By John Noonan, USAF veteran
Former staffer on defense and armed-service committees in the House and Senate
The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump transition team is drafting an executive order to “create a board to purge general officers.” Such a board, the article’s subhead warned, “could upend military review process and raise concerns about politicization of military.”
To the first suggestion, on upending the military review process, you will find no shortage of active-duty service members who say, “Hell to the yes.”
On the second, the Biden administration’s stewardship of the Pentagon — from throwing it into the abortion debate, to mandating force-wide diversity, equity, inclusion seminars, to promoting climate activism at the expense of real-world mission requirements, to quixotic campaigns to weed out domestic extremists, the list goes on — represents the most extreme politicization of U.S. military forces in modern history.
Therein is the inherent challenge that Republicans face in the courtrooms of newsrooms — radical progressive policies are considered routine, but the act of removing those policies is considered inherently political and divisive.
I fear we may be returning to the toxic practice of “history began yesterday” reporting, in which every proposed action by a Trump administration is written as a tectonic, norms-defying event without precedent or historic rationale.
But the act of removing bad or distracted leaders is a tool as old as war itself. President Lincoln went through several field commanders before settling on Ulysses S. Grant. Patton took over for Lloyd Fredenhall, whose failure at the Kasserine Pass in North Africa resulted in a catastrophic American defeat.
President Eisenhower replaced General Matthew Ridgway with Maxwell Taylor after a policy disagreement over military end-strength. Barack Obama purportedly found Marine general James Mattis too aggressive for leadership of the U.S. Central Command and fired him, an act all but celebrated by Manhattan editors and D.C. think tanks.
Perhaps the most relevant example here is that of General George C. Marshall and his “plucking” committee.
This was the informal name given to a panel, not dissimilar to the one described in the Wall Street Journal, that Marshall established in 1940 to reform and modernize the U.S. Army leadership in preparation for entry into World War II.
The committee aimed to replace ineffective or outdated senior officers with younger, more dynamic leaders better suited to the quickly evolving demands of modern warfare.
The committee, established by Marshall, identified and “plucked” over 600 senior officers they deemed unfit or too old for command in wartime.
Rather than basing their decisions on seniority, the committee focused on competence, leadership ability, and physical fitness. This process allowed Marshall to infuse the Army’s upper ranks with officers who could handle the pace and rigor of large-scale-maneuver warfare.
While Marshall was blasted on the floor of Congress and in the press for allegedly gutting U.S. national security, the men who ascended key Army billets are now legend: Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton, and Lightning Joe Collins, to name but a few. It was successful, but not permanent.
When I worked in the upper chamber of Congress, one of the duties inherent to working for a Senate Armed Services Committee senator was evaluating officers who aspired to the highest levels of command.
My colleagues and I, many of them veterans of the War on Terrorism, shared a sense of discomfort with many of the admirals and generals seeking Senate confirmation.
In the stratospheric officer ranks, those with a couple of stars on their shoulders, there seemed to be more emphasis on administrative fripperies than the enemy and his capabilities.
Some could not articulate a vision for the command that they sought. Some obsessed over structural reorganization inside the Pentagon, “shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic,” as we called it.
Some loved to talk up the latest changes to their service uniforms, others offered mousey platitudes to the faddish political trends of the day.
Few seemed like genuine war winners, though there were a few real standouts who gave us hope.
I wish every officer in the United States armed forces and political appointees to the Pentagon would read On the Psychology of Military Incompetence, which was written by a British World War II veteran in the 1970s.
The lieutenant turned psychologist Norman F. Dixon detailed, in a meticulous analysis of a century of British military disasters, how lack of focus, promoting the wrong qualities in an officer, and bureaucratic obsessiveness can lead to brutal and sometimes irreversible losses on the battlefield. To read it, and compare it to our officer corps today, is a disconcerting endeavor.
If there is to be a small criticism of the Trump effort, long historical precedent and all, it is that a single committee working for but a short snapshot in time may have a hard time establishing permanent roots in the Pentagon.
We cannot stop bad officers from rising to the top of our ranks until we begin promoting the right qualities.
And the only true way to promote the proper qualities is through realistic, hard-nosed competition.
A committee is fine and a positive start, but a more proven method is creating high-excellence institutions that act as a filter for aspiring commanders.
The template is military schoolhouses, like Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL school or the Air Force and Navy fighter weapons schools. These schools produce elite graduates using a simple and common formula: high barrier to entry, high attrition, and a high level of prestige for those selected to be school instructors.
Still today, if you walk this earth with a SEAL badge on your chest or Top Gun patch on your flight suit, you are rightly acknowledged as elite.
Should battlefield commanders, charged with the lives of thousands of American sons and daughters, not meet the same level of scrutiny and rigor?
Should they also not be products of institutions that are ruthless in their mission to manufacture elite graduates?
Consider a shift from the bureaucratic and administrative promotion system used by the Pentagon, in which officers are often rewarded for their management skills rather than their aggressiveness and battlefield prowess, to a paradigm in which hundreds of officers apply for a school that selects only a few dozen to compete in realistic war games, problem-solving exercises, physical competitions, and technical challenges, and only ten or so are rewarded with a prized command billet.
Strong battlefield leaders love a challenge and love a fight. It is sensible that the military offer both as a condition for advancement.
It is also how you separate your bureaucrats from your war winners. It is noteworthy that SEAL training and the two fighter weapons schools were among the few corners of the Pentagon that went unaffected by the Biden administration’s unusual and at times obsessive campaign to promote war fighters based on gender, sexual orientation, and race.
The incoming Trump administration also has a very real problem on its hands with America’s war colleges.
Military professional education has brought on a host of civilian Ph.D.s, who in turn have brought with them the toxicities of the modern college campus.
There are few barriers to entry and almost zero attrition, suggesting an undemanding curriculum, a syllabus awash in nonmilitary courseware, a dog’s breakfast of student profiles with military dentists receiving the same instruction as the bomber pilots next to them, and a decreasing number of active-duty professor billets that are seen as little more than pastures for old retiring colonels to graze.
There has also been a good deal of rumbling in the rank and file that the military has been too exposed to the trappings of academic rent seekers, D.C. think-tankery, and social-media influencers who think war is icky and have sought to turn a generation of battlefield leaders into diplomats, academics, and aspiring social scientists.
Fixing professional military education would be a small, but important, step in reversing that trend.
New Pentagon leadership has the ability to kill two birds with one stone here. Reshape broken war colleges into “Perisher” courses for aspiring commanders. Only by changing the military promotion system into a real, practical competition can you sort the meat-eaters from the leaf-eaters and create a permanent, rather than politically temporary, merit-based promotion system.
As for the committee planned by the incoming Trump team, the effort may benefit by restraining the impulse to staff the body out with retired flag officers, who may have contributed to the problem, and instead handpick a team of political appointees hyper-empowered by a secretary of defense to enact a lasting, merit-based promotion system at the Defense Department.
Old officers may stick a Pentagon with the same old thinking, and the same old thinking will ensure that the military returns straight back to the old broken way of promoting bureaucrats.
In 1941, General Marshall held the Louisiana Maneuvers to test his officers on their leadership abilities. This series of exercises involved close to half a million soldiers, one of whom was a young colonel named Dwight Eisenhower. Ike was a standout performer, and his career skyrocketed as a result. In three short years, he went from colonel to supreme allied commander. The rest is history.
You can do only so much with performance reports and promotion boards. Go big.
Create a competitive process full of practical challenges that test everything from an officer’s mind to his judgment to his temperament to his response to stress and the unforeseen.
War colleges often test nothing more than an ability to regurgitate 200-level international-relations textbooks. This is how you separate the bureaucrat from the battlefield commander.
The Pentagon has built elite schools before; it should do it again.
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