A good summary of where things stand on bottom-up change in the U.S. Army

ARTICLE: "Challenging the Generals," by Fred Kaplan, New York Times Magazine, 26 August 2007, found online with email push from reader Tom Wade.

I get asked a lot of questions about how long it will take the U.S. government in general and the U.S. military in particular to adapt itself to the changes that lie ahead in this Long War, and I always reply that it's a generational thing.

In politics, it's getting past the 60s-soaked Boomers.

In business, we arrived about 12 years ago.

In military affairs, it's fair to say that there's a lot of guys who get it on top (like my "monks of war" Mattis and Petraeus), but the reality is, they're stuck with a presidential administration still operating with a neocon mindset that defines war solely within the context of war and largely ignores the everything else until it's forced upon them. Absent these political limitations, I know full well we have the talent on top of the military to run this Long War well. I've interacted with many of them for years, some across almost two decades. They are high quality and they're serious lifetime learners, as Wass de Czege implies in this article. The Cold War dinosaur flags I ran into in the early 1990s simply no longer exist, although way too many of them still opine on TV.

The real change generation (as it always is in the military) stands ready and willing and able at the 04-05-06 levels, with the big thing being, do the 06s (colonels/navy captains) make it into the flag ranks, or are they all crapped out by the system for their inconvenient truths?

Most important line in the piece says much to the same effect:

“Guys like Yingling, Nagl and McMaster are the canaries in the coal mine of Army reform,” the retired two-star general I spoke with told me. “Will they get promoted to general? If they do, that’s a sign that real change is happening. If they don’t, that’s a sign that the traditional culture still rules.”

Now, of course, it's a bit more complicated than that. The right champion high up can push a lot of much needed new thinking into the flag ranks, so it's not just a matter of this popular handful getting through. What happens to the iconoclasts and thinkers up topside can be crucial as well. I'd like to see the right people shoved into the Joint Chiefs over the next few years, because without them, even if the Yinglings and Nagls and McMasters move up, the going will remain too tough for their innovative thinking to penetrate the system as far as it needs to go.

Right now we're at a potentially profound tipping point.

As the operational experience builds up, the training, the tactics, the doctrine all change. Soon that infiltrates the planning and the scenarios and they in turn start making things uncomfortable for the force structure efforts, because far too much in the pipeline is still built for another age. As those iffy programs lose connectivity to training, tactics, doctrine, planning, scenarios and the schoolhouses, their champions can no longer cite such logical bonds as validating their purchase.

And that's when things can really shift.

Why?

Once you become a flag, the most important thing you do is protect your service's cherished force structure plans from all comers. That's how you get the next star the vast majority of the time.

The radicals of the next generation won't be prone to this mindset. If they emerge, with some top cover from similar visionaries above, and hit the ranks just as the still, relatively united front of the Leviathan force structure mafia starts crumbling, then we're into a serious paradigm shift.

I believe that discomfort zone rapidly approaches, based more on my industry contacts than on my Pentagon ties (thus the basis of my optimism). The industry is moving off a future view of the world that says "what's good for the Leviathan is what keeps my company where it is or moving up." The "everything else" simply beckons far too strongly.

Once that industrial edifice begins to crumble, the capacity for the Nagls and Yiinglings and McMasters to foster system-wide change as flags really takes off.

But no, I don't base my thinking on any sacred, small collection of officers. I've known too many good ones over the years to fall into that trap.

But yeah, this group is special. The visionaries above them are just as special. And given the right correlation of forces, this ball will get moved very far, very fast.

Comments

[outback71]

A lot of us are also looking for such signs in a number of fields; academia and K-12 education in particular. The boomers are locked into some type of Great Society mindset that keeps them from adapting to 21 century realities.

[John G. Mooney]

I'm a company-grade Army officer with 7 years active duty service, and 4 years at West Point before that. I've worked for or dealt with dozens and dozens of field grade officers and I have to say that very few actually live up to the young, hungry agents of change you talk about so often. Most of them have had the faults of either narrow-mindedness, self-serving careerism, weak character, or just plain mediocre talent. They, I believe, are a product of the system. So many potential transformational leaders leave the force before they make the field grade ranks (for a variety of reasons), that the best field grades and flags aren't the best, they're just the best of what's left. I don't expect to see major changes in the Army culture in the next 10-15 years.

[Bill C.]

Questions:

(1) Would a continuation of the war in Vietnam have resulted in greater regional security and less suffering for the Vietnamese people?

(2) Would a continuation of the war in Vietnam have resulted in a quicker connection of Vietnam -- and the region -- to the global economy?

Same questions (proper tense) for Iraq.

Based on the answers, should the Generals advise for or against such wars?