"Tarnished Brass" (new article by Dick Kohn)

[Surferbeetle]

Professor Kohn’s essay is an interesting piece, and captures a valid sentiment: America needs a cost effective strategy in order to meet the demands of our Nations range of desires and responsibilities. I’ll state the obvious assumption: the Department of Defense was created in order to conduct a large part of our Nations strategy and it is allocated a large part of our Nations resources in order to do so. Professor Kohn is of the opinion, however, that DOD is not providing an adequate return on the Nations investment.

Fair enough, he is a fellow taxpayer, and I applaud him for taking the time and effort to try and identify areas where we can improve.

My education, training, and experience have helped me to understand that in order to identify, define, and solve a problem one must understand the context of the problem and solution as well as have the appropriate skills to respond. Professor Kohn correctly identifies the importance of education, training, and experience for DOD personnel, however like Goesh I keyed in on the glaringly apparent failure to internalize the power of teamwork:

This may require further de-emphasis of mathematics, science, and engineering at the academies, on the grounds that war is first and foremost a human phenomenon, not a technical or engineering problem.

My drill sergeant taught me a valuable lesson very early in my career. A team is stronger than an individual…after 48 hours an individual needs sleep, an individual cannot watch all avenues of approach at once, etc. etc. Professor Kohn appears to subscribe to the mistaken idea that mathematics, science, engineering, and humanities can’t successfully team up to solve national strategy issues.

Contrary to Professor Kohn’s assertions the history of our nuclear forces to include Strategic Air Command and the Navy’s Submarine force, among others, are an example of the successes of this multidisciplinary approach. Proof positive are all of the free standing American and Russian populations.

Iraq 2003-06 (pre-surge) is a recent example of a failure to successfully create and employ an integrated mathematics, science, engineering, and humanities approach to warfare. Proof positive is our failure to consistently recognize the importance of the Iraqi population with the resultant exacerbation of the conflict. Afghanistan appears to follow this same pattern.

With respect to assertions of a political officer-corps, any one who would like to make these mostly baseless assertions needs to simply join and serve. My observation is that politically active officers are outliers in the general population and are dealt with appropriately. The assertion of a political officer corps is a red herring, which does not serve to identify, define, and solve our national strategy problems.

Fortunately the pace and requirements of the conflicts we have chosen to engage in are purging the force of dead weight and forcing the re-examination of faulty assumptions concerning American strategy, operations, and tactics. Professor Kohn would benefit from some more time spent in the field with USMC and US Army forces and we would benefit from his observations after this experience.