Thomas E. Ricks's Blog, page 162

While we were out . . .

And
we're back. Some events since the beginning of July, when I took a breather
from daily blogging.

--The
Russians convicted the female punk band Pussy Riot of hooliganism (what a great
word). Apparently beating and killing journalists to stop unfavorable coverage of
those in power isn't a problem, but singing in the wrong place must be stopped.
I think Putin is the world's biggest shmuck, edging Robert Mugabe. The Financial Times says the
trial of the band should worry even investors. As one member of the band said
in her closing statement, "This
trial is highly typical and speaks volumes. The current government will have
occasion to feel shame and embarrassment because of it for a long time to come.
At each stage it has embodied a travesty of justice. As it turned out, our
performance, at first a small and somewhat absurd act, snowballed into an enormous
catastrophe. This would obviously not happen in a healthy
society. Russia, as a state, has long resembled an organism sick to the
core."

--The
son of a senior Communist Party official in China was involved in a deadly
crash in his Ferrari, perhaps whilst engaging in sex games. I am not sure this is what Marx and Lenin had in mind. More here about the Party's image.

--In the
Navy's continuing Command Sweepstakes, the skipper of the USS Pittsburgh was hurled overboard after a just a week in command. Apparently the officer, who is
married with a family, had gotten his 23-year-old girlfriend pregnant and then
tried to end the affair by pretending to be dead. Also a helicopter squadron
commander got the heave-ho, making 16 for the year.

--The
former inspector general of the Air
Force's 31st Fighter Wing in Italy was charged with sexual assault. Must be
something in the water: A major in the 173rd Airborne, which also is based in Italy, apparently
went down the same road with a female PFC.

--Wired's "Danger Room" had a thoughtful piece on Strator, which, according to the
article, used its role as an information provider to tout an intelligence
product in which it had a financial
interest.

--I
don't understand what happened in South Africa when the police killed 34 striking miners.

--McDonald's
is opening some vegetarian-only outlets in India. I'd love to try the McSpicy Paneer. But in the long run I think I'd prefer a
pizza Domino's sells in India, the "pizza keema do piazza," with spiced lamb.

--The
Duffel Blog. What can I say? Where else can you find such a
tribute to General Mattis? How in the world do we find such bloggers?

Hey, funding for a program that actually helps wounded warriors is running out!

[image error]

By
Kenneth E. Blackman

Best
Defense guest commenter

The Defense Department,
the veterans administration, and the Obama administration are missing an enormous
opportunity to help wounded warriors, indeed every serviceman and woman
returning from battle overseas.  

There's a hugely
successful program in North Carolina called the Citizen Soldier Support Program
(CSSP) that maps data about the deployments of service members down to the
local level, trains civilian health professionals to identify and treat those
in their communities in need, and then connects the military, veterans, and
their families with knowledgeable providers to deal with post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD), traumatic brain injury (TBI), and other behavioral problems
that result from combat and repeated rotations overseas.

Here's the rub: Federal
funding has run out and the program is about to go out of business, despite
memos of support from former Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen, two
letters from North Carolina Senator Kay Hagan, another from four influential
Tar Heel Congressmen (David Price, Mike McIntyre, Walter Jones, and Larry
Kissell), and applause from virtually all who have looked at this effort.

The Citizen Soldier
Support Program began with $9.8 million dollars from Congress in 2005-2007. The University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill serves as host (who says academe doesn't care
about the military?). The focus is
on military members and their families, especially in the reserves and
National Guard, and especially in rural, sparsely populated, and other
under-served areas -- in other words, those areas where the military and the
veterans' administration aren't reaching the people who need help.

Check it out at www.citizensoldiersupport.org. It's unique -- no
other program like it in the country. It starts by mapping the service
populations by home zip code. For example, there are currently reservists
and National Guardsmen and women in all but 12 U.S. counties (out of 3141
nationally). There are reserve/Guard vets of the Iraq, Afghanistan, and
other deployments in all but 27 counties. So the first contribution is locating
all those eligible, and their dependents. Take a look.

Then the program trains
behavioral (and other) health providers onsite and online -- to date, over 20,000
practicing in all 50 states. Then it tracks the distribution of those
trained and matches them against the needs identified in the mapping of
deployment data. CSSP offers nationally recognized courses on PTSD, TBI, issues
relating to women in combat, issues of importance to military families, and the
like. There's training focused on primary care physicians and
optometrists to recognize these injuries during routine examinations. All
courses are available for free and the cost of continuing education credits is
covered.

Last, the program contains
a web-based, searchable database of providers to connect them with service
members and their families who are in need. This database is modeled on the one
developed for North Carolina, where there are more than 1200 total providers in
96 of the 100 counties. The goal is three trained health providers within
30 minutes of every service and family member who needs it -- nationwide.

For
over two years, CSSP has sought re-funding from the Defense Department,
Veterans Administration, and other government agencies at the highest levels,
including speaking directly with the Secretary of Defense, the current and
former Joint Chiefs Chairmen, and the Staff of the First Lady. They have had ample opportunity to act but
have not, despite White House efforts to marshal the involvement of the
nation's leading professional medical associations. The issues facing our returned and returning
military population, veterans, and their families are not a government problem;
they are a national crisis that is only going to get worse.

The Citizen Soldier
Support Program is led by Bob Goodale, a retired CEO of the Harris Teeter
supermarket chain, and retired LTC Bill Abb, a veteran of 21 years on active
duty in the army. They have been working cooperatively with all these agencies,
including the White House Joining Forces effort, and countless others at the
local, state and national levels -- not as competitors but to complement and to
help.

What puzzles
CSSP, and its distinguished advisory board led by a retired Chief of the Army
Reserves and a retired Adjutant General of the North Carolina National Guard, is why with all this
support, after all these efforts at the highest levels of government, this
program will die. It needs immediate funding to continue and then long-term
money to realize its national potential -- in total, some $18 or 20 million over
five years.

From the start
of his first presidential campaign in 2007, Barack Obama has reached out to the
military, emphasizing the needs of our soldiers and our military families.
His bureaucrats say "they have it covered." But they
don't -- not like this, not at the community level, not training local health
providers, not focusing on the Guard and reserves and their vets. Last Friday
the president essentially admitted that by issuing an executive order full of
plans for interagency cooperation, partnering with community mental health
services, new plans for more planning, hiring more therapists, creating pilot
programs, and more -- proof positive of the crying need to expand mental health
services to the military.

Everybody
knows that Active Duty Service Members have overwhelmed the military's mental
health resources, forcing referrals to local civilian providers. Everybody knows that deployments affect far
more than those who went overseas: parents, spouses, siblings, significant others, children, and more. Everyone knows that it takes weeks or
months for far too many wounded warriors to get help and that many vets are
hours away from the nearest VA facility -- and that help often requires months of
waiting and involves terribly frustrating runarounds. Suicides among
current and former military have skyrocketed -- July just saw the worst monthly
total on record among those on active duty, and those suicides are only the tip
of the iceberg.

In that same
month of July, the Pentagon asked Congress to allow $708 million appropriated
for TRICARE, the health insurance for service members and vets, to be
reprogrammed for use elsewhere. Twenty-four members of the House Armed Services Committee asked that the
money be focused on PTSD, TBI, and related problems. What better use of the money than to find and
connect health providers to those wounded, and their families, who aren't
getting help from the VA or the military health system?

The president
and first lady will soon be in North Carolina for the Democratic
convention. His Executive Order sets in
motion all sorts of good efforts but they will take months and years to
implement. The Citizen Soldier Support Program is up and running, succeeding,
and using the private sector -- health providers in local communities all across
the country -- to identify those who need help, and getting it to them through
professionals practicing right next door. If the president wants to be consistent with everything he's doing to
support our military, and his own Executive Order, he will order the Pentagon
or the VA, or both, to continue the Citizen Soldier Support Program, and
announce it loudly to the Convention and the country. If he won't act, then Congress should. Not a single soldier or family should be left
to suffer if help can be provided.

Kenneth E. Blackman,
PhD, served four years in the Air Force Security Service and has spent a career
in the biomedical and substance abuse treatment field. He currently serves on the Board of Directors
of the Alcohol Drug Council of North Carolina and as a volunteer veteran
representative in the Jail Diversion and Trauma Recovery Program.

Rebecca's War Dog of the Week: Summer Postcard Series: Marines Mourn Fallen Handler, Sgt. Ashley

By Rebecca
Frankel

Best Defense Chief Canine Correspondent

Marines with Military Working Dogs Platoon, 2nd Law
Enforcement Battalion II-MEF (Fwd) pay their final respects to Sgt. Joshua R.
Ashley during a memorial ceremony in the Regional Command Southwest chapel,
Aug. 17. Ashley, from Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., was killed in action July 19 while conducting combat
operations in Helmand province.

Ashley's partner, MWD Sirius, was also at the memorial.

Rebecca Frankel, on leave from her FP desk, is
currently writing a book about military working dogs, to be published by Free
Press.

These days, reservists are just soldiers who get laid off between deployments

By Maj. Gen. Michael Symanski
(US Army, ret.)

Best Defense department of
reserve affairs

The
Army will add more time to the National Guard and Reserve training year, so
let's be candid about what the "operational" reserve military forces really
are: A method to avoid the cost of a full-time military of adequate size.  The reserve force, which was our
strategic capital banked for a once-in-a-career national military emergency,
has been cashed in because our expensive regular force has been too small to
wage a protracted war.  We
no longer have citizen soldiers; we have professional soldiers who are laid off
between deployments overseas.

It is
no longer economically or politically feasible to expand our military with a
draft, and a modern, effective standing force is very expensive to hire and
sustain. Citizens and their employers accepted and supported the concept
of voluntarily giving and allowing the time necessary to economically sustain a
reserve with which to expand the army for the common defense for a short,
unwanted war. Our laws regulating the mobilization of reservists (the term
includes the National Guard) and their post-war re-employment are still based
on that concept of finite and rare service.

America
met the sudden demand for soldiers for the War on Terrorism by calling up our
reserves involuntarily for a year, and by offering short-term employment to
volunteers who are available to serve. The war goes on, but Congress will not
fund a regular force of adequate size and, instead, allows the cheaper
reservists to be involuntarily called up every five years or to voluntarily
extend their active duty. Unemployed reservists welcome the opportunity
for active duty and under-employed reservists can do an important job for
better pay commensurate with their actual abilities. Employers are obligated to
re-employ a returning reservist, even if the soldier has, in truth, volunteered
for active duty.  Since the
reservist cannot refuse the government's periodic call-ups, the government is
his or her primary employer who regularly lays him off. A civilian employer needs
the revenue generated by each employee, and sharing him or her is a very
expensive expression of patriotism. Consequently, the reservist finds it very
difficult to find career civilian employment.

The
Chief of Staff of the Army has announced that reservists will spend more time
training in the future, and be on a schedule of periodic active duty (Army
Force Generation). The availability of each individual reservist for training
or duty varies according to his or her current circumstances, and it would be
good management for the military to use all that available time. All soldiers'
contracts with the government, however, are subject to the unpredictable needs
of the nation and have been difficult to always honor despite all good
faith. The old one weekend a month two weeks a year for training model was
always a burden for the civilian employers, and will get worse as long as the
government remains the soldier's primary employer with increased demands for
time.  We cannot sustain an
exceptional national military policy, forever.

Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Michael Symanski served on the U.S. Army
Staff (G-3/5/7) as the Assistant Deputy Chief of Staff for Mobilization and
Reserve Affairs, 2005-2007, and represented the Army Staff on the Army Reserve
Policy Committee and the joint Reserve Forces Policy Board. He commanded Army
Reserve and National Guard units at all levels through two-star.

 

Blown up in the boondocks, then busted in Bagram for not wearing a reflector belt

While Tom Ricks is away from his blog, he has selected a
few of his favorite posts to re-run. We will be posting a few every day until
he returns. This originally ran on December 7, 2011.

Another episode in the department
of "shit you can't make up," from a guy
I know:

"I
had a company commander (Spring '09) who was in the remotest part of our
province and had been medevaced after getting blown up and knocked unconscious.
They sent him up when the medevac came for a more seriously wounded soldier.
While he was on Bagram, he was feeling better and they let him go walk the main
to go to a DFAC for dinner. He was in the only uniform he had, complete with
burn marks.

He
was stopped by MPs who were posted and writing tickets to soldiers who were not
wearing a reflective belt. When that story got around, we were wondering
what world he had just come from because it wasn't the same as the units who
were fighting the war.

I
think you understand how crazy it seemed to us (the line guys) that someone (definitely
a CSM!) posted MPs for the specific purpose of writing tickets to soldiers not
following the asinine policies that had no basis/grounding for the war we
were/are fighting. Think about the implications of that on US manpower
--how much the nation invested in getting those soldiers trained to deploy to
combat, what it takes to sustain those soldiers over the course of the
deployment ... and this is what we are going to use them for? It struck me as a
terrible waste and I remember talking about it with the company commander. We
both commented on how we had requested MPs to help mentor ANP but we couldn't
actually get any real MPs to do that mission."

Hazing vs. leadership: Some thoughts on getting my arm broken at West Point

While Tom Ricks is away from his blog, he has selected a
few of his favorite posts to re-run. We will be posting a few every day until
he returns. This originally ran on December 2, 2011. 

I found this essay, which until now has only been available
on an internal Army website, quite striking. It essentially asks: How could a
place that prides itself on its honor code tolerate sadism?

Just FYI, the author's own title for this piece is "Cool on Honor: Sadism, Cruelty, and
Character Development at West Point."

By Lt. Col. Peter Fromm, U.S. Army (Ret.) 

Best Defense department of military ethics

Cool on Honor: Sadism, Cruelty, and
Character Development at West Point

I have had one serious unanswered
injustice done to me in my life, and it occurred when I was 21 years old. I
mean "unanswered" in the sense of reciprocity-there has been no accounting for
this injustice. I have always wanted to write about it, not because of
self-pity but because of something I learned from it that has grown on me over
the years. This personal essay describes it as a snapshot from the Army's
troubled times in the 1970s. The story surfaces one important aspect about
leadership and stewardship in the modern Army: the antithetical relationship
between gratuitous cruelty and honor and the duty to do something about it. In my experience as an Army ethicist,
having been sent to graduate school for that purpose, I have seen this
antithetical relationship as potentially the most important ethical failure the
institution faces. I say this because the institution puts weapons in the hands
of young, inexperienced people and then gives them the power of life and death
over others. If we do not do all that we can to get this part of Army culture
right (the relationship between cruelty and honor), we stand convicted of
hypocrisy of the worst kind.

When the Army educated me to teach
ethics (a sign of health in the organization that it actually does such a
thing), I developed an eye for institutional moral window dressing. That's
mostly what I want to talk about here. In the Odyssey, Homer says that "the blade itself incites to
violence." I want to rephrase that beautiful observation to say that
"power over others incites to cruelty." When one exercises power over
another, if there is a lack of moral sense, of maturity, or of wisdom in the
execution, it inevitably becomes entangled with that most basic of impulses,
sexual dynamics. [[BREAK]]

As Jean Paul Sartre demonstrates in Being and Nothingness, this sexual component to power dynamics
remains a common denominator in human nature, a basic component of our
social-political experience. In the case of power over others, there is a psychological
impulse to see the other as an object, to dehumanize the other, and to attempt
to take action to literally objectify the other through violence or through
institutionalized cruelty. This impulse stems from a need to exert one's
existence at the expense of the other, and in this effort there is a tendency
toward sadistic abuse. This dynamic is what happens when adults abuse children,
as in the case of pedophiles. In power relationships, like rank hierarchies in
the military, sexual impulse arises either overtly or in some sublimated way.
If it arises overtly, it often ends in sexual harassment or assault, such as
what became known at the Air Force Academy in 2005 when several women came
forward to say that had been raped or otherwise assaulted there. Another famous
case occurred at the Naval Academy when women were chained to urinals in the
men's latrines. When this impulse arises in some sublimated way, it often finds
its outlet in violence vented out in some more or less "acceptable" form, such
as hazing. Army leaders have to be knowledgeable of and on guard against this
natural tendency and not minimize it, writing it off as, or justifying it as,
discipline, toughness, or some other thing not daring to name it for what it
is, which is what happens all too often. Such abuses happen primarily at the
lower levels, at the young levels of leadership, though we are all too familiar
with the abuses of more senior and notorious "toxic leaders" of the past.

Click here to view a PDF of the entire essay. 

General MacArthur's interesting role in the fall of the Philippines in 1942

By "Tyrtaios"

Best Defense book reviewer

 

Fighting for MacArthur:
The Navy and Marine Corps' Desperate Defense of the Philippines by John Gordon arrived mysteriously at my post office
box in town yesterday

My quick perusal of the book (which I will begin to read next week in
more detail), would be disturbing to anyone had the information it
contains been researched and made available while General Douglas MacArthur was
still alive, to say nothing of the embarrassment to those that allowed
MacArthur to continue to command after such a startling defeat, a road
early-on toward that defeat which essentially
followed the General's flawed plans for the defense of the
Philippines, in view of the changing situation confronting him.

I should note that the author in his zeal, delves into a lot of minute
details that seem to clutter the story he wants to tell, which is primarily
about the Navy and Marines role in support of the Army commanded by MacArthur. However,
the Army is not overlooked, and the over use of details aside, for anyone
interested in historical backdrop surrounding MacArthur, as well as his
performance in the Philippines, I would say the book is an important
contribution toward such.

Although most know that MacArthur along with his chief of staff
Sutherland should have shouldered much of the blame for losing the. What I
found intriguing was MacArthur's early on rosy picture he was painting to
Washington, and then later outright lies in message traffic to Marshall who
seems to have somewhat taken it all in stride, knowing MacArthur as he did,
instead of weighing the evidence provided by a very competent Admiral
Thomas Hart who was also sending his candid assessment of the situation to Washington.

Moving along quickly, the author's research notes that as MacArthur
finally, too late in the game began to accept the
situation, MacArthur started to scapegoat Hart (whom he pretty much forced
into retirement), when in actuality, it was MacArthur that should have
"faded away." I had heard about Admiral Hart only peripherally and
that he had been fired, only accepting the Admiral's firing as the way of
things in the naval service for those in command that lose. Perhaps it is about
time I find out more about this man who seems to have had his finger on the
pulse as events were unfolding in the Asian-South Pacific theater even before
being attacked in the Philippines, and the measures the Admiral was wisely
taking, while the Army was to some degree under MacArthur, not coming to grips
with reality that would contribute to disaster later.

Also of interest to me, as Hart early-on understood the desperate time
line all forces in the Philippines were facing, the Admiral directed
that tunnel construction be sped-up on Corregidor, and began
transferring food stocks there 10-days prior to the Army who only then seem to
have began facing the reality the Japanese were tightening their hold around
the island of Luzon. This action, and other decisions by Hart, along with quick
thinking Navy and Marine leaders, would later see the Navy and Marines better
fed than the Army as a result. But, would lead to resentment by Army personnel
pointing a finger at the Navy as not supporting the effort, not realizing their
command had let them down and the Navy had in fact shared much with them
early-on prior to the evacuation to Corregidor, to include salvaged weapons and
ammunition.

Additionally, the 4th Marine Regiment which had been evacuated from
China a few months earlier, started their men on 2-meals a day early-on,
and Hart followed with direction for all naval forces to do so also several
days later, while the Army continued to chowed-down, which would also
contribute to outright starvation during the siege on Corregidor later . . .
All the while, MacArthur stunningly only visited up front with his troops once!

To be fair, the book does point-out there was a lot of bad luck, poor
equipment in inventory, along with skill training against a war tested Japanese
invading force, as well as that fog of war that contributed to the fall of the
Philippines. However, my quick thumb through of the book revealed some very
facinating messages back to Washington by MacArthur that hindsight aside,
would seem to go to the question of the MacArthur's mental state and his
competence as a senior general officer that history really shouldn't overlook
because I believe it goes to MacArthur's eventual same early attitude toward
the unfolding of the situation in Korea that seems to parallel his
understanding of the situation around him in the Philippines earlier.

"Tyrtaios" was a
professional private who retired from the Corps at the pleasure of the
Commandant as a lieutenant colonel.

Fixing the Army (II): Let's downgrade 4-stars and end the regimental system

While Tom Ricks is away from his blog, he has selected a
few of his favorite posts to re-run. We will be posting a few every day until
he returns. This originally ran on November 18, 2011.

By "Petronius Arbiter"

Best Defense department of Army affairs

Institutional

Downgrade all Army general-level
commands to LTG commands. CSA and VCSA would be only 4-star generals in the
Army. Army Generals serving in COCOMs could be 4-star. Doing so would help
empower the CSA as the commander of the Army. The Army is roughly 60 percent
the size it was in the Cold War, but with near-same institutional structure and
greater rank structure. If there is concern that 3-star corps commanders could
not work for 3-star major commanders, it worked well in WWII. There just needs
to be a pecking order of 3-star generals. They will know and they will
understand and being the professionals they are they will work together. This
would greatly assist in streamlining the Army structure. For every star there
is a needed staff of military and civilians to provide staff work. This
reduction would greatly streamline the Army and would make it more efficient,
taking out layers of bureaucracy.

Downgrade existing
Army special staff billets from LTG to MG, example Dir Army budget to MG, etc.
Leave principle Assistant Chief of Staff, G1 to G8 alone. Other services may
have to do same in order for Army to compete in the Pentagon.

Now that the National
Guard Bureau has a 4 star seat on the JCS, insist that the NG replace "U.S.
Army" on the uniform with "Guardsman." They are now close to the 6th service. As
such, reduce or eliminate Title 10 support to the NG. All NG budgetary and
personnel issues should be Title 32.

Refer to Soldiers by
rank and not pay grade, not all Sergeants are Sergeants; PV1/2 are Privates,
SSGs are Staff Sergeant, MSGs are Master Sergeant, etc, and LTCs are Lt Colonel
and Colonel (06) are Colonel. Refer to no one as a pay grade. It is
disrespectful to do so. No professional wants to be called by or referred to as
a pay grade.

Expedite soldier
valorous awards so that heroism is recognized rapidly. Over three years to
award a MoH is absolutely ridiculous, especially in this information age with
fast moving communications. Sgt. Basilone, WWII USMC, along with three others,
received his MoH 7 months after his action while still serving in the area of
operations and they had no internet. The latest USMC award of the MoH took two
years to approve. Even that is too long. If it is the veracity of the action
that they are concerned about, I think history will tell you that war stories
get more questionable with age. Go with the witness statements at the time of
the action, not months later. They will be more accurate.

Assess the necessity
for the manning of the Acquisition Corps (AC) with senior officers as is
currently staffed. May be wrong here but the AC seems terribly top heavy. This
must be a product of industry only wanting to deal with GOs or senior officers,
otherwise lower level officers could easily accomplish the task. Do all those
contracting GOs count in the AC and what do contracting commands command?

Acquisition Corps
(AC) officers should not be the requirements generators for developing systems.
A tanker should develop a new tank rather than an AC officer who wears Infantry
brass from a long ago experience. An AC officer wearing MI brass should not be
the principle developer for Infantry weapons systems. There are many, many
examples of how this should not be done. Knowledge and hands-on experience are
the key ingredient in developing new materiel, not knowledge of programmatics. Build
in the programmatic experts into the system but not at the requirements
generation level.

What does the
regimental system do for our Army? Either give it a function or eliminate it. It
means little to most Soldiers. Only value I see is to give some old General,
Colonel or Sergeant Major some honorary position in his waning time.

Since 75th Ranger
Regiment is not an Infantry Regiment do not allow Infantry personnel in that
organization to declare 75th Infantry as a regimental affiliation. But, if we
eliminate the Regimental system from a personnel perspective, don't have to
worry about this. This may only be applicable to officers as most enlisted men
in 75th Ranger Regiment stay in that organization until they are very senior.

Re-instill drill and
ceremonies so that units can at least have confidence in unit abilities to
conduct a pass in review at ceremonies. Oh, and when supervised properly, it is
a tremendous discipline builder and junior NCO developer, but most officers don't
know that. It is a great way to instill confidence in NCOs and discipline in Soldiers.
A lost trade I think . . . unfortunately, and still needed.

Settle on a uniform set and let it alone. There are great frustrations in the
Army the last several years over this. In particular, the combat uniform has
seen 4 versions in 10 years and they still can't get it right. The dress
uniform is a real joke, especially the Class B uniform. Even the GOs gripe
about it. 2 CSAs agocould have stopped it but he did not. His predecessor
made so many horrific decisions about everything, especially uniforms, that the
Army has been unstable ever since. I guess the bottom line on uniforms is there
are no standards. Think CSA Dempsey was on his way to fix all those items but
he was there only a very short time. He would have fixed it.

Q: 'Just what did we fight and bleed for?' A:

While Tom Ricks is away from his blog, he has selected a
few of his favorite posts to re-run. We will be posting a few every day until
he returns. This originally ran on November 23, 2011.

I think that as the United States leaves Iraq and shuffles
toward the exit in Afghanistan, we need to think about how to answer that
question when veterans of our wars there pose it.

This is a difficult one for me, because I think the war in
Afghanistan was the correct response to the 9/11 attacks, but was mishandled
for years after that, and I think the war in Iraq was an unnecessary and very
expensive distraction from that response. Also, we may well see further
violence in both countries that will raise questions about exactly what we
achieved.

Also, today's vets tend to have good BS detectors. Recently
I walked past a small monument to graduates of a high school who were lost in
the Spanish-American War. It stated that they died "for humanity." I don't
think so.

I think my response would be along these lines -- but I'd
welcome your thoughts. "When your
country called, you answered. You did your duty on a mission your country gave
to you. In our system, thankfully, the military does not get to pick and choose
what missions it will undertake -- that is decided by the officials elected by
the people. Those officials are not always right, but they are the leaders we
chose to make that decision. No matter what happens in Iraq and Afghanistan,
you have the thanks of a grateful nation for answering the call."

Is that enough? I don't know. If someone said that to me, I
suspect I would think, Yeah, well where
was everyone else? Why did my friends die and yours didn't?

I don't know. Help me out here.

Is joint reform worth the cost?

By Robert
Kozloski

Best Defense department of jointness

Since the
passage of the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reorganization Act of 1986 countless
practitioners, scholars, and elected officials have written on the positive and
negative aspects of this watershed legislation. However, there is a crucial gap
in the current literature -- an assessment of the total cost of joint reform
followed by a determination if the benefits have outweighed the costs of
implementation.

The
military's quest for jointness actually represents an inefficient compromise
between two schools of thought dating back to WW II: On one hand, complete
unification of the military, and the other, maintaining a service-centric
structure. Much of today's joint organizations and processes are layered on the
existing overhead of the services.

It is important to consider the
conditions which led up to the passage of Goldwater-Nichols.  A series of disappointing military operations
and out of control defense spending resulted in a 1982 closed session of the
House Armed Service Committee. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
General David Jones, USAF, told Congress that the system was broken and that
despite his best efforts, he was not able to reform it-congressional action was
needed.

Has it worked? That was the
question the primary architect of Goldwater-Nichols, the Honorable James Locher
III, asked in 2001. To answer this fundamental question, he assessed the nine
objectives of the act:

Strengthening
civilian authority - Grade B minus

Improving
the military advice to the president- Grade
A

Placing
clear responsibility on the commanders of the unified and specified commands -
Grade A

Improving
the authority of commanders of unified and specified commands - Grade
A

Increasing
attention to strategy formulation and contingency planning Grade C

Providing
for the more efficient use of Defense resources - Grade D

Improving
operational effectiveness - Grade A

Improving
joint officer management policies - Grade C Plus

Improve
defense management and administration - Grade D

While
joint reform has made some improvements, any serious defense analyst today
would be hard pressed to give such high scores considering the events of the
past decade. There are two exceptions - those dealing with the Combatant
Commanders.  However, changes in the
geopolitical environment since 1986 raise a question about the effectiveness of
these expensive organizations.

As
Ambassador Edward Marks observed, "In today's world, military engagement
programs with other countries can only be seen as part of the overall
engagement activity of the U. S. government. The . . . ‘nexus' of security
challenges-terrorism, narcotics, smuggling, international criminal networks,
etc.-can no longer be managed as single agency programs but must be integrated
into ‘whole of government' programs. Unfortunately the character of the
geographic commands militates against effective whole-of-government engagement
programs and therefore coherent foreign policy."

DoD should now reap the benefits of its extensive
investment in 25 years of joint reform and transition to maintaining jointness
rather than compelling it.  This will
result in a significant savings of defense dollars.  A three phased approach is recommended:

First,
leverage joint training and education to maintain the joint culture. This would include creating joint ROTC units and
fully incorporating joint matters into the curriculum of the service academies
and war colleges. Congress should then eliminate the requirement for all
officers to complete joint duty for promotion to General and Flag Officer rank.

Next,
reduce joint billets and organizations. If
all officers began their careers in a joint environment, the need to maintain
over 13,000 joint billets to facilitate joint officer development would not be
needed to the extent it does today. This would include completely reorganizing
the outdated unified command structure for a leaner organization model. A secondary
benefit is the elimination of a significant portion of the joint General and
Flag Officer billets from the joint structure.

Finally,
reduce the roles and missions of the joint staff. Over the past few decades jointness has been largely
viewed as a panacea. For instance, the cumbersome JCIDS and JROC processes were
implemented to control acquisition problems. 
These efforts have been costly failures. Congress should descope the
roles and size of the joint staff and refocus the joint staff on key
operational planning considerations.

Today,
the more relevant question is not has joint reform worked, but rather, was it worth the cost?

Robert Kozloski is a
program analyst with the Department of the Navy.  The views expressed are his own and not those
of the Department of Defense or the Department of the Navy, nor even those of
Pumpsie Green.  He
is the author of Building the Purple Ford:
An Affordable Approach to Jointness
that appeared in the latest Naval War College Review.