Air University Review, January-March 1987
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In October l986, Senators Barry M. Goldwater (R-California) and Sam Nunn (D-Georgia) released a 645-page staff study detailing problems with the current Department of Defense (DOD) and proposing fundamental changes in that organization.1 Benjamin Schemmer, editor of Armed Forces Journal International, considered the appearance of this report and the joint statement by the two senators sufficiently significant to issue a special edition of his journal, only the third such edition in its 122-year history. Schemmer stated in an opening editorial that his staff considered the Senate study to be "the single most important body of work on national security matters done so far this century."2 In April 1986, the President’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Defense Management (Packard Commission) issued its recommendations for the reform of the defense acquisition system.3On 7 May 1986, the Senate voted unanimously to pass what the Washington Post referred to as "the most sweeping revision of the nation’s military since 1947." On 5 August 1986, a far-reaching reform bill in the form of an amendment to the 1987 defense authorization bill "whizzed" through the House of Representatives on a vote of 406 to 4.4 In the midst of this ferment, Sen Gary Hart (D-Colorado), a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, and William S. Lind have coauthored America Can Win,5 a book that bids well to make military reform a key issue in the next presidential election.
Military reform would seem to be an idea whose time has come. If so, it would be to the advantage of the military professional to understand the reform movement and its ideas.6 Until recently, this would have been difficult to do, for the rather extensive literature of the reform movement consisted mostly of articles and briefings, which means that information about the ideas of the movement was scattered and more or less inaccessible to most officers. Fortunately, within the past two years, several major books have appeared that make it considerably easier to get at the issues raised by the reform movement. In addition to the Hart and Lind volume, two others are particularly noteworthy: Lind’s Maneuver Warfare Handbook and Richard Gabriel’s Military Incompetence.7. In general, the reform movement argues that America’s defense system does not work and has produced an incompetent military. There are four basic problems: the officer corps of the military establishment is too large and is mired in a bureaucracy of its own making; the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) fails to integrate our military services into effective unified military forces and gives inadequate military advice to civilian leaders; our defense establishment develops and procures the wrong kinds of weapons; and our military doctrine is flawed. We shall look at each of these points in turn, but first let us begin by looking at why the reformers believe the military is incompetent.
According to the reformers, clear evidence of problems in our military establishment is found in the poor operational performance of US military forces since the Korean War. Thus, Hart and Lind begin their book with a standard reform theme: America has not won a "brilliant victory since Inchon."8 The most elaborate statement of this operational indictment appears in Gabriel’s Military Incompetence.
Gabriel has long held the view that something is seriously wrong with the US military. In 1978, he and Paul Savage coauthored Crisis in Command, a book that severely criticizes the performance of Army leadership in the Vietnam War. In this work, the authors argue that during the Vietnam era entrepreneurial mentality came to dominate officer thinking as officers became more concerned with managing their careers to ensure promotions than with serving the nation.9
Gabriel again presents the concept of an entrepreneurial officer corps in his 1985 book, Military Incompetence, a work that begins by defining military incompetence as the "inability of military leaders and forces to avoid mistakes which, in the normal course of things, should and could be avoided." A competent officer corps is capable of minimizing "foreseeable risks, thereby increasing the probabilities of success."10 Having defined military incompetence, Gabriel devotes most of the remainder of the book to discussions of military operations in which our armed forces have either failed outright or performed poorly in the presence of minimal opposition. This portion of the book contains five chapters, each one dealing with a US military operation beginning with the Sontay raid in November 1970. Other chapters deal with the Mayaguez operation, the Iranian rescue attempt, the Beirut attack that killed 240 Marines, and the invasion of Grenada. While there is little new in Gabriel’s discussion of these operations, his volume does provide the interested reader with good, readable accounts of these undertakings.
Hart and Lind cite essentially the same examples used by Gabriel in arguing that America’s defense establishment is ineffective. They tell us that after the Korean War, the United States fought an unsuccessful 10-year war. They also remind us that we lost 41 Marines rescuing 40 seamen in the Mayaguez operation. To them, the effort to rescue the Iranian hostages was an "ignominious failure." In short, our military record since Korea led Hart and Lind to conclude that "our conventional forces are not effective enough to defend us. Unless we make them effective, in every crisis we will risk a choice between national humiliation and nuclear war."11
The reformers generally believe that the basic causes of incompetence in the US military are to be found in an overly large bureaucratic officer corps. This means that the size of the officer corps must be reduced and its composition altered so that we shall have "a military that is run by educated warriors, not trained managers."12
Gabriel considers the officer corps of the Army twice as large as it has to be and those of the Air Force and Navy one-third too large. Strangely enough, he believes that the excessive number of officers is both an indication of a decline in quality of the officers and a cause of the decline. "Standards have deteriorated," he tells us, "because there is an inflated officer pool, inflated staffs, and excessive school assignments."13
Where the composition of the officer corps is concerned, the reformers cite several problems. Hart and Lind believe that the current military promotion system rewards the wrong kind of behavior, that the up-or-out promotion requirement puts undesirable strain on career officers, and that professional military education programs (with notable exceptions) need improvement. They also criticize our nation’s service academies for producing officers who are ideally suited for the military bureaucracy but ill-prepared to serve as warriors and military leaders.14 Gabriel chides the military for having too many short assignments. The large number of short assignments leads to "amateurism" because officers do not have time to master their duties before they are reassigned. Gabriel also criticizes modern professional officers for careerist tendencies that are bred by a personnel system that overemphasizes promotion.15
Given the strong views expressed about an excess of officers in today’s military, it comes as no surprise that one major change favored by the reformers is a substantial reduction in the number of officers. Gabriel would achieve his reductions as a by-product of several other changes he proposes. He would begin by establishing a firm ethical code to shift the values of officers away from careerism back toward a view of officership that emphasizes the special calling of the officer.16 He would stabilize the assignment system so that people remain in positions longer, learn their duties better, and become more effective. At the same time, he would make a 30-year career the norm, rather than the current 20-year term. An officer corps in which the people are better versed in their current duties and whose officers remain on duty 30 years would reduce amateurism and make the officer corps more efficient so that it would be possible to reduce the number of officers by one-fifth to one-third. In this smaller officer corps, Gabriel believes that officers would assume more responsibilities and the corps itself would be more likely to develop into a professional brotherhood in which officers know each other and are aware of each other’s strengths and weaknesses. But, alas, even cutting Air Force officer strength by 50 percent would leave more than 40,000 officers, still far too large a group to develop into anything like Adm Horatio Nelson’s small band of brothers.17
Reduction by 50 percent of the officers above the grade of 03 is part of the solution Hart and Lind propose for the woes of the officer corps. They would accomplish this by retiring officers early, even if they do not have the 20 years now required for retirement. The decision of who would retire and who would remain on duty would be made by warriors and not by the "milicrats" who presently dominate the officer corps. Such a reduction of officers would force the military to divest itself of many of the jobs it is now doing. Furthermore, officers would have much more responsibility and would be forced to delegate more of the tasks remaining to subordinate officers and noncommissioned officers.18
Congress has already shown itself disposed to agree with the reformers where the size of the officer corps is concerned. Bills being considered by the House and Senate would reduce the number of officers during the next three to four years by as many as 25,000.19
In addition to this major point about reducing the number of officers, the reformers offer several other suggestions for improvement in the officer corps. Among these are eliminating the up-or-out feature of the promotion system to "reduce the current fixation on promotion and the resultant careerism"20 and reforming the military educational system.21
One place where the reformers see the bureaucracy of the officer corps clearly manifested is in the Joint Chiefs of Staff system. In Richard Gabriel’s view, the JCS is a "bloated and overburdened bureaucracy," the decisions of which represent the least common denominator among competing bureaucracies."22
The JCS also receives a scourging at the hands of Hart and Lind, who claim that the advice given by the JCS is "notoriously poor." They claim, for example, that the JCS opposed the Inchon landing for two months prior to finally approving the operation a week before it began. They bolster their criticism of the JCS with quotations from important national leaders like Sen Barry Goldwater and Gen David C. Jones, former Air Force chief of staff and chairman of the JCS. Here is General Jones’ comment: "The corporate advice provided by the Joint Chiefs of Staff is not crisp, timely, very useful, or very influential . . .Individual service interests too often dominate JCS recommendations and actions at the expense of broader defense interests."23
America Can Win argues that the problem with the JCS is "systemic" and has little to do with the people involved. The JCS is a committee that must conduct its business on the basis of consensus. Business is conducted through the famous "flimsy, buff, green" decision-making process. Each of these terms refers to an issue paper in its different stages of coordination. Since JCS decisions require the concurrence of all the services, the coordination process produces decisions that represent the "lowest common denominator."24
Hart and Lind recommend several changes in the JCS to make it effective. They would replace the current JCS with a National Defense Staff of about 500 officers. Selection to the staff would be based on a competitive examination and would come while the officer is serving in the grade of major/lieutenant commander. Once selected, an officer would complete a rigorous three-year school program and remain a member of the staff for the remainder of his or her career. Also, staff officers would be assigned periodically to duties with units in the field, returning to the staff after completion of such assignments. The National Defense Staff would consciously work to cultivate an atmosphere in which all officers, regardless of rank, are encouraged to speak their minds; there would be no penalty for disagreeing with a senior officer—such disagreements would be expected of junior officers. Finally, once the National Service Staff is established, the service chiefs would be forbidden expressly to interfere with the combat employment of America’s military forces; guiding these forces would be the responsibility of the staff.25
Another area in which reformers believe the defense establishment has serious problems is weapons development and acquisition. Arguments between the defense establishment and the reformers in this area all too frequently wind up with the two sides badly polarized. 26 In fact, according to Hart and Lind, there is much more common ground than one might suppose. The reformers do not favor low-technology weapons, but rather weapons with characteristics that ensure effective performance in combat. This means that weapons should be designed with combat in mind. They must be rugged and easy to maintain, small and thus difficult to spot, and simple so that they can be operated effectively by troops under the stress of combat. Since numbers are still important in warfare, our weapons should also be inexpensive so that sufficient numbers of them can be purchased.27
America Can Win presents several examples of what the reformers consider poorly designed weapons. The M1 tank is criticized for having machine guns that are poorly mounted, for being too heavy, for drinking fuel, and for having parts that are very expensive. Large aircraft carriers are criticized for being too expensive and too vulnerable for the amount of combat power they provide. Indeed, much of the Navy force structure and most of the aircraft on the carriers exist to defend the carriers themselves. American fighter designs are criticized for stressing the wrong qualities (range and speed) rather than performance factors like turning rate.28
While Hart and Lind offer suggestions for improving the equipment of all the services, some of their more interesting views on military technology would affect the Navy’s force structure. Hart and Lind argue that the Navy, with its reliance on the large carrier as the backbone of its force structure, is behind the times. To begin with, the carrier is no longer the capital ship, that role having been assumed by the submarine. According to the authors, the Navy should undertake a submarine building program that would give the United States 300 attack submarines by 2015. In addition to relying on the submarine as the new capital ship, the Navy should begin to develop and use high adaptability surface combatant (HASC) ships. These would have a basic generic-type hull that is essentially like a small aircraft carrier with features such as a flat deck and an island structure. This basic hull could be modified through the addition of modularized weapons and electronics packages to become a cruiser, a minesweeper, a frigate, or a destroyer. However, most of the HASC would be fitted with vertical and/or short takeoff an landing (VSTOL) aircraft, fighters, or antisubmarine aircraft and serve as carriers. In other words, we would replace our small number of large carriers with a large number of small carriers. A substantial number of hulls would be built and be configured as merchantmen in peacetime. In war, they could be converted quickly to warships.29
One other significant aspect of Hart and Lind’s discussion of hardware issues is their excellent summary of Franklin "Chuck" Spinney’s analysis of defense planning. Spinney argues that the planning for weapons acquisition is guided by overly optimistic assumptions about funding and weapons costs. When these optimistic conditions fail to materialize, a budget crisis occurs that causes funds for operations and maintenance to be squeezed, resulting in detrimental effects on readiness. Those who do not have time to read Spinney’s Defense Facts of Life30 will find a clear exposition of his plans and reality mismatch in America Can Win.31
The final area of defense we are to view through the ideas of the reformers is the American approach to war, our operational doctrine. According to Hart and Lind, the US approach is basically one of firepower/attrition. Here the objective is to drown the enemy in fire, killing his troops and smashing his equipment with overwhelming firepower. This approach to war leads to attrition battles, such as Verdun, in which masses of troops on both sides die in battle with very little that is meaningful being accomplished. On the other hand, in maneuver warfare, one aims to disrupt, to confuse, to disorganize one’s enemy so that the enemy’s command structure becomes disoriented and his forces fall apart.32
An excellent, more detailed discussion of maneuver warfare is contained in Lind’s Maneuver Warfare Handbook (1985). Although this book is "addressed primarily to Marines," it is the single best source for anyone interested in understanding the elements of maneuver warfare.
Here we can learn that the ideas underlying this approach to war come from Col John Boyd, a retired Air Force fighter pilot. Boyd used experience he gained in flying F-86s against MiG-15s in Korea as the foundation for a concept of warfare that stresses rapid decision and maneuver. Boyd holds that warfare involves a universal pattern in which a combatant must observe the situation, orient himself to the situation, decide on a course of action, and act. This is the famous Boyd cycle, or OODA (observing-orienting-deciding-acting) loop, which represents the kind of universal generalization found in military classics such as Carl von Clausewitz’s On War and Sun Tzu’s Art of War. The one with the shorter cycle will be constantly ahead of his enemy. As a result, the enemy’s action becomes a reaction that is further and further behind his opponent’s action and that is increasingly ineffective.
Maneuver means Boyd cycling the enemy, being consistently faster through however many OODA Loops it takes until the enemy loses his cohesion—until he can no longer fight as an effective, organized force.33
Normally, Lind writes, "God is on the side of the bigger battalions—unless the smaller battalions have a better idea." In his view, maneuver warfare is a better idea of how to fight—it is "military judo." In this form of warfare, the principal function of firepower is to screen movement, not kill people and break things. Firepower may indeed be destructive, but its destructiveness is incidental to its main function of covering movement.34
A key element of maneuver warfare is the idea that battle presents a free-wheeling, unpredictable environment that requires a decentralized command system if an army is to respond quickly to fleeting opportunities. In this type of warfare, it is vital that subordinate commanders understand the broad objects of their superior. This information is communicated through mission orders that specify what units are to accomplish, but leaves the "how" to subordinate commanders. The mission order should specify the Schwerpunct, the unit located where the commander thinks he can "achieve a decision." The Schwerpunct determines the focus of the parent unit’s objective, for the unit so designated receives maximum support from artillery and sister units. The location of the Schwerpunct, then, is flexible—it is where the Schwerpunct unit pushes and this location is determined by "reconnaissance pull." Reconnaissance forces search for gaps or weak spots in the enemy line, and when they find such weaknesses or gaps, they draw the attacking units to this point or these points. This, it seems, is another way of expressing the expanding torrent concept of Sir Basil H. Liddell Hart, the idea that attacks should be carried out like water flowing over a surface. Since water seeks the patch of least resistance, most water flows through the place where resistance is weakest. In short, you reinforce units that are successful in their attacks, not the units that are halted by stubborn resistance.35
Interestingly, two recent studies of command support this view of decentralized command in combat operations. The first of these studies, Combat Operations C3I: Fundamentals and Interactions, was written by Maj George Orr while a research associate in the Air University Center for Aerospace Doctrine, Research, and Education (AUCADRE). In it, he argues that combat operations are stochastic in nature. Therefore, a decentralized command system that emphasizes autonomous operations at all levels is best.36
In the second study, Command in War, Martin Van Creveld describes command as essentially the effort to ensure certainty about a number of factors that must be coordinated to achieve victory. He argues that we are no closer to achieving this goal today than Napoleon was because war involves unpredictable, uncontrollable factors like people, emotions, irrationality, and human efforts to deceive and confuse. This makes uncertainty "the central fact that all command systems have to cope with." The best way to deal with the uncertainty of battlefield conditions is through a decentralized command system with freedom of action at the lowest possible level.37
Reform of the officer corps, restructuring of the JCS system, changing the weapons we procure, and implementing a new general combat doctrine—these are the major goals of the reform movement. Ten years ago, when the reform movement was building up its initial head of steam, few people were even talking about these issues and fewer still agreed that the reformers were describing real problems in need of solution. Through their public writings and briefings and discussions with national leaders, especially congressmen, the reformers have succeeded in building a constituency for military reform.
All of this is not to say that there are no problems with what the reformers propose and that there is no resistance to changes the reformers advocate. The idea of maneuver warfare as a panacea for operational deficiencies in our Army has been challenged by one of the Army’s brightest officers, who has pointed out that successful military operations will involve elements of both maneuver and firepower/attrition warfare.38 There would also seem to be a valid concern about what will happen to the motivation and energy of the officer corps if the up-or-out feature of the promotion system is eliminated. Senior officers know that the current promotion system was introduced in response to a pre-World War II officer corps that contained far too much deadwood. There are other specific questions such as how Hart and Lind would see to it that warriors (as opposed to milicrats) would oversee the officer reduction in force (RIF) they propose in reducing the size of the officer corps. Furthermore, there appears to be strong resistance to at least some of the changes pending in proposed legislation.
Nevertheless, thanks to forces set in motion by the reformers, fundamental changes in the way the military does business are already in progress. Military reform has become a political idea whose time has come.
Notes
1. Senate, Committee on Armed Services, Defense Organization: The Need for Change, staff report, 99th Cong., 1st sess., 16 October 1985, S. Prt. 99-86, 645.
2. Benjamin F. Schemmer, "The Foundation Needs Fixing and the System Needs Rewiring," Armed Forces Journal International, special edition, October 1985, 3.
3. President’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Defense Management, A Formula for Action: A Report to the President on Defense Acquisition, April 1986. The commission also published An Interim Report to the President, 28 February 1986. Both reports are available through the Government Printing Office, the April report for $4.25 and the February report for $1.75.
4. George C. Wilson, "Mr. Reliable Becomes Mr. Fix-It," Washington Post, 7 August 1986, A21.
5. Gary Hart and William S. Lind, America Can Win: The Case for Military Reform (Bethesda, Md.: Adler and Adler, 1986).
6. For an excellent discussion of the origins and evolution of the reform movement, see Hart and Lind, 1-28. Hart and Lind tell us that the reform movement ‘s goal is "to make all our defense policies and practices—from the infantry squad through the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Congress—serve the purpose of winning in combat."
7. William S. Lind, Maneuver Warfare Handbook (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1985); and Richard A. Gabriel, Military Incompetence: Why the American Military Doesn’t Win (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985). Edward N. Luttwak’s The Pentagon and the Art of War: The Question of Military Reform (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984) is another important reform work that was reviewed in the May-June 1985 edition of this journal, 97-100.
8. Hart and Lind, 1.
9. Richard A. Gabriel and Paul L. Savage, Crisis in Command: Mismanagement in the Army (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978).
10. Gabriel, Military Incompetence, 6, 13-14.
11. Hart and Lind, 1-3, 25.
12. Hart and Lind, 189, 238-40; and Gabriel, Military Incompetence, 8-9.
13. Gabriel, Military Incompetence, 8-9.
14. Hart and Lind, 165-88. Where PME schools are concerned, the Air Force's Squadron Officer School, the Army's Command and General Staff College, and the Naval War College are singled out for special praise.
15. Gabriel, Military Incompetence,9-15.
16. For a more elaborate discussion of Gabriel's views on a military code of ethics, see his To Service with Honor: A Treatise on Military Ethics and the Way of the Soldier (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982).
17. Gabriel, Military Incompetence, 7-9, 191-93.
18. Hart and Lind, 163-64.
19. P. J. Budahn, "Pressure by Congress May Spur Officer Cuts," Air Force Times, 21 July 1986, 1, 10. Authorization bills in both houses for FY 1987 call for reductions in the number of officers. The Senate version would reduce officers by 18,285 over three years, whereas the House bill calls for the elimination of 25,957 officers over four years. Luttwak's Pentagon and the Art of War is credited with triggering this interest in officer reductions.
20. Hart and Lind, 185.
21. Ibid., 165-81; Gabriel, Military Incompetence, 194-96; Luttwak, 198-99.
22. Gabriel, Military Incompetence, 16-20.
23. Hart and Lind, 212-13. For more on General Jones' view of the JCS, see his "What's Wrong with the Defense Establishment," in Asa A. Clark et al., eds., The Defense Reform Debate: Issues and Analysis (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 272-86.
24. Hart and Lind, 214-15. For a detailed discussion of the JCS and its problems from the perspective of the Senate staff study, see S. Prt. 99-86, Defense Organization, 139-274.
25. Hart and Lind, 216-18. For a similar set of recommendations, see Luttwak, 272-76.
26. For example, see the exchanges between Col Alan L. Gropman and William S. Lind in the Air University Review, September-October 1983, 86-91, and January-February 1984, 92-95.
27. Hart and Lind, 13-14, and chapter 6 passim. For an interesting example of the relationship between complexity, combat stress, and effectiveness as illustrated by the use of the Norden bombsight, see Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate, eds., The Army Air Forces in World War II, vol. 2, Europe: TORCH to POINTBLANK, August 1942 to December 1943 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949; New Imprint by Office of Air Force History, Washington, D.C., 1983), 270.
28. Hart and Lind, 13-14, 40-53, 83-98, 192, and chapter 3 passim; Luttwak, 98-111, 215-27, and Pierre Sprey, "The Case for Better and Cheaper Weapons," 193-208, in Clark et al., Defense Reform Debate. Those especially interested in the debate over US aircraft design might wish to check these sources also; the exchanges cited earlier between Lind and Gropman in the Air University Review and a series of articles in Armed Forces Journal International started by Marconi von Spangenberg, "USAF's 'Fighter Mafia' Needs a New Aircraft Design Philosophy," in the March 1986 issue of that journal, 64, 66, 68.
29. Hart and Lind, 98-99, 101-5.
30. Franklin C. Spinney, Defense Facts of Life: The Plans/Reality Mismatch, edited and with commentary by James Clay Thompson (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1985).
31. Hart and Lind, 149-57, 219-25.
32. Ibid., 30.
33. Lind, Maneuver Warfare Handbook, 4-6.
34. Ibid., 2, 6, 19.
35. Ibid., 9, 113-19.
36. Maj George E. Orr, Combat Operations C3I: Fundamentals and Interactions, CADRE Research Report No. AU-ARI-82-5 (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air University Press, 1983), 87-90.
37. Martin Van Creveld, Command in War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 261-74.
38. Huba Wass de Czege, "Army Doctrinal Reform" in Clark et al., Defense Reform Debate, 102-5.
Lt Col Donald R. Baucom (USAFA; M.A. and Ph.D. University of Oklahoma) is a historian in the Air Force Office of History. He has held positions in the communications-electronics career field, served on the faculties of the U.S. Air Force Academy and Air War College, and was director of research, Airpower Research Institute, Maxwell AFB, Alabama. Colonel Baucom has published in the Strategic Review and was editor of the Air University Review.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.
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