thedrifter
03-15-06, 07:27 AM
A Defensive Culture
President Bush needs to win hearts and minds in the Pentagon too.
BY BRENDAN MINITER
Wednesday, March 15, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
It's a disgrace that many of our public intellectuals and a disproportionate number of elected officials in one political party have abandoned a war they once supported. But as President Bush embarks on new campaign to shore up support for the war by outlining his strategy for victory in Iraq, he must now conduct his hearts-and-minds campaign in a surprising place: the Pentagon.
There is no indication that the military's top brass is going wobbly on the war. But there is mounting evidence that a large number of individuals inside the Pentagon have not internalized the president's strategy for winning it. That is to say, outside the immediate reach of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others, much of the military and its civilian appendages still operate as they did during peacetime.
That the military struggled to get enough armor to Iraq more than a year after Baghdad fell was an early indication of this. But it was also evident during the invasion when former House speaker Newt Gingrich forwarded a memo by Col. Douglas Macgregor to Mr. Rumsfeld. Col. Macgregor had long chided Army leaders for being too risk averse at a time when speed and agility were more important than large numbers of troops. Mr. Rumsfeld shot back at the time, according to the New York Times this week, "Nobody up here thinks like this."
Apparently not much has changed in three years. So on Monday President Bush stepped in front of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy in Washington to outline his plan for defeating the insurgency and leaving a free society in place in Iraq. In his speech, the first in a series, he pulled out a piece of the military machinery that needs improvement: the effort to defeat improvised explosive devices. Mr. Bush identified by name the man who is heading up the anti-IED effort inside the Pentagon, retired four-star general Montgomery Meigs, and noted that he met with Gen. Meigs and Mr. Rumsfeld on Saturday. The president also announced he was expanding funding for the anti-IED project to $3.3 billion, up from $150 million; and he noted some success in combating IEDs. It was a thinly veiled message to the Pentagon to take this project seriously.
This isn't the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned against five decades ago. It's the Cold War culture that military "transformation" was supposed to break apart. That culture is proving to be more resilient than many had hoped. And as revealed by a recent ruling by federal judge Emmet Sullivan, which tossed out new personnel rules designed to allow Mr. Rumsfeld greater flexibility in using his civilian workforce, that culture enjoys entrenched union support.
To figure out how to reshape the military culture into one that fully supports the war effort, we called Gen. Charles Krulak, a retired Marine Corps Commandant, on a recent Sunday, shortly after he returned from church. He didn't have many nice things to say about the military's acquisition system--which soldiers rely on for everything from food to clothing to weapons and protective armor--describing it as an entity into itself that no longer shares the same goals as soldiers on the ground. That goes a long way in explaining why three years into the war and long after it became clear that IEDs were the biggest threat to American forces (and Iraqi civilians) and would likely show up on every battlefield in the future, the president still has to push for new technology, tactics and training to combat this somewhat low-tech threat.
Gen. Krulak knows a thing or two about breaking apart entrenched military culture, because he spent the second half of the 1990s pushing the Marine Corps through a similar transformation. The essential point was to increase the capabilities of individual Marines. Gen. Krulak is quick to note that he was not alone in thinking about the idea that low-level officers interacting with civilians would come to determine the fate of military interventions, and that for this kind of fighting it was essential to increase individual soldiers' capabilities by training them to make command decisions and giving them the technology to conduct a wide variety of missions. This, he realized, would make them better able to fight conventional as well as "asymmetrical" wars--a concept that would come to be called "the strategic corporal."
But Gen. Krulak does remember the moment he realized that the nature of the conflicts the U.S. would face had fundamentally changed. It was March 20, 1995, the day a handful of terrorists attacked Tokyo's subway system with poisonous Sarin gas. At the time he was commander of Marine forces in the Pacific. After learning of the attack he immediately realized that unless military planners changed the way they thought about warfare, the U.S. would be vulnerable to similar attacks.
Not long afterward, he became commandant of the Marine Corps and immediately opened a "war fighting lab" in Quantico, Va., to spur innovative thinking. He couldn't find a general to run the lab, but soon found a bold thinking colonel and a handful of other officers--men he describes now as "Young Turks." He needed a paltry $10 million to launch his experiment and quickly found support in Congress. Republican Sen. Rick Santorum and Democrat Sen. Joe Lieberman were among a handful of early supporters.
Today the lab still has a tiny budget--less than $40 million--but it is responsible for developing urban warfare tactics being used around the world as well as scores of new weapons. One of them, a remote-control plane called Dragon Eye, is so small and light that it fits inside a backpack. Marines now are using it to scout for enemy fighters in Iraq without the risk of getting shot.
The trick to the lab's success, Gen. Krulak told us, was it created an incentive for innovation, while also quickly field-testing new ideas by using "normal Marines." The day Marines tested Dragon Eye in an urban warfare training exercise, he recalled, the small plane was bouncing off a building and "one Marine stepped on it." Its flaws quickly became apparent and were corrected. Meanwhile, another Marine--a private first class--showed up to the second day of that urban warfare exercise wearing knee and elbow pads designed for rollerblading. "The PFC had gone out the night before and used his own money," Gen. Krulak said, and became a "great example" of why the most useful innovations often don't come from the high command. Now knee and elbow pads are standard issue for urban combat.
In Gen. Krulak's view, transformation isn't working in the Pentagon because somewhere along the way a crucial step has been lost. Until war planners change the way they think about the nature of the threats facing the nation today, they won't be able to change how the military is set up to combat those threats.
Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com. His column appears Tuesdays.
Ellie
President Bush needs to win hearts and minds in the Pentagon too.
BY BRENDAN MINITER
Wednesday, March 15, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
It's a disgrace that many of our public intellectuals and a disproportionate number of elected officials in one political party have abandoned a war they once supported. But as President Bush embarks on new campaign to shore up support for the war by outlining his strategy for victory in Iraq, he must now conduct his hearts-and-minds campaign in a surprising place: the Pentagon.
There is no indication that the military's top brass is going wobbly on the war. But there is mounting evidence that a large number of individuals inside the Pentagon have not internalized the president's strategy for winning it. That is to say, outside the immediate reach of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others, much of the military and its civilian appendages still operate as they did during peacetime.
That the military struggled to get enough armor to Iraq more than a year after Baghdad fell was an early indication of this. But it was also evident during the invasion when former House speaker Newt Gingrich forwarded a memo by Col. Douglas Macgregor to Mr. Rumsfeld. Col. Macgregor had long chided Army leaders for being too risk averse at a time when speed and agility were more important than large numbers of troops. Mr. Rumsfeld shot back at the time, according to the New York Times this week, "Nobody up here thinks like this."
Apparently not much has changed in three years. So on Monday President Bush stepped in front of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy in Washington to outline his plan for defeating the insurgency and leaving a free society in place in Iraq. In his speech, the first in a series, he pulled out a piece of the military machinery that needs improvement: the effort to defeat improvised explosive devices. Mr. Bush identified by name the man who is heading up the anti-IED effort inside the Pentagon, retired four-star general Montgomery Meigs, and noted that he met with Gen. Meigs and Mr. Rumsfeld on Saturday. The president also announced he was expanding funding for the anti-IED project to $3.3 billion, up from $150 million; and he noted some success in combating IEDs. It was a thinly veiled message to the Pentagon to take this project seriously.
This isn't the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned against five decades ago. It's the Cold War culture that military "transformation" was supposed to break apart. That culture is proving to be more resilient than many had hoped. And as revealed by a recent ruling by federal judge Emmet Sullivan, which tossed out new personnel rules designed to allow Mr. Rumsfeld greater flexibility in using his civilian workforce, that culture enjoys entrenched union support.
To figure out how to reshape the military culture into one that fully supports the war effort, we called Gen. Charles Krulak, a retired Marine Corps Commandant, on a recent Sunday, shortly after he returned from church. He didn't have many nice things to say about the military's acquisition system--which soldiers rely on for everything from food to clothing to weapons and protective armor--describing it as an entity into itself that no longer shares the same goals as soldiers on the ground. That goes a long way in explaining why three years into the war and long after it became clear that IEDs were the biggest threat to American forces (and Iraqi civilians) and would likely show up on every battlefield in the future, the president still has to push for new technology, tactics and training to combat this somewhat low-tech threat.
Gen. Krulak knows a thing or two about breaking apart entrenched military culture, because he spent the second half of the 1990s pushing the Marine Corps through a similar transformation. The essential point was to increase the capabilities of individual Marines. Gen. Krulak is quick to note that he was not alone in thinking about the idea that low-level officers interacting with civilians would come to determine the fate of military interventions, and that for this kind of fighting it was essential to increase individual soldiers' capabilities by training them to make command decisions and giving them the technology to conduct a wide variety of missions. This, he realized, would make them better able to fight conventional as well as "asymmetrical" wars--a concept that would come to be called "the strategic corporal."
But Gen. Krulak does remember the moment he realized that the nature of the conflicts the U.S. would face had fundamentally changed. It was March 20, 1995, the day a handful of terrorists attacked Tokyo's subway system with poisonous Sarin gas. At the time he was commander of Marine forces in the Pacific. After learning of the attack he immediately realized that unless military planners changed the way they thought about warfare, the U.S. would be vulnerable to similar attacks.
Not long afterward, he became commandant of the Marine Corps and immediately opened a "war fighting lab" in Quantico, Va., to spur innovative thinking. He couldn't find a general to run the lab, but soon found a bold thinking colonel and a handful of other officers--men he describes now as "Young Turks." He needed a paltry $10 million to launch his experiment and quickly found support in Congress. Republican Sen. Rick Santorum and Democrat Sen. Joe Lieberman were among a handful of early supporters.
Today the lab still has a tiny budget--less than $40 million--but it is responsible for developing urban warfare tactics being used around the world as well as scores of new weapons. One of them, a remote-control plane called Dragon Eye, is so small and light that it fits inside a backpack. Marines now are using it to scout for enemy fighters in Iraq without the risk of getting shot.
The trick to the lab's success, Gen. Krulak told us, was it created an incentive for innovation, while also quickly field-testing new ideas by using "normal Marines." The day Marines tested Dragon Eye in an urban warfare training exercise, he recalled, the small plane was bouncing off a building and "one Marine stepped on it." Its flaws quickly became apparent and were corrected. Meanwhile, another Marine--a private first class--showed up to the second day of that urban warfare exercise wearing knee and elbow pads designed for rollerblading. "The PFC had gone out the night before and used his own money," Gen. Krulak said, and became a "great example" of why the most useful innovations often don't come from the high command. Now knee and elbow pads are standard issue for urban combat.
In Gen. Krulak's view, transformation isn't working in the Pentagon because somewhere along the way a crucial step has been lost. Until war planners change the way they think about the nature of the threats facing the nation today, they won't be able to change how the military is set up to combat those threats.
Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com. His column appears Tuesdays.
Ellie