By Adrian Bonenberger,
As Army leadership ponders who and what to cut from its budget,
the first groups in the crosshairs are the junior and mid-level
officers. This is a logical step: To wage counterinsurgencies in Iraq
and Afghanistan, the Army expanded its fighting force, and now it’s time
to draw down. What isn’t logical is that other ranks will largely get a
free pass.
The Army, and the military overall, would be better served by
retiring some of the generals, colonels and senior lieutenant colonels,
and promoting the best captains, majors and junior lieutenant colonels
into those roles.
When the United States invaded Afghanistan in
2001, the Army stood at 480,000 soldiers. Over the next decade, it
ballooned to 565,000 soldiers in 2011 and has since shrunk back to
528,000. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said last summer that the Army
needed to reduce its numbers to as few as 380,000, the lowest since
before World War II. It seems likely that the Pentagon will adopt this
number as its target for 2020. These cuts will overwhelmingly fall where
the recent growth occurred: younger soldiers and officers, nearly all
of whom joined to fight in Iraq or Afghanistan.
But cutting personnel who have
the most direct experience with contemporary wars — the senior captains,
most majors and the junior lieutenant colonels — erodes U.S. military
capabilities in precisely the place they’re needed most.
Most of
the colonels and generals leading the Army were trained to fight World
War III against the Soviets; most of the captains and majors have
trained and fought against al-Qaeda, Sunni militias and the Taliban.
Unfortunately, few colonels and generals have, in practical terms, been
able to adapt their 1980s and ’90s training to the needs of today’s
warfare.
The best evidence for this is that we didn’t win in Iraq and haven’t won in Afghanistan. Military journalist Thomas E. Ricks has argued
that America’s generals and colonels have been largely responsible for
these failures. Small, transient battlefield successes — the Sunni
Awakening in Iraq and partnering with militias in Afghanistan to defeat
Taliban groups — were largely products of enterprising junior officers:
perceptive lieutenants, captains and occasionally majors. In the past
three years, those officers have been promoted to captains, majors and
lieutenant colonels — and now they’re the ones on the chopping block.
Another
reason to consider promoting mid-level officers into substantial
leadership roles is the military’s fast-changing culture. The younger
captains, majors and lieutenant colonels did not, for the most part,
grow up in a country or a military where being gay was automatically
seen as disgraceful; they are also more readily able than prior
generations to imagine women in combat. Empowering officers who can help
solidify such changes will boost morale and enhance the Army’s fighting
capability, especially at a time of austerity and decreased training
opportunities. These officers have in many cases served alongside women
in combat (or are women themselves).
They’re better able to see them as warfighting equals than as irksome
obligations or legal liabilities — making these officers ideally suited
to help the military transition away from its current culture, in which
serial rapists are slapped on the wrist or tacitly endorsed.
I
am not suggesting that every colonel or general deserves to be fired to
make way for a new generation. I do, however, think that trimming a
similar number of colonels and generals — say, 10 percent of captains
and majors — would create room for the change the Army badly needs. The
number of generals remains constant at 230, and I don’t believe we need
fewer colonels — just different ones — so this won’t reduce the actual
number of senior leaders in the military. It will, however, open up
senior leadership to younger officers. To do this correctly, Congress
would have to select which senior officers to retire, at which point the
military would select which officers to promote. It could be as
straightforward as putting every senior lieutenant colonel, colonel and
general under the microscope and getting rid of the least capable.
Some
of the greatest leaders I’ve met were general officers, and I was
honored to serve with them. But we already evaluate tens of thousands of
individuals for secret clearances every year, and as the military
reviews the careers of thousands of captains and majors to determine who
to dismiss and who to retain, it would make sense to review the senior
leadership, too. If the future of warfare is going to be small-scale,
counterinsurgency conflicts, the likes of which we’re now fighting in
South America, Africa, Asia and Oceania, we should empower the officers
who understand at the ground level how to fight.
There’s another
consideration that the military needs to face, and this moment of force
adjustment would be the perfect time to do it: Senior officers are
becoming obsolete faster than ever. The complexity and pace of
technological change over the past 15 years have been unprecedented. In a 2011 Army study
surveying all ranks about the Army’s program to teach digital literacy,
none of the respondents said the program was “on track”; two-thirds
said it had problems; and a third characterized it as “substantially
behind.” For most captains and majors who were born in the late 1970s
and early 1980s and grew up on computers, digital literacy doesn’t need
to be taught or mandated — it’s part of life.
At the current pace
of promotion, it will take at least a decade for the Army’s officer
corps to catch up to today’s technology. Colonels and generals don’t
seem to have enough time to learn their current jobs, let alone time to
train themselves in the technology that holds promise for the future of
warfare. It would be much simpler and more feasible to find and promote
those junior and mid-level officers best suited for tomorrow’s wars.
At
a time when billion-dollar start-ups are developed and sold by
20-somethings, it’s not such a stretch to imagine that suitable service
members in their 30s — three or four among 1,000 — could accept a level
of responsibility far beyond the military’s usual promotion progression.
After all, Amazon’s chief executive is 50 years old, Microsoft’s is 46,
Google’s is 40 and Facebook’s is 29.
Technology isn’t the
exclusive province of the young, and nobody would argue to replace the
highest-ranking Army general — Chief of Staff Ray Odierno — with a
company commander. Out of 95 brigadier generals, however, it seems
likely that there’s a major or a junior lieutenant colonel who would be
much better equipped than at least one of them to lead the military into
the 21st century. The swift promotion, against heavy institutional
resistance, of H.R. McMaster
, now 51, from colonel to lieutenant general shows that the Pentagon
understands that the higher ranks require a certain amount of young,
new vision. However, McMaster isn’t going to change a culture all by
himself.
There’s as great a need for responsible, mature military
leadership as there is for flexibility and change. The bulk of the
military’s top decision-makers should be those three- and four-stars who
saw us defeat Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War, who trained for
battle against Russia or China. That still leaves a lot of room at the
top for more flexible, youthful leadership, which could easily be filled
by the most qualified junior officers.
While budgets are being
cut and wars drawn down, it is tempting to simply realign according to
old habits. It’d be better, though, to use this moment of fiscal
austerity to overhaul the military at all levels, rather than cutting
just the layers that appear bloated. If the Army is serious about
building a modern, high-tech force, it’ll consider these changes — and
the rest of the military will follow.
Twitter: @AHBonenberger
Published in The Washington Post
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