The US Military has huge problems, starting with strategic military doctrine and extending through recruitment shortfalls, weapons development and procurement to production and logistics. The effort that will be needed to fix this will be enormous, possibly as great as WWII.

As pointed out in the post, Pete And The Pentagon, the new Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, has some pretty bold ideas that, if implemented, will severely shake up the Pentagon. I’m assuming that he will not only be approved by the Senate but quickly and solidly, since his opposition have quit the reasonable arguments about him not having run any large organisation and resorted to whinging about White Supremacism, a ploy already rendered so tired, worn out and useless against Trump that you’d think these idiots would quit, especially when none other than a former Biden WH Aide slams it:

This shit has to stop. Opposing DEI initiatives does not make you a white supremacist. Conversations and demonization like this are a big part of the reason we got our asses kicked. The answer to extremism is not more extremism.  Voices like this on the left are turning the Democratic Party into a joke…Let’s fight back with a strategy and tactics …. not pointless, defamatory, and juvenile invective.

Dude, if your party and its activists can’t stop doing this in the wake of such a devastating loss then it’s obviously going to take more such losses.

Back on the more pertinent aspect of Hegseth’s skills, Big Org. Expertise, especially in relation to the Pentagon, is this history:

I got together with Donald Rumsfeld in Washington, not long after he finished his second tour of duty as Secretary of Defense. He described the Pentagon as an almost insuperable obstacle to getting anything done. When he had a high priority project, the temptation was to bypass the bureaucracy entirely, and hire a team of independent contractors to get the job done. That isn’t a good practice, in principle, and the taxpayers wind up paying twice. But it was, in his view, the only way around the Pentagon blockade.

Meanwhile the Bland Corporation (H/T Stanley Kubrick) has all sorts of grand plans to propose to Mr Hegseth, but starts with much the same warnings he made, as quoted directly from their report by none other than Mitch McConnell in the US Senate recently:

The U.S. military lacks both the capabilities and the capacity required to be confident it can deter and prevail in combat… the U.S. defense industrial base (DIB) is unable to meet the equipment, technology, and munitions needs of the United States and its allies and partners….the U.S. public are largely unaware of the dangers the United States faces or the costs (financial and otherwise) required to adequately prepare.

The Bland Corporation’s answer to all these problems is apparently to put the USA on a permanent war footing with something called the “Multiple Theater Force Construct” because apparently neither of the previous “constructs” for the Cold War or the Two War Rogue State era of 1990’s-2010’s is adequate for today’s global threats facing our brave new world.

As you can guess, even a combined defense and intelligence budget of roughly $1.4 trillion a year would likely not be enough for such a plan. You can check that link for the gruesome details that are far beyond the official budget request of $842 billion made this year.

The article on Bland’s grand plan also has juicy stuff about the primary author, former Democratic Representative Jane Harman, and it’s yet another indicator of the problems Hegseth will have to deal with in the AYFKM area:

Readers may recall that in 2006 Harman was picked up on a wiretap promising an Israeli spy she would lobby federal prosecutors to go easy on two officials from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC. In return for that assistance, the Israeli agent offered to lobby then-Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi to name Harman as chair of the House Intelligence Committee.

In a normal country, Harman’s offer to undermine a federal case to benefit a foreign power, as a sitting member of Congress no less, would have landed her in prison. At the very least, she’d be treated as persona non grata among the great and good of Washington. But instead Harman, wife of a California billionaire who later became the owner of Newsweek, was appointed to the CIA’s External Advisory Board only a couple of years after her quid pro quo was caught on tape.

The article also points out that America hasn’t been doing well in actual wars with what they’ve got now and the money already spent, and that the Plan doesn’t apply much thought to concerns about what China and company might do in response to all this – and they’re not just talking about Ms Harman when they conclude:

In the end, the RAND report leads one to a conclusion that can’t be avoided: The U.S. establishment is itself a threat to U.S. national security.

As to why America hasn’t been winning wars lately, an article in Tablet goes where Harman did not, starting with a brutal truth about war:

 The greatest of political disputes, over fundamental questions of policy and morality, are not settled by negotiation, eventually leading to peaceful diplomatic compromise. Rather, they are resolved in bloody battle, in which one side imposes its view of what is right upon the other. 
…
Yet when America marks the 80th anniversary of VE-Day and VJ-Day next year, it will also mark eight decades since it has won a decisive victory in war. The reason is that since 1945, America has adopted patterns of thought and action that make victory impossible.

The two primary examples of this are:

  1. Avoiding civilian casualties (The latest formal document on this subject is the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan of Aug. 22, 2022, which claims that “mitigating … civilian harm … makes us the world’s most effective military force.”)
  2. The poorly defined and easily manipulated doctrine of proportionality (which holds in the version appearing in the U.S. Department of Defense Law of War Manual, that “force may be used … only to the extent that it is required to repel the armed attack and to restore the security of the party attacked.”)

With #1 you end up in Israel’s current situation with Hamas, where the enemy deliberately uses civilians as human shields for their fighters and weapons, relying on anti-Israel sentiment around the world (but especially in the West and specifically the USA) to enable their war crime.

With #2 that common understanding is bad enough in the public arena (you-drop-a-bomb-I-drop-a-bomb: nope, see Bombing your way to proportionality) but when it’s part of the military it leads to situations like that with the Houthis in Yemen where it’s the US Navy that’s on the back-foot, (Houthis vs America: 1-0) hostage to their own desires to “send a message”: just this morning is this, Behold the Red Sea Clown Show,

The Tablet article also adds a third reason, and argues that it wasn’t just the doings of the “neocons”:

[The USA’s] misunderstanding of democratization, which is not at all limited to the actions of President George W. Bush, or the ideas of so-called “neoconservatives.” Predictably, relying on democratization as a long-term solution to a foreign threat has proved a misguided and exceptionally expensive approach.
…
Seeking democracy, or even some substantively democratic form of government, is futile in places like Iraq and Gaza, because democratic governance requires a preexisting institutional and social basis. What should be done, and what America can do, is to rapidly destroy military threats to its national security and economy
…
America cannot afford to fight long wars against its enemies, both because of the cost, and because any long campaign inevitably teaches the enemy to adapt and adjust, and thereby become at least partially immune to attack. What the United States should do instead is carry out sudden crushing attacks, which can be repeated without warning.

When you’ve had thinking like this locked in place for twenty years it’s going to lead to lot of other bad things. Over at RedState, Ward Clark, a veteran of the Gulf War lays out three problems that have grown under these strategies in Why Pete Hegseth Is a Great Choice for Secretary of Defense:

  • The current Department of Defense is [] a gigantic Charlie Foxtrot. (see The US Secretary of Defense should be fired, as just one example)
  • The purpose of a military is to close with and destroy the enemy by fire, maneuver, and shock effect. Anything that forwards that mission is good. Anything that impedes it is bad.… The military is not a jobs program for the neurotic.
  • Despite our current involvement in a variety of conflict zones, we seem to have a surfeit of non-combat leaders in the Department of Defense. The military should not be run by HR types, social-issue experts, DEI consultants, or accountants. The military, starting from the top, should be run by warfighters.

As Clark puts it, Hegseth harbors no politically correct illusions, he has been in combat and dealt with the essential question every officer faces from his men: “Sir, what do we do now?”

Further on point regarding the “leadership” from the top to many layers down is this X comment.

His list of the problems is as follows, along with recommendations I suspect Hegseth would totally agree with:

  1. The promotion of the concept of “interagency.”
    – Cut it back except for strict intelligence functions.
  2. We sent [people to] Ivy League universities and made advanced degrees a key promotion criteria.
    – Drop that promotion criteria and make it “stellar service in combat and line units”
    – Wipe all DEI programs and any evidence of using such will be a “do not promote” criteria.
  3. The service academies and War Colleges tried to be like Ivy League universities
    – Cease all advanced degree-producing programs at civilian universities for line officers
    – Greatly reduce permanent military faculty at the service academies and War College.
    – Rotate accomplished line officers through these schools as instructors.
    – Refocus on warfighting and engineering. (Nothing that ends in “studies.”
    – Completely revamp War College curriculums to focus on strategy at national-theater levels.
    – Mirror all of this in NCO professional development programs.

There may be problems outside the Pentagon over which Hegseth has little to no control, like the USA already being $36 trillion in debt, with a recent spike of $473 billion in just the first three weeks of October alone.

Given that, as Cdr Salamander put it recently, A Larger Navy Alone is Not in the Cards, as he looked at his predictions of financial issues from 2010 and compares that to CNO (Chief of Naval Operations) Lisa Franchetti’s Navigation Plan for 2024:

Without substantial growth in Navy resourcing now, we will eventually face deep strategic constraints on our ability to simultaneously address day-to-day crises while also modernizing the fleet to enhance readiness for war both today and in the future.

She sees no path to 350 ship navy or even anything north of 300.!

And that’s just the Navy! Across all five branches the US Military has huge problems, starting with strategic military doctrine and extending through recruitment shortfalls, weapons development and procurement to production and logistics. The effort that will be needed to fix this will be enormous, possibly as great as WWII.

Remember also that you can’t go to war with your factory:

Good luck Mr Hegseth.

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See Also:
Will America lose its next war?
“The U.S. military is in a state of managed decline”
More Expert Wrongness, Military version: Missile Defence and the F-35

Production & Logistics
You Can’t go to War With Your Factory
The Aussie AUKUS Subs Will Be Late!
Hey Siri, how did the US win World War 2?
A new military world? (the B-21)
The Death Whine Of Weapon Systems That Are Big, Expensive and Few

Recruitment
Remain Calm. All is Well
Pride goeth before the fall!