Five Points of Pentagon Reform?

...you can work with this...

Everyone has their ideas about where they would like the new administration and its Secretary of Defense—and here at CDR Salamander our Secretary of the Navy too—to focus on reforming our military.

Regulars here, especially those who were readers at the OG Blog, and listeners to the Midrats Podcast have a good fix on my ideas, so let’s take today to look at another person’s ideas.

Over at The American Spectator last week, retired USMC Colonel Gary Anderson put out an article, Real Military Reform Begins: Will Pete Hegseth be able to reverse our military’s decline?

It’s not a long article, and as the balance of it aligns with positions we’ve argued here for years, I found myself nodding my head for much of it.

Though he states four, I found it best to break his recommendations into five areas:

1. Shipbuilding/Maintenance

2. Re-reform the USMC

3. Goldwater-Nichols

4. Learn from the Russo-Ukrainian War of 2022

5. Chinese soft power is eating our lunch

Let’s take some pull quotes from each.

Shipbuilding/Maintenance

First, the attack submarine fleet must be expanded to the point that it can simultaneously deter a war with China, maintain commitments to NATO, and ensure freedom of the seas in the Persian Gulf.

Additionally, there are not enough large-deck amphibious ships to provide a 24/7 Navy–Marine Corps presence in the world’s most likely trouble spots (the Mediterranean, Persian Gulf, and the Indo-Pacific regions). The Marine Corps is equally responsible here, as it released the Navy from its commitment to maintain thirty-eight amphibious ships, reducing the number to thirty-one; this did not account for the chronic maintenance problems that now limit the Navy to twelve to thirteen operationally ready amphibious ships at any given time. A minimum of eighteen combat-ready amphibious ships are needed at all times — nine on station and nine working — to maintain the required 24/7 presence worldwide.

The submarine issue is almost intractable at this point. It will take a decade of hard work to get both production—not even going through AUKUS requirements—and maintenance to an acceptable point. We could make progress faster in getting maintenance up on step. Less times in the yards will get you more time underway.

As for the large-deck amphibs, like with the submarine industrial base, those leaders who are responsible for the failure of stewardship and for their silence on the neglect of the last two decades should be held to account in the court of public opinion if nothing else. Again, without drastic action, significantly more funding and executive priority, it will be hard to improve things in the short term—but effort should be made nonetheless.

Remember, like it or not, if we have to go to war with the People’s Republic of China in the next decade, we will largely go to war with the Navy we have, not the Navy we wish we had.

Re-reform the USMC

The Marine Corps’ entire Force Design 2030 project, which aims to transform the branch “into a more agile, efficient, and technologically advanced force,” is based on questionable war games and shoddy analysis, much of which has been discredited by legitimate games conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies as well as the Marine Corps Times and the Wall Street Journal. Despite all this and the strong objections of virtually every former Marine Corps commandant, Generals David M. Berger and Eric M. Smith have repeatedly refused to revisit the flawed assumptions that underlie the concept. Unless Smith and the coterie of three-star generals who have enabled him are removed, the Marine Corps will degenerate from the world’s foremost maritime assault force into a bizarre combination of light infantry and coastal artillery.

A lot of people I respect have endorsed Force Design 2030. Likewise, a lot of people I respect oppose it. I like a lot of the motivation and desire that begat FD2030, but I don’t think it was helped by the USMC’s laudable pack mentality and no small bit of lack of humility of its senior leadership.

I’ve never been a fan of, “I see the future clearly” mindsets that move from there to exquisite designs to meet that perceived crystal clear view. It tends to be a brittle force that cracks then pressures come from unexpected directions. You can weight towards what you expect, but you must be humble enough to hedge, balance, and be flexible. As a species, we suffer from an overconfidence in our own wisdom and a blinkered view of the past. We have to maintain a diverse tool set because one thing we do know is that fate likes to laugh at our plans and assumptions. Be flexible. Have options.

The fact remains—and has only been reinforced by recent events—that the only way to be able to effectively project national will ashore on a global basis is with a large and capable naval force that can carry enough sovereign power to operate at its own will, to its own end.

Our Marine force at sea is a unique tool no other nation has on its own. We have taken it for granted to the point of fragility by people who are driven by theory and military fiction while keeping an intentional blind eye to practical experience and recent history.

Goldwater-Nichols

The Goldwater–Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986 has not aged well. Its original intent of improving joint warfighting capabilities has yielded unintended consequences. For instance, its requirement that any officer aspiring to flag and general officer rank (FOGO) complete a tour has led to a bloated system, with far more FOGOs and staffs, even as the number of troops in uniform has been reduced.

Military education has suffered as well. Our command and staff colleges should be the places where majors and their naval counterparts learn the real skills of high-level military tactics. Today, due to the military education reforms of Goldwater–Nichols, these schools are more concerned with granting second-rate political science master’s degrees. Additionally, our war colleges place greater emphasis on civil-military relations than on strategy and military history.

I could not state it better myself. We are coming up on the 40th Anniversary of Goldwater-Nichols. In the name of all that is holy, someone buy it a gold watch and send it into retirement.

The Russo-Ukrainian War

If we have learned anything from the Russo-Ukrainian War in the sky, it is that quantity has a quality of its own. In the immediate future, the side that can best integrate human decision-making with swarms of armed unmanned aerial systems and inexpensive “kamikaze” drones will control the air. This is a competition we cannot afford to lose. Currently, the Russians, Chinese, and even the Ukrainians are producing large quantities of relatively cheap, “good enough” drones — far outpacing our overly engineered and expensive systems. In World War II, large numbers of cheap, easily produced U.S. and Russian tanks overwhelmed the smaller numbers of technologically superior German Panzers. A similar dynamic threatens to play out in the sky today, but this time, we’re on the losing end. We must rethink the production of unmanned aerial systems and develop tactics to effectively take advantage of AI.

I know good, smart, people in hard jobs know this and are doing their best, but our acquisition system and risk-adverse bureaucracy still moves at the speed of smell. This warfare area especially is moving too fast for our present, un-reformed system to respond in a timely manner.

Small Islands Matter

It is so good to see more and more people…and not just Cleo Paskal and her friends…seeing clearly what is happening on the small islands of the Southwest Pacific.

This is a political-military challenge. With the combination of their Belt and Road Initiative and coercive diplomacy, the Chinese are challenging us for control of the Indo-Pacific Region, and they are making significant inroads. They are constructing resort hotel complexes with adjoining airfields (some of which we built in World War II) in Micronesia and Melanesia that can quickly be converted to military purposes. In the strategically significant Solomons, the Chinese co-opted the corrupt and authoritarian government to serve their interests while the Biden administration slept.

The U.S. has slowly begun to recognize the issue, but our military and diplomatic influence in the region has been severely under-resourced.

There is a broad 80/20 consensus on these issues. I also have confidence that a lot of people brought into the Trump Administration and Congress are aligned with the ideas to address them…the key will be if that shared Executive and Legislative Branch concerns can be translated into funding and action.