Posted on 03/19/2017 9:30:52 AM PDT by Lorianne
Last month, President Trump took an important first step toward ending our military’s string of defeats by Fourth Generation opponents: he acknowledged we have lost. The president said, according to the February 28 New York Times,
We have to start winning wars again. I have to say, when I was young, in high school and college, everybody used to say we never lost a war. We never lost a war, remember? And now we never win a war. We never win. And don’t fight to win. We don’t fight to win. We’ve either got to win or don’t fight at all.
Unfortunately, the president followed this important realization with a measure that will do nothing to improve our chances of winning. He increased the defense budget by $54 billion. This is a classic case of doing more of the same and expecting a different result.
If one thing should be obvious about our defeats by Fourth Generation opponents, it is that they did not outspend us. America’s total defense spending, as measured by the Budget Committee’s “National Defense Function”, is about a trillion dollars a year. Hezbollah, Somali warlords, Iraqi militias, and the Taliban have budgets in the millions of dollars, at most. If we graphed their spending and ours on the same scale, theirs would not be visible. But we still lost.
I’m sure President Trump is aware he knows little about militaries. It is logical he would therefore rely heavily on his advisors. But General Flynn, whose departure I think a loss to the country, understood the real problem. Before his military retirement, he testified to Congress that our weakness is that we are fighting Fourth Generation wars and we have a Second Generation military. Secretary of Defense Mattis is very well-read in military history and theory. Surely he recognizes that more money, a quantitative solution, will not fix qualitative problems such as outdated doctrine, over-officering, and institutional cultures that range from merely dysfunctional to downright poisonous (the Army and Air Force).
To win, we need military reform. The agenda laid out by the military reform movement of the 1980s remains largely valid. It begins by setting priorities straight: to win wars, people are most important, ideas come second, and hardware is a distant third. Current policy inverts that pyramid, with hardware (and the budgets it justifies) first and the other two hardly visible.
Putting people first means reforms such as promoting different kinds of men (more leaders and risk-takers, fewer ass-kissers and bureaucrats), reducing the number of officers above the company grades by at least 50%, getting rid of the horde of civil servants and contractors that now clutter up our armed services, ending all-0r-nothing retirement vesting at 20 years (which undermines moral courage), abolishing the up-or-out promotion system (which forces officers to be careerists), and revamping both officer and enlisted personnel policies to create cohesive units with long-term personnel stability. A curse that has fallen on our armed services since the 1980s must also be lifted: get women out of the combat units and out of any roles in which combat might find them. The way we incorporated women in World War II offers a workable model for current policy.
In terms of ideas, we need to move our doctrine from the Second to the Third Generation: from dumping firepower on opponents in a contest of attrition to maneuver warfare. Maneuver warfare must, however, be real doctrine, what our Marines, soldiers, sailors, and airmen actually do, not just words on paper. Nor is that enough: once we have institutionalized the culture of maneuver warfare, with its outward focus on combat results, we must tackle the difficult intellectual challenge posed by 4GW. That will be a long-term effort, because 4GW is itself evolving in a process likely to take most of this century.
In hardware, good design normally yields simplicity, not complexity. Weapons’ designs must be based on combat history, not the self-interested claims of technology hucksters. We must remember that most complex systems have simple counters and that automated systems cannot deal with situations not envisioned by their designers (who are engineers, not soldiers). All major weapons should be chosen by competitive flyoffs and shootoffs and none should be produced until they have passed operational testing and evaluation.
None of this is new. But it is what Secretary Mattis needs to do if he is to give President Trump what he wants: a military that wins. Absent reform, $54 billion just digs the hole we’re in a little deeper.
True. Somebody once said, let Allah sort it out.
Right.
We tried to help the people in Iraq. What a tragic waste. As long as they’re tied to islam, there is no hope. No way to help them.
We need to just stay out of it.
These 4th gen wars are not an existential threat to us as long as they do not erupt on US soil.
However, China is an existential threat, and that’s what the extra spending is for. An actual first generation war threat. A total war.
I agree.
But at the same time the military wastes a lot of money and depends too heavily on contractors. We could have an extremely strong and capable military for far less money.
4th Generation Warfare is simply a buzzword for an ill-equipped militia withdrawing to a city and bleeding it’s opponent thru guerilla tactics. It’s effective because few modern militaries are willing to do what’s necessary to win with the tools at hand and accept international faux outrage over the results.
“But at the same time the military wastes a lot of money and depends too heavily on contractors. We could have an extremely strong and capable military for far less money.”
Folks have been saying that since the Revolutionary War. So far nobody has figured out how to do it.
War, and the ability to fight one effectively is enormously expensive. Especially when you wear out the men and equipment in these silly-assed “fourth generation wars”.
Well, when those internecine wars involve flying airplanes into our buildings, it's a little difficult not to get involved, isn't it?
Or do you think we can call a 'time out' and explain to the enemy that we just made some mistakes and want to take the ball home?
The difficulty is that maneuver warfare requires the means of maneuvering: trucks, tanks, armored vehicles, self-propelled artillery, aircraft and the logistics tail to support that. This also includes enough vehicles in which to train and a sufficient training budget. Unless you want troops to train with broomsticks and cars mocked-up as tanks.
So, contrary to the author's opinion, the first need for the military right now is money to restore readiness and training.
They mostly fight each other in their own lands.
We let those guys in here and even allowed them to learn to fly planes. That kind of thing has to stop. We need to keep them out.
However, most of them are not coming here. If anything Europe has the most to fear there. Containment is the first priority. And we don’t need to intervene when they are fighting each other.
We should not be in these 4th gen wars.
That is a waste of our resources: money, people, time, equipment, etc.
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