roosevelt) a small team of Army and Navy officers, never more than 30 or 40, put together a series of plans and proposals and war games, and figured out how to fight and win what would become WW II.
Fleet Admiral Nimitz noted after the war that everything that happened in the war, with the exception of the Kamikaze, had been addressed at war games in Newport. More than that, they worked out all the infrastructure questions: how much electricity will we need and where will we get it? How much concrete? How much steel? How many welders and electricians? The entire problem, from an industrial, agricultural and work force perspective to make the massive army, navy and air force, train all of that huge force, and equip them with the right weapons – guns, ships, aircraft, and make all the “stuff” from candy bars to B-29s to aircraft carriers – everything needed to execute the plan – all that was worked out before hand as well – and actions taken.
As one small example, before the attack on Pearl Harbor the US Navy had already ordered the building of 13 Essex class carriers, among a host of other ships.
The generally accepted story line is that the services prior to the war were stacked with deadwood, officers who were at best poor leaders, and who had been in the service too long. In fact, there was a good deal of that – there often is. But, at the same time virtually all of the great leaders of World War II were already in uniform when Pearl Harbor was attacked; there are literally just a handful of officers who rose to any sort of command position who joined after Pearl Harbor.
The services had a certain ability that they seem to lack today: they could identify very good officers, and knew how to keep hold of them. When the war started there were people who were plucked out of the “crowd” and placed in key positions and a remarkably high percentage of them performed superbly.
But the problem today isn’t simply that we have admirals and generals who accept what amounts to defeat; the problem is systemic, the organizations themselves don’t care about outcomes. And there is no one with bold, broad sweep of thought because the system squeezes them out. Officers who think like that are pushed aside, often as commanders or lieutenant colonels, and if not then, as captains and colonels. Such officers make admiral or general (one star) by mistake. They make 3 or 4 star only by grave error.
Occasionally a good admiral or general ends up on a service staff, and invariably ends up working on some procurement issue. Invariably a situation develops in which glaring problems arise. One of two things then generally happens: 1) the officer is suborned by the system and suddenly is fighting for the F-99 fighter/M99 tank/SSN-999 submarine loudly proclaiming it to be the great fighter – tank – submarine in all Christendom, or 2) he bucks the system, says we need to reconsider F-99, and suddenly little is coming out of his office, his staff administratively “strangles” him.
This is not malicious, strictly speaking, nor is there some nefarious plot. Rather inside the Navy (Army, Air Force, etc.) there are long-serving civilians who have been involved with SSN-999 when it was just a gleam in some admiral’s eye. The Admiral wants to give the Navy the very best submarine possible; so does the Navy civilian. So do the Congressman and Senators who will work the appropriation bills. And really, so do the defense contractors who will build SSN-999 and all the associated systems. And, especially since 1991 and the demise of the USSR, there is no real pressing need to have something NOW! There is no need to make a hard call and say: “We’ll wait on subsystem Z,” or “We don’t need an entirely new radar (engine, etc.).” Instead, there is the plaintive response: “What about our troops / airman / sailors? Don’t they deserve the best we can give them?”
The answer to that, of course, has to be, “well, no.” Because the truth is that the best is pretty much impossible to reach. Tradeoffs are made all the time, but there remains a fascination with large, very complex systems that also can do a little bit of everything. But for the fleet, “good now” is better than “perfect in 3 decades.”
And at the root of all this is simply this: we no longer have any sort of strategic thought going on in the service staffs. Instead, we have program-centric thought. The Navy is buying F-35 because buying F-35 is one of the Navy’s goals. Success is marked by inputs: money committed or things bought; no one is responsible for real outcomes.
And the system likes that, as long as the system functions based on inputs (“We spent $900 billion on Defense”) and not on outcomes (“We have yet to win in the Horn of Africa” (or Yemen, or Afghanistan or…)
And the system functions that way because the staff function has become the dominant persona of each of the services.
The thing is, every organization, from the Boy Scouts to the Red Cross, to the Yankees to IBM, develops a persona. The Navy Staff, the Army staff, every command in the Army and Navy and Air Force, has a unique persona. Firing admirals who need to be fired will help, but only for a short time; more is needed.
If you want to dramatically change that organization you have to, for all intents and purposes, kill the persona. It can be done, but it will require firing a good chunk of folks in uniform as well as many civilians.
But it also requires doing things differently. In the simplest and most obvious way: move the entire service staffs and joint staffs out of their office spaces and have them sit someplace else – everybody has to move. Unless you are in a command center or a comms center, you move. Everyone moves and they do it in a rush: This week. Everyone needs a visceral signal that things have changed; they must not walk back into their offices, after you have said everything is changing, and find themselves sitting at the same desk, with the same five folks in the surrounding cubicles, doing the same thing. If so, they will then assume this is just another “re-org,” that they are still doing what they were doing, and you will have failed. You have to “go large,” and do it right away.
