Speaker 1: Welcome to mid Rats with sal from Commander Salamander, an
Speaker 1: Eagle one from Eagle Speak at Seer Shore. You're home
Speaker 1: for a discussion of national security issues and all things maritime,
Speaker 1: and welcome board everybody to another edition of mid Rats.
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Speaker 1: it live for a time that's more convenient to what
Speaker 1: you want to do. And today our discussion we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about change. Change is always good and reform
Speaker 1: is always good. And at the beginning of every administration
Speaker 1: there is a window and it can be short or
Speaker 1: it can be long, but it's usually to the short
Speaker 1: side where you can set the tone and start to
Speaker 1: reform things in year one and then spend the next
Speaker 1: few years trying to operationalize it. It Congress on board,
Speaker 1: and we're at that point here a couple of months
Speaker 1: into the Trump administration, and when we look at the Pentagon,
Speaker 1: there's lots of options, lots of people with ideas. Is
Speaker 1: on some things that the new administration should look at
Speaker 1: on reforming in today's guest is the author of a
Speaker 1: recent article and you can find a link to it
Speaker 1: on the show page titled real military Reform? Will Pete
Speaker 1: Hegseth be able to reverse our military decline? And our
Speaker 1: guest is Gary Anderson, Colonel the United States Marine Corps retired.
Speaker 1: He was the chief of Staff at the Marine Corps
Speaker 1: War Fighting Lab and he also served as a special
Speaker 1: advisor to the Deputy Secretary of Defense and adjunct professor
Speaker 1: at George Washington University. Gary, Welcome to Interraps.
Speaker 2: Good to be here, thank you, great.
Speaker 1: To have you on board, Gary, and to get things
Speaker 1: rolling here. The opening sentence to your article had me
Speaker 1: pondering a bit. It's America's military has been a dress
Speaker 1: for some time. And I had realized that if you
Speaker 1: measured the length of time that the US fought in
Speaker 1: World War Two, from Pearl Harbor to VJ Day, that
Speaker 1: was oney three and forty seven days. And I've always
Speaker 1: thought the link that we had fought World War two
Speaker 1: is useful in a couple of ways, sometimes humors to
Speaker 1: measure how we're being able to do things, whether you're
Speaker 1: talking about programs or personnel changes or things like that.
Speaker 1: So one thousand, three hundred and forty seven days for
Speaker 1: the US to fight World War two, And when you
Speaker 1: look at the most recent significant inflection point in national security,
Speaker 1: that was the fall of Kabul, which you can measure
Speaker 1: as the thirtieth of August of twenty twenty one, that
Speaker 1: was one thousand, three hundred and thirty six days ago,
Speaker 1: ninety nine point one three percent of the time it
Speaker 1: took for US to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
Speaker 1: And I know you're probably when you're saying some time
Speaker 1: it's a little longer than that, But time flies, and
Speaker 1: there's been a lot of problem appreciation, uh, consuming that time.
Speaker 1: So when you when you talk about that sometime, what
Speaker 1: timeframe are you looking at and what direction do you
Speaker 1: see that drift that concerns you the most.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's it's a good question. But let me go
Speaker 2: back to statement you made at the beginning of the
Speaker 2: broadcast that military reform, that reform is always good. I'd
Speaker 2: kind of take exception to that because it takes imaginal
Speaker 2: line and the concept that the French developed was radical
Speaker 2: military reform, and that didn't work out very well for
Speaker 2: him there. I can you know, cite other examples of
Speaker 2: failed reforms, and that goes back to the original, you know,
Speaker 2: to the question of since the fall of Kabul, you
Speaker 2: would think that we would have taken a step back
Speaker 2: and said we're doing something wrong here, something something went
Speaker 2: badly wrong about how we were dealing with Afghanistan and
Speaker 2: perhaps the world in general. I personally think that a
Speaker 2: lot of it goes back over thirty years to the
Speaker 2: Goldwater Nichols quote military reforms unquote, that we're supposed to
Speaker 2: make us a lot better. I think we have been suffering.
Speaker 2: It took a while for us to really feel the
Speaker 2: unintended consequences of the Goldwater Nichols Reform. But I think
Speaker 2: a lot of that has to do with what the
Speaker 2: unintended consequences of that particular that particular piece of legislation,
Speaker 2: and along with that the Skelton Military Education reforms that
Speaker 2: we kind of went hand in hand with it. So
Speaker 2: this thing, in my view that the rot goes back
Speaker 2: a long way. We're just starting to see the real
Speaker 2: results of it.
Speaker 3: Well, let's I have a question that first, what is
Speaker 3: the Marine Corps war Fighting Lab and what does it do?
Speaker 2: And Yeah, now you know, I've been far away from
Speaker 2: the Marine Corps war Fighting Lab for a number of
Speaker 2: years now. I retired back in twenty two thousand and
Speaker 2: then I spent a little time working for the Lab
Speaker 2: as the director of the Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities,
Speaker 2: And so I haven't been associated with with the Lab
Speaker 2: for quite some time. But it was originally designed to
Speaker 2: we have began back in the mid nineties a little
Speaker 2: thing we call the Experimental Unit that we grew out
Speaker 2: of our war Marine Corps Wargaming Center, which I was
Speaker 2: the director of, and was really designed to take a
Speaker 2: look at the future and emerging opportunity, emerging concepts and
Speaker 2: so forth, and see if we could integrate those into
Speaker 2: the Marine Corps. It started out very small, with about
Speaker 2: fifteen people, but when General Charles Krulak took over his
Speaker 2: comment doant on the Marine Corps, he expanded the concept
Speaker 2: into a bunch larger, much more reasonably funded organization. Robustly
Speaker 2: Fundedzation I should say, grew to several hundred people, and
Speaker 2: it was designed to do exactly that, to try to
Speaker 2: try to look into the future and see if we
Speaker 2: could take some of these emerging technologies, emerging concepts and
Speaker 2: integrate them into the Marine Corps. Marine Corps operating approach.
Speaker 2: One of our first, very first successes was General Tony Zen.
Speaker 2: He took a group of unit of mostly Marines to
Speaker 2: evacuate the UN mission in Somalia when thing started to
Speaker 2: go really bad in nineteen ninety five, and having noticed
Speaker 2: that we were dealing with if you've ever seen that
Speaker 2: movie Blackhawk Down, were civilians and are masked are masked
Speaker 2: by masking enemy snipers and things like that to try
Speaker 2: to keep the to try to keep civilians away from
Speaker 2: our forces with non lethal force. We had some emerging
Speaker 2: technologies that we looked at and he was able to
Speaker 2: use them and in a number of ways, a number
Speaker 2: of innovative ways to help the operation go. And uh,
Speaker 2: those are the kinds, those are the kinds of things
Speaker 2: that we were looking at, things that maybe we could
Speaker 2: pull off the shelf very quickly in an emergency, but
Speaker 2: also to look long range down the pike and see
Speaker 2: if we could do some some good things with the
Speaker 2: Marine Corps from a standpoint just not just a technology,
Speaker 2: but some emerging concepts as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, as in your in your article that we've been
Speaker 3: talking about here a little bit you you coul do
Speaker 3: do it look downrange. You see a lot of things
Speaker 3: that have changed in the in the Marine Corps and
Speaker 3: the Navy that you've kind of taken to task. Talk
Speaker 3: a little bit about about your what you see as
Speaker 3: things that need to be reformed or re reformed or
Speaker 3: re regenerated from the way things used to be or
Speaker 3: where where the future should be should be driving it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there were I think, uh, if I remember properly,
Speaker 2: there were a number of of things that I suggested.
Speaker 2: I I think personally that the Marine Corps went off
Speaker 2: in the wrong direction in twenty eighteen with a concept
Speaker 2: that they call force design, and I think that was
Speaker 2: a very dangerous thing, and I think it's hurt the core.
Speaker 2: I think the second thing I was talking about, if
Speaker 2: I remember properly, was the need to get the Navy
Speaker 2: squared away as far as both of its shipbuilding and
Speaker 2: its and its maintenance procedures and so forth. I think
Speaker 2: we've gotten really off course with that, and I think
Speaker 2: it's hurting us from a standpoint of readiness, both of
Speaker 2: the Navy and the Marine Corps. And I am a
Speaker 2: little I am concerned with the overall state of the
Speaker 2: military education and the situation with the ability to promote
Speaker 2: war fighting competent officers up to general officer flag officer rank.
Speaker 2: And I think I go back to the go Water
Speaker 2: Nichols thing. I think that that has been, you know,
Speaker 2: a major thing that got us soft. Course. Those are
Speaker 2: the kinds of things I was talking about the article.
Speaker 1: It's funny the I can almost see my co host
Speaker 1: creating right now is the one of the trigger phrases
Speaker 1: for me, at least for a long time, has been
Speaker 1: Goldwater Nickels. And we're coming up on the fifth anniversary
Speaker 1: of Goldwater Nickels, and we've talked about it on a
Speaker 1: regular basis for over a decade here about the need
Speaker 1: to reform if nothing else. When you look at the
Speaker 1: time from the was it forty seven or forty nine
Speaker 1: they did the big Pentagon Reform Act and then Goldwater
Speaker 1: Nichols came in. If you look at the timeframe, it's time.
Speaker 1: But when you talk to a lot of the leaders
Speaker 1: in Congress that our knowledgeable system will, they'll nod their head.
Speaker 1: But when you look to your left and right, it's
Speaker 1: hard to find a modern Goldwater are Nichols. It's willing
Speaker 1: to invest the time to make that change, but it's
Speaker 1: critical because it was developed during the Cold War forty
Speaker 1: years ago. Somebody was asking for you just to ride
Speaker 1: on the back of a three x five card. You know,
Speaker 1: some of the top areas you think should be looked
Speaker 1: at first to replacing Goldwater Nickels. What are those things
Speaker 1: that you really think stand out that's getting in our
Speaker 1: way either intellectually or operationally. Having a more optimized total
Speaker 1: force than what we have right now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think there would be three bullets. Ticket punching
Speaker 2: and cruism. The bloat of staffs caused by this ticket
Speaker 2: punching cruism thing that the Goldwater Nichols did, And I
Speaker 2: think the other thing is a misunderstanding of what was
Speaker 2: attempted and what actually occurred. I think those are the
Speaker 2: three things that stick out in my mind, and I
Speaker 2: think the first and most important is it encouraged crurism
Speaker 2: and ticket punching. Now, I mean, you know, expand on that.
Speaker 2: One of the things that go Water Nichols did to
Speaker 2: try to improve the quality of joint staffs because back
Speaker 2: then joint staffs were looked at, probably realistically as a
Speaker 2: dumping ground for mid grade to senior officers who didn't
Speaker 2: have a potential future in their various services. That may
Speaker 2: or may not have been true, but the quality of
Speaker 2: the of the joint staffs was in question. So they
Speaker 2: made a decision to go ahead and make sure that
Speaker 2: every mid grade officer who aspired general officer or flag
Speaker 2: officer rank spent at least three years if he was
Speaker 2: selected to go to a to go to a joint staff,
Speaker 2: which most of them were actually quite small at the time,
Speaker 2: but to accommodate that huge influx of you know, of
Speaker 2: ambitious young officers with career promise, they actually mandated that
Speaker 2: they spend so much time in at least three years
Speaker 2: on a joint staff. The problem with that was the
Speaker 2: size of the staffs at the time was reasonably limited,
Speaker 2: so they had to make the staffs bigger to accommodate
Speaker 2: all this access influx, and as a consequence, the staff
Speaker 2: became you know, the word I use is bloated. I
Speaker 2: think that's not unfair. I quite frankly don't see how
Speaker 2: you know a job for a major or lieutenant commander
Speaker 2: as the graves registration officer at Central Command is going
Speaker 2: to produce another Halsy or another limits, And I think
Speaker 2: that's an accurate way of thinking about it. I've talked
Speaker 2: to a lot of people who've come out through that system,
Speaker 2: and many of them thought at that time their career
Speaker 2: was wasted when they could be honing their war fighting
Speaker 2: skills as fighter pilots, as battalion commanders, as operations officers,
Speaker 2: and so forth. As a consequence, that forces these people
Speaker 2: to develop what I would call a ticket punching mentality.
Speaker 2: You know, I have to go to a Command of
Speaker 2: Staff college, and I have to do my joint staff tour.
Speaker 2: Then I have to do a command tour, and I
Speaker 2: have to go to the War College, and I personally
Speaker 2: think that this is causing a situation where we become
Speaker 2: jacks of all trade and masters are none. If that
Speaker 2: makes any sense.
Speaker 3: It makes a lot of sense. One of the emphasis
Speaker 3: that the new Secretary of Defense is set out is
Speaker 3: he wants to get back to war fighting as the
Speaker 3: primary consideration for many things in the services. And I
Speaker 3: was really fascinated to see that Admiral McRaven, the four star,
Speaker 3: advised him to assemble a council of colonels, apparently because
Speaker 3: the unpromotable ones, because they're the only ones who would
Speaker 3: tell the truth to him. Is there indeed, to have
Speaker 3: a council of colonels at the elbow of the Secretary
Speaker 3: of Defense to stop him from him to deal with
Speaker 3: all these political people who were ticket punching and actually
Speaker 3: tell him what needs to be helped, tell them to
Speaker 3: know what needs to be done to get back to warfighting. Well,
Speaker 3: the problem with that is where are you going to
Speaker 3: get these colonels? In my view, Back in the day,
Speaker 3: when I was, you know, raising through the ranks, I
Speaker 3: was promoted to colonel and in nineteen seventy or nineteen
Speaker 3: ninety three, at that time, you would spend a certain
Speaker 3: amount of time in command at the battalion or the
Speaker 3: regimental level, and you would be bumped up once you
Speaker 3: finish that successfully to become a you know, to become
Speaker 3: maybe the chief of staff of a unit, the operations officer,
Speaker 3: and you would be seen as a guy with the
Speaker 3: type of knowledge and that they could give the commander
Speaker 3: a good, honest shot. And then in many cases, if
Speaker 3: those guys got passed over for promotion or so forth
Speaker 3: and didn't just want to retire, they would, you know,
Speaker 3: they would become the cigar chomping old colonels who you know,
Speaker 3: who basically were your chiefs of staff, your operations officers,
Speaker 3: and they were the guys that could look the general
Speaker 3: in the eye, know and they weren't going to be
Speaker 3: promoted and say, generally, you're all screwed up. But this,
Speaker 3: this is a this is a terrible idea. That's that's
Speaker 3: going away because of this ticket punching thing. Regimental commander
Speaker 3: now has to go to the ask to go do
Speaker 3: as joint staff tour or do something else other than
Speaker 3: become a sort of a graver beard for the commanders
Speaker 3: and for the senior civilians. And I'm afraid that's kind
Speaker 3: of the that's a skill that Goldwater Nichols has got,
Speaker 3: as we do us out of I think too many,
Speaker 3: too many people if they get passed over for you know,
Speaker 3: for either colonel or for brigadier general rank, just say okay, fine,
Speaker 3: I'll you know, go out and make some money in
Speaker 3: the contracting world and get out. And I think I
Speaker 3: think we've lost that corporate memory of you know, war
Speaker 3: fighting skills, and not just the ground forces, but in
Speaker 3: the Navy and probably the Air Force as well.
Speaker 1: Sometimes going back to the concept of time is where
Speaker 1: over twenty three years away from the events of nine
Speaker 1: on them. So the guys that are strapping on six
Speaker 1: right now, they've known nothing but the post nine to
Speaker 1: eleven world and that institutional knowledge. All they know is
Speaker 1: what they know and what they've experienced. And I think
Speaker 1: you described a bit those secondary effects from Goldwater Nickels
Speaker 1: and the incentives and disincentives that came along with it.
Speaker 1: Part of it is and you're exactly right. I left
Speaker 1: active duty in nine and to Bob and weave through
Speaker 1: what I call the Millington dictat and the people in
Speaker 1: active duty I'll still talk about, they'll still talk with
Speaker 1: They talk about this as well, is you have all
Speaker 1: these requirements that don't make any sense to them, whether
Speaker 1: it's these huge staffs where you have very talented people
Speaker 1: doing busy work, but you also had with these joint
Speaker 1: requirements for people, many of them before they even are
Speaker 1: looking at commander command. Is this everybody has to have
Speaker 1: as a master's degree has over the course of a
Speaker 1: few decades, it's warped what our war college is on.
Speaker 1: You talked a little bit about that part of the
Speaker 1: military education, what our war colleges have become. And in
Speaker 1: that fine out amount of time that you have these
Speaker 1: people's backsides and seats that the emphasis and the drive
Speaker 1: for the time they're there may not be the most
Speaker 1: optimized thing for that what the military needs them to do.
Speaker 1: But it goes back to these incentives and disincentives and
Speaker 1: in theory the military controls, but it's reached the point
Speaker 1: that they are in many ways controlling them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I absolutely agree, because one of those ticket punching
Speaker 2: steps is of course they go to Command and Staff College.
Speaker 2: Now to go to Command and staff college due to
Speaker 2: the goal of the Skelton military very reform things. For
Speaker 2: some reason, they got it into their heads that all
Speaker 2: masters degree would somehow make you militarily smarter and so forth.
Speaker 2: Quite as a matter of fact, I think that's had
Speaker 2: the opposite effect to make room for all the academic
Speaker 2: and I won't use the word, but the academic bs
Speaker 2: that goes into an academic master's degree. A lot of
Speaker 2: things like you know, amphibious planning for the Marine Corps,
Speaker 2: all sorts of other those little skills like being able
Speaker 2: to put together a coherent operation order, et cetera, et cetera,
Speaker 2: have to get scoped down or maybe even eliminated to
Speaker 2: give you the time to discuss such hurricane topics as
Speaker 2: the role of civil military relations and various various a
Speaker 2: lot of I took a look a couple of years
Speaker 2: ago at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College, a
Speaker 2: curriculum ant of time, and I was appalled to see
Speaker 2: the short amount of time given the things like, uh,
Speaker 2: you know, amphibious operations, which used to be the Marine
Speaker 2: Corps bread and butter, and even some of the you know,
Speaker 2: the the military histories. I've been talking about, hard military histories,
Speaker 2: battle studies, and looking at you know, staff rights and
Speaker 2: things like that, we're quite frankly cut out of the
Speaker 2: curriculum to do a lot of the to get up.
Speaker 2: Quite frankly, what I feel is a second rate master's
Speaker 2: degree from a third rate institution that should have been
Speaker 2: a war college or should have been a commanded staff college.
Speaker 3: Well, among the other things that we've seen coming down
Speaker 3: the path is the is the sudden increase and interest
Speaker 3: in revitalizing the American shipping shipbuilding industry, and even some
Speaker 3: reaches outreaches to some of our allies like the South
Speaker 3: Koreans and the Japanese to help us maybe help us
Speaker 3: build and develop our own shipyards as well as build
Speaker 3: some ships perhaps in their in their yards. That is
Speaker 3: that a positive movement? You're in your way of thinking.
Speaker 2: Well, I think revitalizing the entire military defense complex is
Speaker 2: really critical, and trying to keep up with the Chinese
Speaker 2: who were outbuilding us at least five to one, and
Speaker 2: you know, capital ships and so forth. You know about
Speaker 2: shortly before, I well, shortly before, at the end of
Speaker 2: the Cold War, I was a fellow at the Naval
Speaker 2: War College for their Center for Naval Warfare Studies, and
Speaker 2: Newt Gingrich, who was at that time the Speaker of
Speaker 2: the House came up and gave us a talk, and
Speaker 2: he warned about the danger of what he called the
Speaker 2: peace dividend. We were at the time watching the Soviet
Speaker 2: Union collapse, Berlin Wall had come down, and he basically
Speaker 2: told us that we would be making a very very
Speaker 2: serious mistake if we didn't at least keep the defense
Speaker 2: industrial base warm. And I think they at this point
Speaker 2: in time, we let that happen, and thirty year, you know,
Speaker 2: thirty almost forty years later, we see the chickens coming
Speaker 2: home to roost.
Speaker 1: It's amazing that people appreciated that problem and had seen
Speaker 1: it for so long, to a point that it's we've
Speaker 1: run out of time in miny regards to address that.
Speaker 1: And one thing you brought up that I think is
Speaker 1: one of the worst examples of it is, you know,
Speaker 1: you emphasize our submarine levels and how important our submarines are,
Speaker 1: and anybody who looks at the fight in the Pacific
Speaker 1: knows how critical our SSNs are. We've entered into August
Speaker 1: with Australia to eventually get them I think the latest
Speaker 1: number US saw was four at some period of time,
Speaker 1: but to get them to have a nuclear submarine capability,
Speaker 1: and yet We also have situations where our existing submarine
Speaker 1: fleet just we have boats sitting there for literally years
Speaker 1: just waiting for regular maintenance. What was the underlying cause?
Speaker 1: Do you think that we waited so long until it's
Speaker 1: really reached the crisis point that we would talk about it,
Speaker 1: But there wasn't an effort for people to invest their
Speaker 1: personal and professional capital to say stop, this has got
Speaker 1: to be fixed, and we got to fix it now.
Speaker 1: So we now find ourselves halfway through the physical year
Speaker 1: twenty five and you're not seeing the needle move in
Speaker 1: the direction you think it would be when you look
Speaker 1: at some of the briefs that we're getting on the
Speaker 1: threats that we have coming inside of a few palm cycles.
Speaker 2: I think part of the problem is we read our
Speaker 2: own press releases. So we the military, we the United States,
Speaker 2: have advertised ever since essentially Desert Storm, that are technological
Speaker 2: overmatch of potential enemies as such that we really didn't
Speaker 2: need to build a lot of ships, build a lot
Speaker 2: of you know, more tanks. We you know, we basically
Speaker 2: convinced ourselves that we were invincible. And as we were
Speaker 2: doing that, you know, the potential opposition has been taking notes,
Speaker 2: taking a look at the way we fight, ta look
Speaker 2: at the way we do things come back, and essentially,
Speaker 2: you know, they slowly, but you know, and not particularly overtly.
Speaker 2: We're quietly figuring out what we were doing, trying to
Speaker 2: match our technologies, and maybe they couldn't afford to do
Speaker 2: it as sophisticated as we do, but they looked at
Speaker 2: other ways to get bad things and so forth. And
Speaker 2: I think we were basically living on our laurels. And
Speaker 2: I think we've gotten to a point where now we
Speaker 2: suddenly started to realize that the Chinese have got a
Speaker 2: pretty formidable you know, military arsenal all the way around
Speaker 2: to include space, and that we don't have the capability
Speaker 2: to keep up with them here in the near term.
Speaker 2: So quite frankly, we've gotten to a point where our
Speaker 2: navy is so small, you know, our number of troops
Speaker 2: that we could put in the field or decrease and
Speaker 2: so forth. I think we need to really consider the
Speaker 2: fact that we we're going to have to do some
Speaker 2: short term catching up. But that may mean some innovation.
Speaker 2: It may mean actually, you know, in the case of
Speaker 2: amphibious ships, where we're really in trouble right now, it
Speaker 2: might mean taking some of those ships that we put
Speaker 2: in the off balls and not turned into razor blades
Speaker 2: or turned into coral reefs, and investing a little bit
Speaker 2: and putting the black box is necessary to bring them
Speaker 2: up to speed. In the case of the Navy, old
Speaker 2: technology has not changed that much in the last probably
Speaker 2: fifty years. What has you know has changed is electronic warfare,
Speaker 2: harming our ships with more sophisticated anti ship missiles or
Speaker 2: sophisticated air defenses. And I don't think it's that hard,
Speaker 2: although the shipbuilding industry, the entrenched interests will tell you
Speaker 2: it's too expensive. I think it's a heck of a
Speaker 2: lot easier to strap some high tech black boxes ont
Speaker 2: a fairly old ship which still has good propulsion and
Speaker 2: so forth, and and get it back out there to
Speaker 2: the fleet and try to get us back up to
Speaker 2: the numbers we probably need to fight a real war.
Speaker 3: Well, the logistics problems that we have, you didn't really
Speaker 3: address it in your In your Peace very much, you know,
Speaker 3: other than low on ammunition and other things, but just
Speaker 3: supporting a force the way we did in World War Two,
Speaker 3: even a smaller force across the Pacific requires a level
Speaker 3: of shipping that I don't think we have right now,
Speaker 3: and I'm not sure where we're going to find the
Speaker 3: assets even in the Mothball fleet to uh to do
Speaker 3: to have the numbers we need. Do you do you
Speaker 3: see a similar thing?
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, absolutely. Our maritime industry is in many ways
Speaker 2: in the same boat as our as our combatant navy
Speaker 2: the military. The ability to protect convoys and uh, you know,
Speaker 2: and get things from point A to point B in
Speaker 2: a contested environment is way down, and quite frankly, I
Speaker 2: think you may have had my colleague T. X Hands,
Speaker 2: another required retired colonel, who recently wrote an article about
Speaker 2: arsenal ships taking you know, older uh, you know, older
Speaker 2: commercial halls and putting a you know, putting aboard missiles
Speaker 2: and drone systems in that and then semi automating them
Speaker 2: so you don't have to use so many seamen and
Speaker 2: use them to augment not only the ability to project
Speaker 2: power and so forth, but even to do things like
Speaker 2: escorting the convoys and things like that. I think that's
Speaker 2: a cost effective, potential solution to some of the problems
Speaker 2: we have with building new ships. It's going to take
Speaker 2: a long time to rebuild that industrial base, so we're
Speaker 2: going to in my view, we're going to have to
Speaker 2: be innovative about in the interim about how we build
Speaker 2: up both our naval power and our our ability to
Speaker 2: even produced drones. Right now, I think the biggest problem
Speaker 2: we have and I hate the word drone. I think
Speaker 2: it's a terrible miss, you know, misapplication of the robotic
Speaker 2: aerial technology. But the way we over engineer our drones
Speaker 2: is they make, they make, they almost price themselves out
Speaker 2: of the business. And in many ways Stalin was right
Speaker 2: when he says that quality has a quantity of his own.
Speaker 2: If you've got one super drone that can, you know,
Speaker 2: can shoot down twenty enemy drones, and the enemy can
Speaker 2: still reproduce you with cheaper, inexpensive thirty drones, you're still
Speaker 2: going to get overmatched. In my mind, part of that
Speaker 2: is just this concept that we have to absolutely have
Speaker 2: the you know, the line of everything, even if we
Speaker 2: price ourselves out of business doing it.
Speaker 1: I align with you fully on that. It's one of
Speaker 1: the frustrating things that I've seen, especially again they all
Speaker 1: want to call it everything what they are the loyal wingman,
Speaker 1: when you actually look at what they're proposing. They're almost
Speaker 1: as expensive as a manned aircraft over engineered, and one
Speaker 1: of the lessons from the Russio Ukrainian conflict is the
Speaker 1: most exquisite drones aren't really what's winning the fight for you.
Speaker 1: It's what you can produce in volume that you're expected
Speaker 1: a fair bit of attrition, and you have to be
Speaker 1: able to have it operate in a highly contested electronic
Speaker 1: warfare environment to get there. And secondhand discussion, with some
Speaker 1: of the work that we've been doing recently with drones,
Speaker 1: some individual really is starting to see something that is
Speaker 1: not new. We've seen this before. It's your classic. You
Speaker 1: have to have no happy talk. You have to have
Speaker 1: a really hard bit program manager that's willing to accept
Speaker 1: bad news and tell other people about it. But with
Speaker 1: a lot of the unmanned systems that we're bringing on
Speaker 1: right now, as they're operating with them, there's a big delta.
Speaker 1: Forget the pricing point of view, but there's a big
Speaker 1: delt between what's on the industry power point and now
Speaker 1: that they're doing a fair bit of operational valuations with them,
Speaker 1: what they're actually able to do with them, and that
Speaker 1: delta between what the senior leadership is being promised vice
Speaker 1: what the operator are actually working at the initial operating
Speaker 1: email A huge problem are being able to operationalize that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'll give you an example. And I'm going back
Speaker 2: a number of years now, when I was still chief
Speaker 2: of staff at the War Fighting lad My commanding general
Speaker 2: couldn't go to a meeting with the Secretary of the
Speaker 2: Navy one day, and it was close to the end
Speaker 2: of the fiscal year. The Secretary of the Navy was
Speaker 2: mister Danzig at the time. Said Hey, I've got a
Speaker 2: I've got a million dollars burning a hole in my pocket,
Speaker 2: and I gotta I've got to commit it before the
Speaker 2: end of the fiscal year. What do you think you
Speaker 2: could do with it? I said, Well, we had a
Speaker 2: little at that time, a little uh On manned aerial
Speaker 2: vehicle you'd call it a drone that could be operated
Speaker 2: by an individual to go out, you know, far enough
Speaker 2: out to check out a bush sites and things to
Speaker 2: let a rifle company commander have much more situational awareness.
Speaker 2: The dierent thing was only costing. It had just had
Speaker 2: a cheap little camera in it and control device, and
Speaker 2: it costs less than thirteen thousand dollars. And I said,
Speaker 2: you know, if you give the Marine Corps that money,
Speaker 2: and we can give you one of these little guys
Speaker 2: for each rifle company in the Marine Corps within the
Speaker 2: next year year and a half. So he made a
Speaker 2: decision to allocate that money. Well, we changed generals and
Speaker 2: we got a new general and marine aviator who I
Speaker 2: won't mention his name, but he allowed some of his
Speaker 2: retired buddies to come in to show him an autonomous
Speaker 2: UAV that didn't need to be piloted all the time,
Speaker 2: that was would have two engines and all that sort
Speaker 2: of thing, and uh, you know was it had all
Speaker 2: the bells and whistles that probably a company commander didn't need.
Speaker 2: He decided to use that money for that. Well, I
Speaker 2: think by the time, I think by the time I
Speaker 2: shortly after I retired, instead of having one for every
Speaker 2: price kept going up, instead of having one for every
Speaker 2: rifle company in the Marine Corps, we barely had one
Speaker 2: to give one to each regiment. That's the kind of
Speaker 2: that's the kind of ridiculous, uh fascination with better being
Speaker 2: the enemy of good enough that you run into I
Speaker 2: think somebody so much and he's and he's yeah.
Speaker 3: I think one of the other things about about unmanned aircraft,
Speaker 3: unmanned vessels, whether they're service or sub service. Is I mean,
Speaker 3: you're right that the cost is should be lower because
Speaker 3: just the Ukrainians managed to sink some quite a few
Speaker 3: Russian ships or really damage one off your Russian ships
Speaker 3: with some of their stuff. But it also has an
Speaker 3: impact on things that we normally expect to be key
Speaker 3: elements of war on land where the it's not the
Speaker 3: although it is javelins and other weapons systems taking out
Speaker 3: a lot of Russian tanks, they're also using these these
Speaker 3: small drones and expensive drones to take out the logistics train.
Speaker 3: And you know, you can, you can, you can drive
Speaker 3: a tank for a while, but it's going to run
Speaker 3: out of gas and it's going to run out of AMMO.
Speaker 3: And so which is the better way to deal with
Speaker 3: expensive equipment to attack the enemy's support base or these
Speaker 3: cheap drones, And these drones seem to be doing a
Speaker 3: pretty effective job and something we ought to be concerned about.
Speaker 3: And you know, I know you're interested in the amphibious
Speaker 3: warfare ships, but I have the same concerns about those.
Speaker 3: Those ships were not designed they were designed to be
Speaker 3: protected by a large number of ASAAW ships and we
Speaker 3: don't have those, and that they most of those amphibs
Speaker 3: are not exactly designed for self defense against some of
Speaker 3: these smaller weaponses. They could be seriously damaged by by
Speaker 3: these inexpensive drone things, all those range limitation on most
Speaker 3: of these.
Speaker 2: Small US Well, I think part of the problem is
Speaker 2: since nine to eleven, the wars we've fought are uh,
Speaker 2: you know, against enemies that are not capable of seriously
Speaker 2: interdicting our logistics. I mean, you know, gorillas are going
Speaker 2: to uh ambush supply columns and things like that. But
Speaker 2: we've essentially been operating in a permissive environment logistically, and
Speaker 2: we've taken for granted the fact that they're you know,
Speaker 2: that is not given anymore. And certainly both the Russians
Speaker 2: and the Ukrainians have seen that happen, and they've really
Speaker 2: had a hard time supplying their front line troops and
Speaker 2: so forth due to the due to the unmanned aerial
Speaker 2: environment and a number of other things that happened. They
Speaker 2: have a really difficult time not just only resupplying their troops,
Speaker 2: evacuating their wounded, evacuating their damaged equipment to be repaired,
Speaker 2: and so forth, and we just we have not dealt
Speaker 2: with that for so long that we need to really
Speaker 2: be thinking about it now. I think to some extent,
Speaker 2: you know, robotics can can help there. We experimented quite
Speaker 2: a bit with using on manned vehicle convoys and so
Speaker 2: forth to resupply resupply isolated units and air dropping things
Speaker 2: from onmanned aircraft and so forth. But because we have
Speaker 2: operated for essentially two decades in a combat environment where
Speaker 2: logistics was assumed, but we've probably forgotten about how important
Speaker 2: it is. There's always that old saying that professionals, you know,
Speaker 2: amateur's talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, and there's a lot
Speaker 2: to be said about it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, kind of greatness, like the old staff we need joke. Okay,
Speaker 1: now the J four is going to tell the J
Speaker 1: three why he can't do what he wants to do.
Speaker 1: It's it's true. I think the loggie maybe should speak
Speaker 1: a little earlier than he usually does. We've we've talked
Speaker 1: a little bit about a lot of it about problems,
Speaker 1: but there's also some positive news that you one of
Speaker 1: the items that you raised in your article, I want
Speaker 1: to have you flesh out a little bit as you
Speaker 1: you mentioned, and we've all seen it. Recently they announced
Speaker 1: the for all the services, the recruiting numbers are off
Speaker 1: the charts. But you stated at the end of the
Speaker 1: first paragraph in your article, quote, I have not seen
Speaker 1: such an uptake in morale among our uniform services since
Speaker 1: Casper Weinberger became Ronald Reagan's Secretary of Defense. Unquote. What
Speaker 1: are some of the things you think are driving that
Speaker 1: increase in morale that we're seeing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it was, you know, and having lived
Speaker 2: through that period, I was at Vanderbilt University as an
Speaker 2: ROTC Naval ROTC instructor at that time, and you could
Speaker 2: see the turnaround from the attitude of the Carter administration
Speaker 2: towards the military to you know, to you know, the
Speaker 2: kind of support we were getting. I saw an uptick
Speaker 2: within the year between seventy nine and eighty one of
Speaker 2: you know, just recruiting on campus for the ROTC program
Speaker 2: and so forth. Most people don't remember this, but back
Speaker 2: in those days, the Carter administration was permitting serving officers
Speaker 2: working at the Pentagon from going to work in their
Speaker 2: uniforms except for one day a week. What kind of
Speaker 2: signal are you sending when you do that sort of thing.
Speaker 2: So an awful lot of that was just simply saying, Okay,
Speaker 2: we are not going to pander to anti military attitudes.
Speaker 2: We're going to encourage kids to That's when you saw
Speaker 2: the Army go to the concept of, you know, we
Speaker 2: do more things before eight in the morning than most
Speaker 2: people do all day. Those are the kinds of things
Speaker 2: that started to pop up that were actually discouraged during
Speaker 2: the previous administration, and at that time we were coming
Speaker 2: out of the doldrooms of Vietnam and so forth. But
Speaker 2: I think just the I think a big part of
Speaker 2: that is and I've done it myself since since the
Speaker 2: last election. I was I won't say I was actively discouraging,
Speaker 2: you know, young members of my family from going in
Speaker 2: the military, but I was certainly under the last administration,
Speaker 2: I wasn't going to encourage them to go in. And
Speaker 2: recently I gave a close friend of mine whose son
Speaker 2: is graduating from college, the advice that, hey, he might
Speaker 2: want to look he's a smart kid. The nuclear Navy
Speaker 2: is looking for you know, it's looking for people and
Speaker 2: so forth, instead of looking at going to work for Microsoft.
Speaker 2: When I give him a chance to you know, hone
Speaker 2: his skills and up his resume by doing some time service.
Speaker 2: I would not have done it a year ago today, Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was.
Speaker 3: I was leaving active duty about the time of the
Speaker 3: transition between Harder and Reagan, and I remember going to
Speaker 3: a meeting with one of the Assistant Secretary of Defense
Speaker 3: where some of the sailors were complaining about the conditions
Speaker 3: that they were working with and they and this guy's
Speaker 3: response was, and I remember it well, was well, then
Speaker 3: vote with your feet, which you know is an absolutely
Speaker 3: terrible way to treat people who are serving their country.
Speaker 2: Yeah. You know, I think a lot of a lot
Speaker 2: of that has to do too with the discouragement of
Speaker 2: or the doing away with a lot of these UH
Speaker 2: DEI programs and so forth. You know, if you're a
Speaker 2: if you're a kid that going in the military and
Speaker 2: you think you might get knocked out of a uh
Speaker 2: you know, get knocked out of a potential promotion slot,
Speaker 2: not because you weren't qualified, but because there was a gay,
Speaker 2: pregnant whale who who needed that slot to fill a
Speaker 2: DEI quota. You know, you can just of yourself, what
Speaker 2: do I want to be in an outfit.
Speaker 1: Like that that has been one of the big and
Speaker 1: dramatic changes that we saw, and a lot of the
Speaker 1: strongest advocates forward in uniform were were invited to to
Speaker 1: pursue excellence elsewhere, so to speak. And some people have
Speaker 1: taken taken umbrage to that. But it is not uncommon.
Speaker 1: And you have a professional scope of seeing multiple administrations
Speaker 1: coming in that a commander in chief he should have
Speaker 1: in his uniformed leadership the people that are best aligned
Speaker 1: with the direction that he wants to go. Some of
Speaker 1: the changes that we've seen that has not been that
Speaker 1: out of the scope of what we've seen previous administrations
Speaker 1: do to get the people and the priorities that they
Speaker 1: want to have in a leadership position. Do you see
Speaker 1: anything outside of the normal for some of the resignations
Speaker 1: and reassignments that we've seen so far, or is this
Speaker 1: about in line with a new administration that really wants
Speaker 1: to make some changes fast.
Speaker 2: Well, I think if you've you know, if you have
Speaker 2: been major mark in the last five or six years,
Speaker 2: you know, falling in line with you know, with some
Speaker 2: guidance that you don't necessarily believe in, I think that
Speaker 2: that has a tendency to you know to to discourage
Speaker 2: you know, people that you know that that believe that
Speaker 2: things are going in the wrong direction. It's one thing.
Speaker 2: It's one thing to salute smartly once you've got once
Speaker 2: you've been given an order, all of us who are
Speaker 2: in the military, once you've stated your you know, your
Speaker 2: opinion and all that sort of thing, and the decision
Speaker 2: goes against you, to salute smartly and you march off
Speaker 2: and try to do the job as best you can.
Speaker 2: It's another thing to slavishly play up to that. And
Speaker 2: I quite frankly think that the reason we've seen some
Speaker 2: of these firings and so forth is we've had too
Speaker 2: many officers that have that have drunk the kool aid,
Speaker 2: not just in things like DEI, but in many areas
Speaker 2: where you they they may have known that they were
Speaker 2: getting bad direction, and it was one It's one thing
Speaker 2: to go ahead and salute smartly and carry on. It's
Speaker 2: another thing to not just say, hey, let's think about this,
Speaker 2: let's think about the unintense intended consequences. And I think
Speaker 2: unfortunately we've had too many senior officers in the in
Speaker 2: the past that have that have gone overboard to keep
Speaker 2: the civilian It's one thing to accept direction from the
Speaker 2: senior civilians, it's another thing to pander to it. And
Speaker 2: I think we've we've got too many officers, unfortunately, a
Speaker 2: couple of very sigure ones or marines who who went
Speaker 2: in that direction.
Speaker 3: Well, you started off kind of talking about the failure
Speaker 3: in Afghanistan withdrawal and maybe the tall twenty here experience
Speaker 3: to a certain extent, talk a little bit one of
Speaker 3: your other pieces. You talked about what some of these
Speaker 3: senior rosters should have done rather than just gone along
Speaker 3: with the flows. Should we have seen more resignations by
Speaker 3: people who knew that things were going down the wrong path.
Speaker 2: It should have been obvious to I mean, when I
Speaker 2: was in Afghanistan in two thousand, two thousand and eleven
Speaker 2: to twenty twelve, it was obvious to us that whatever
Speaker 2: we were, to those of us who were lower level.
Speaker 2: I was in the State Department at the time as
Speaker 2: a field advisor, and it was obvious to me that
Speaker 2: once we left that the army, the Afghan army that
Speaker 2: we had built in our image, was not going to
Speaker 2: be able to sustain itself out in the field, particularly
Speaker 2: in the very rugged areas like I was up near
Speaker 2: the Turkbanistan border, and we had to be resupplied totally
Speaker 2: by air, particularly during the winter months and so forth.
Speaker 2: There was just no way to get to us. And
Speaker 2: there was no way that the Afghan Air Force, if
Speaker 2: we'd turned things over to them, would have been able
Speaker 2: to support that. And we were told that we were
Speaker 2: going to hand this, in my case a district that
Speaker 2: I was the district support team leader, over to the Afghans,
Speaker 2: and it was obvious that there was no there was
Speaker 2: no way that this was going to work. You know,
Speaker 2: there was no way they were going to be resupplied
Speaker 2: as soon as we left. The entire security bubble that
Speaker 2: we'd created was going to collapse if it was just
Speaker 2: left up to the to the Afghans. But there was
Speaker 2: a political decision made in Washington that looked good on
Speaker 2: paper to be able to say, hey, we handed this
Speaker 2: province over to the you know, to the to the Afghans.
Speaker 2: Nobody uh objected that. I can't believe. I mean, we
Speaker 2: sent a lot of memos up and so forth, both
Speaker 2: myself as the as a civilian reconstruction leader, commander of
Speaker 2: the Italian contingent was up there, the commander of the
Speaker 2: Marine contingent that was up there, Marine Special Operations Contingent.
Speaker 2: We all sent papers up and we're basically told, thanks
Speaker 2: for your interest in national defense, this is going to happen.
Speaker 2: Get on with it. And I firmly believe that many
Speaker 2: of those generals, and a couple of them unfortunately were
Speaker 2: marines that knew that this thing was you know, it
Speaker 2: was going to collapse eventually, and it collapsed in my
Speaker 2: district much sooner than the nationwide. But you could see that,
Speaker 2: you could see that this thing wasn't working. But nobody
Speaker 2: had the guts to stand up and say, you know,
Speaker 2: we need to change direction. We need to create an
Speaker 2: Afghan army that could self sustain itself locally and so forth.
Speaker 2: That could have been done, but nobody had the intestinal
Speaker 2: fortitude to stand up and say we're heading in around
Speaker 2: direct Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, we could do two hours on this. I
Speaker 1: was on the isaff staff and the couple and eight nine,
Speaker 1: and we outlined exactly what would happen if we did
Speaker 1: what happened to you in twenty eleven of call for years,
Speaker 1: we need something like a truth and reconciliation committee meeting
Speaker 1: of some type about what we did especially in the
Speaker 1: last decade in Afghanistan, but that may never happen. I
Speaker 1: would feel remiss if I didn't at least get this
Speaker 1: question and before we were done it the hour, because yeah,
Speaker 1: I love Marines. You guys are great. Y'all do kind
Speaker 1: of run with a pack, but you're innovative and you
Speaker 1: do like to argue and fight. And one of the
Speaker 1: argues in fights we've seen recently you engaged in on
Speaker 1: and that's on Force Design twenty thirty and you said
Speaker 1: something in your article that I knew had taken place,
Speaker 1: but I hadn't seen somebody and put it in writing,
Speaker 1: and that was quote, much of which has been discredited
Speaker 1: by legitimate gains conducted by CSIS as well as Marine
Speaker 1: corpses and Wall Street Journal. Talk for a bit about
Speaker 1: how people can have this wonderful idea and this wonderful
Speaker 1: theory that they want to promote and they want to execute,
Speaker 1: but when somebody presents them a well run war game
Speaker 1: that raises some legitimate questions, how that can just be
Speaker 1: pushed in the side that sounds like what you're talking about.
Speaker 2: That's absolutely, in my view, that is what happened. Now
Speaker 2: I can't prove that because the former commandant that put
Speaker 2: together Force Design very cleverly classified all the wargames. So
Speaker 2: I don't you don't the Washington Times or the Washington
Speaker 2: Post or the Wall Street Journal doesn't have the need
Speaker 2: to know what went on. That's the parts of bull
Speaker 2: There was nothing classified. There shouldn't have been nothing classified
Speaker 2: about those games. The concept was pretty straightforward. You know. Okay,
Speaker 2: some of the ranges of weapons systems might have been classified,
Speaker 2: but the bottom line is this was put together by
Speaker 2: a small cotrait of the commandants closest advisors and quite
Speaker 2: frankly em betted by the wargaming division, which I ran
Speaker 2: at one time, and we were very proud of the
Speaker 2: fact that we ran an honest table when they did
Speaker 2: war games. Quite frankly, we've had some of the people
Speaker 2: that were involved in the analysis that that did very
Speaker 2: critical analysis that was basically never showed up in the
Speaker 2: final reports. In other words, the books were cooked, and
Speaker 2: I believe that entirely. I think people, I frankly think
Speaker 2: people should have gone to jail over it. Billions of
Speaker 2: dollars have been wasted and spent badly as a result
Speaker 2: of these quote games that validated the concept war games
Speaker 2: don't validate a concept. They basically will show you what
Speaker 2: the issues may be. When somebody tells you that a
Speaker 2: war game or a group of war games has validated anything,
Speaker 2: grab your wallet because you're being scammed. And that's exactly
Speaker 2: what happened.
Speaker 3: Well, I know you've had some thoughts on this other
Speaker 3: stuff in your work at American ex American Spectator. Is
Speaker 3: there other places we can look for your future works?
Speaker 3: Do you have anything else in the in the mix?
Speaker 2: I do quite a better writing for Real Clear Defense,
Speaker 2: occasionally for the Defense Post, and sometimes for military dot Com,
Speaker 2: So you can google those things and they'll pop up
Speaker 2: and so forth.
Speaker 1: Well, Gary, it's been a great hour. We really appreciate
Speaker 1: you taking some time to spend with us. It's been
Speaker 1: a great conversation. I know our listeners are really going
Speaker 1: to enjoy it, and I hope you have a great
Speaker 1: twenty twenty twenty five look forward the next opportunity to
Speaker 1: have a conversation with you.
Speaker 2: Well, thanks for having me, I appreciate it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you for joining us, and thank you everybody
Speaker 1: for joining us for another edition of mid Rides. And
Speaker 1: until next time, I hope you have a great Navy
Speaker 1: and Marine Corde cheers.
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