William S. Lind :collection (merged thread)

[AmericanPride]

This is the stuff of nightmares. It is third world army meets PC monster and they spawn something that will always be beaten. He just said that fighting proficiency is not as important as whatever characteristic is fashionable this week.

But that isn't the worst thing, at least for right now. The worst thing is the window into the mind of a 3 star this comment provides, a three star, supposedly one of the best the Army has. So the best the Army has doesn't acknowledge the importance of being good at fighting, subordinates it to political fashion and can't see what the result would be, or doesn't care.

Lind commented about the moral collapse of the officer corps. Well that 3-star's words validates fully Lind's view at least as far as the multi-stars go. The problem is officers lower down whose morals haven't collapsed yet won't be able to counteract the disastrous effects the multi-stars will have on the military.

What the heck are you talking about? That a general believes the demographics of the officer corps should reflect the demographics of the nation from which it is drawn is "the stuff of nightmares...[subordinated] to political fashion" and will be the bringer of "moral collapse" and "disasterous effects"? It's exactly your kind of reactionary fear-mongering that obstructs the development of sound, rational policy and it creates the very problems you claim you want addressed!

You don't know the context of that 3-star general's conversation. Does everything he speak about at every turn must "acknowledge the importance of being good at fighting"? It goes without saying that in the profession of arms, the ability fight and win wars, is essential. That this forms the basis of your criticism reveals your superficial understanding of the real problems at hand.

Here are the fundamental problems facing the armed forces:
- people and equipment are becoming more expensive on a per unit basis because of long procurement times, increased healthcare costs, inefficient budgeting and expenditures, and technological transformation
- this cost growth exceeds both the rate of inflation and rate of defense budget growth
- the cost growth disportionately reduces the size of the force, meaning that as individual units are more capable, the size in reduction results in an overall decline in combat power
- increased automation and systems means more overhead and administration
- combined, this means less available forward combat power
- less available combat power means greater demands on available combat power
- greater demands means higher operations tempo on both people and equipment, driving maintenance costs, refit/replinishment requirements, and exhaustion in the force
- that in turn means more money devoted to operations and less towards personnel (and more to defense and less towards social services)
- and that means a less fit, less educated, less qualified population to actually design, man, operate, and/or maintain those systems

What does this mean for the officer corps? It means it actually becomes increasingly difficult to formulate an effective strategy - the structural constraints imposed on leaders leaves very few options in implementing a dynamic, flexible strategy capable of matching the threats faced by the country. Instead, the "strategy" is driven by the availability of resources, including the Congressionally-constrained billeting of officers, which is limited because of the structural contradictions of the country's defense political economy.

We have one of the largest military budgets in American history combined with one of the smallest militaries by manpower in history. We are in a high tempo operations environment because of the political obligations of the government - meaning that far more is done today by far fewer people. And that's without the additional burdens of the campaigns in Afghanistan and formerly Iraq. So, in this environment, junior and mid-career officers are incredibly busy, even in the Reserves, with constant training cycles and mobilizations. There's really not time to implement change in the organization - and in any case, that's the job of the general officers, the number of which is tied by law to the size of the force. I don't fault the generals entirely; maybe they're just bad politicians having been imbued with strict conditions on the appropriate boundaries of civil-military relations. That Lind is both wrong (there are officers seeking to learn and transform the Army) and right (that this change is not occuring) should speak volumes about the conditions of our nation's defenses. Blaming black hairstyles or homosexuals is not only wildly off the mark but fuels the kind of obstructionism and division that makes it difficult to seek effective change in the first place.