By Col. Gary Anderson, USMC ret
It was 2012 when I first realized that our current group of four star military leaders are largely inept at best and incompetent at worst.
I was serving as a Department of State advisor in Afghanistan, and it became obvious that the four-star American who commanded all NATO forces (ISAF) was either ignorant or willfully ignoring the fact that the Afghan Army would never be able to take over the war effort.
Despite this, he was enthusiastically carrying out the Obama administration’s “Afghanization” program which was transferring military responsibility for whole districts and provinces to Afghan Army control despite the actual situation on the ground.
That’s when I became convinced that we were losing the war. Nearly everyone realized this except the generals who were running it.
While home on leave, I accepted an invitation from an old friend who was a high ranking Defense Department official to visit him at the Pentagon and give my impression of the war. When I expressed my pessimism, he was shocked. He had been receiving optimistic reports from the field.
As the decade progressed, this trend continued downhill.
It became increasingly obvious that the senior officers of the Navy had lost control of their shipbuilding and ship repair programs and had no idea how to fix the problem.
The dysfunction persists today. The recent ignominious return to home port of the USS Boxer just a few days after it had sailed and the problems aboard the aircraft carrier George Washington are emblematic of the dire situation.
The idiotic 2019 decision by the then Commandant of the Marine Corps to shift the focus of the Corps from that of a world-wide force in readiness to a China-centric anti ship organization was met with disbelief by the entire retired community.
Dissent in the active duty ranks recently forced his successor to issue a gag order to the students at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College from criticizing the new doctrine.
Perhaps the most egregious example of military incompetence came with the evacuation of Afghanistan in 2021.
The senior officers in charge of the evacuation at Central Command meekly acceded to State Department demand to use Kabul’s indefensible Karzai Airport rather than the more secure Bagram Air Base resulting in the ignominious debacle that occurred.
It is hard to imagine a George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, or Chester Nimitz condoning or tolerating such incompetence.
Whatever war gods created such men seem to have deserted us. What is left seems to be children of a lesser god.
In reality, the fault is not in the gods but in a system that we humans created. Somewhere along the line, our process for educating and selecting our senior military leaders went badly off the rails and reforming it should be a priority.
For some time, I have blamed the Goldwater-Nichols reforms of the joint interoperability system for the problem. I believed, and still do, that the hoops the system makes mid grade officers and colonels, and navy captains jump through to become eligible for flag rank is creating a talent pool that is a mile-wide and an inch deep.
However, I have come to conclude that the problem lies much deeper. We have civilianized the officer corps to an alarming extent.
I don’t suggest that all of our flag level officers are incompetent. I have known several exceptionally good ones, but they largely seem self-taught.
In the days of Eisenhower, Nimitz, Hap Arnold, and Alexander Vandegrift, the U.S. military was an insular enclave. Officers were expected to be apolitical and aloof from the temptations of civil society. Many considered themselves to the secular equivalent of warrior monks although celibacy was never a requirement.
When stationed in the Washington DC area, the Eisenhower and Patton families would spend holiday weekends at the Civil War battlefields in Northern Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania where the future generals could study the effects of terrain on military operations and imagine how the emergence of the tank would impact the future of warfare.
Vietnam began to erode that ethos. The military mindset became seen as part of the problem. We know now that the situation was much more complex, but the military was an easy target. In many ways this drove career service people to become much more insular. Being spit at while wearing a uniform in public will do that.
It became a popular notion to “civilianize” the military and the officer corps in particular.
This culminated in the congressionally-mandated Skelton military education reform initiatives which paralleled the Goldwater-Nichols legislation.
Command and Staff Colleges and War Colleges were required to have a civilian professor co-teach with the military “den daddy” in each seminar group to provide a presumably civilizing point of view.
Many promising military officers were sent to topflight graduate business public policy schools and think tanks in lieu of command and staff college or war college assignments.
The culture of such places is bound to rub off, and I believe it did. Harvard and Wharton teach that career advancement is an end rather than a means.
Places like the Kennedy School and the Center for a New American Security encourage their visiting interns to contemplate the grand political and strategic implications of military decisions. Recognizing the tactical implications of selecting an airfield for an evacuation operation or the logistic implications of re supplying a remote missile base in the South China Sea are not taught in those places, but those are the skills where many of our recent generals and admirals have shown deficiencies.
The trend of sending promising officers to Ivy League schools actually started before Vietnam.
General William Westmoreland was a Harvard Business graduate: perhaps that is where he got the notion that body counts were a useful measure of effectiveness.
Had he attended a command and staff college rather than postgraduate school at Columbia, General mark Milley might have been more assertive in his role of Chairman of the JCS in picking out a better evacuation site than Karzai International Airport.
Perhaps if he had attended a war college rather than Johns Hopkins former Marine Corps Commandant David Berger would have some better knowledge of the capabilities of the Red Chinese Navy. If so, he might not have come up with the absurd notion that a few marine platoons firing anti-ship missiles from isolated islets in the South China Sea would deter or defeat Beijing’s fleet.
Is it any wonder that for twenty years, general officers educated in this environment refused to admit that they were creating an Afghan army that would not be able to sustain itself once we left?
The special forces advising the Afghans knew it, the Afghans knew it, and I believe the generals themselves knew it.
However, the likes of Harvard business and the Kennedy School had taught them well. They knew it would not help their post-retirement careers to rock the boat while in uniform.
How do we fix our flag officer problem?
Careerism is a problem, but there is a difference between careerism and ambition. We need our generals to be ambitious.
The problem comes when institutionalized careerism stifles competence.
We cannot go back to the military of the 1930s and 40s. Many of the most successful officers of that era would be considered to be socially unacceptable today. Patton and Ernest King were notorious womanizers. Bull Halsey drank too much when ashore, and probably when at sea. By today’s standards, Curtis Le May would be considered a homicidal maniac.
However, we can largely replicate the best military education and career practices that made them great operational artists and strategists.
I am suggesting three fixes as a start. All will take Congressional action. The fixes needed will require a more extensive evaluation than a single OPED can over, but there is some low hanging fruit that should be considered.
First, we should consider the elimination of the Goldwater-Nichols requirement that every prospective general officer or admiral must complete a joint staff tour to be eligible for flag rank.
To meet this requirement, hundreds – if not thousands – of joint billets had to be created which has led to bloated staffs and caused prospective flag officers to be jacks of all trade and masters of none. Being the graves registration officer at a joint base in Tampa will not likely produce a future Eisenhower or Nimitz.
The second potential fix flows from the first. We should examine the possibility of creating a joint staff track system which would allow officers to pursue a joint career at the major/lieutenant commander (04/05) level that would lead to general/flag officer promotion for the best of them.
That would solve the problem that Goldwater-Nichols tried to address at a time when joint staff officers were considered to be cast offs, this would free up officers who want to command divisions, corps, and fleets to hone their skills as operations officers and chiefs of staff before striking for general officer or flag rank.
The third potential fix would be for all promising majors and lieutenant commanders to attend their service’s command and staff college to hone their skills as practitioners of the art of war. Those who choose a joint track would attend the Armed Forces Staff College. There would be no opt outs for Ivy League schools and think tanks at that level.
War colleges would remain the institutions where officers of all services and career tracks would intermix with civilian students and professors. War colleges are where we should be emphasizing the importance of synthesizing military actions with political and diplomatic objectives.
We should not stop giving advanced degrees at command and staff colleges. Such degrees are useful in competing for post-retirement jobs, and they have become an entitlement for mid-grade officers even though they have little military value.
The list above is just a starting point. Even if the legislative fixes suggested were enacted tomorrow, it would take a decade to see results, but that does not mean that we should not try.
Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps Colonel who lectures at The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, He was the Chief of Staff of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab and served as a Special Advisor to the Deputy Secretary of Defense.
First published in Real Clear Defense
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