In conversations over the years I’ve often said that at the start of war the first thing any nation should do is shoot all the generals, their own.* Generals consistently plan for the last war not the next one and employ battlefield tactics oblivious to changes in technology. The massed formations employed during the Civil War might have worked against smooth bore musket fire in the Revolutionary War but against the rifled barrels used in the Civil War the result was slaughter. In World War I they sent lines of soldiers against the enemy, a better tactic against the rifled barrels of the Civil War but worse than useless against Hiram Maxim’s machine gun. Again soldiers were thoughtlessly sent to slaughter.
Daniel L. Davis, writing in the Armed Forces Journal[1] doesn’t think we should wait until the next war. His opening paragraph is a brutal indictment of senior staff.
“The U.S. Army’s generals, as a group, have lost the ability to effectively function at the high level required of those upon whom we place the responsibility for safeguarding our nation. Over the past 20 years, our senior leaders have amassed a record of failure in major organizational, acquisition and strategic efforts. These failures have been accompanied by the hallmarks of an organization unable and unwilling to fix itself: aggressive resistance to the reporting of problems, suppression of failed test results, public declarations of success where none was justified, and the absence of accountability.”
They wasted our tax dollars weapons buying systems that don’t work. A few examples; the RAH-66 Comanche armed reconnaissance helicopter, cancelled after $6.9 billion, the XM2001 Crusader mobile cannon, canceled after $7 billion, the Future Combat Systems canceled after $20 billion. And the list goes on and on.
And it is not just acquisition programs.
“This sad pattern extends into combat operations, as well. American military leaders have consistently made claims of combat success in Afghanistan. In the face of substantial evidence to the contrary, they repeatedly argued that the Taliban were being defeated and the Afghan National Security Forces were steadily improving.”
Mr. Davis makes several recommendations:
- Replace a substantial chunk of today’s generals, starting with the three- and four-star ranks.
- Fix the promotion system. To change the performance of the general officer corps, there must be a reform in the way officers are selected for promotion.
- Shrink the general officer corps. In 1945, about 2,000 general and flag officers led a total of about 12 million citizens in uniform. Today, we have about 900 generals and admirals and 1.4 million troops, and the ratio of leader-to-led has accelerated upward in the two decades since the end of the Cold War.
I hope someone takes these recommendations seriously.
[1] Daniel L. Davis, Purge the Generals, Armed Forces Journal, August 2013
* Sarcasm doesn’t translate well on the internet but suffice it to say that I don’t recommend the violent overthrow of the officer corp.