by Steve Deal
Are you worried about the president’s meeting with more than 800 senior generals and admirals tomorrow? Consider this: how our military prepares for global conflict hasn’t changed since the Obama era.
And if you also think that America is at an inflection point of global leadership – and, perhaps languishing in terms of defense production – then, maybe, such a unifying connection between senior military leaders isn’t such a bad idea.
So instead of asking why a large meeting of U.S. military leadership is happening in Virginia this week with the President and his Secretary, perhaps we should first ask why we are so concerned in the first place.
If our first thought is distrust of motive, then perhaps we aren’t really thinking for ourselves. That is the work of ideology – to presuppose or preconceive reality. Vermont’s congressional delegation already has that one covered.
Reality is far different. Secretary of War Henry Stimson met with his senior leadership multiple times to guide the country through World War II. So did Robert D. McNamara during Vietnam, for better or worse. As did Richard Cheney during Gulf War I, and again Donald Rumsfeld after 9/11.
Even when gatherings were limited to four- and three-stars, the impact upon their enormous, far-flung staffs — filled with two- and one-star officers, aides, and other support elements — has always made such presidential- and secretarial-level events momentous, if not temporarily paralyzing.
So, what might our concerns about this meeting presuppose? What realities lie behind such worry?
First, some may well believe that our country is fully ready for the next epoch in technology, weapons systems, and the kind of education, training, and talent management needed for Americans willing to serve. In that thinking, such a large meeting just slows progress for leaders already working on the right things.
No serious observer of American military power could agree with that belief today.
Artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing sit at the periphery of defense execution, not at its core. The mainframe — shipbuilding, munitions, and readiness — is where we keep failing.
We cannot seem to get out of our own way in any of these areas, although we are making a lot of government contractors rich by our fruitless attempts thus far.
Next, we might be convinced that our most able and most senior people, fully selected by merit, are the best ones possible, leading us into this new era.
Yet any public scan of military leadership travails and criminal convictions, even at the highest levels, should disabuse us from the notion that our youngest are being led by the best and most virtuous leadership America has to offer.
As I wrote earlier this year, our senior officer promotion systems require serious reform. Providing our three- and four-star leaders, who are political appointees themselves, with strategic goals and results-based discipline has been long on intent but short on execution.
It is exactly our current closed-loop, replication of hierarchy promotion system that perpetuates a type of successor ideology. Without appropriate accountability, that system is enervating to the entire institution.
Finally, we could, impossibly perhaps, believe that America has ample strategic time and space for a geopolitical and technological renaissance, and thus any large meeting of our most senior officers with the President and his Secretary is an overreaction at best, a gratuitous show of force at worst.
That belief would be willfully ignorant of the intense conflict happening right now in just about every dimension of global competition. It is only becoming more, and not less, difficult for America to find overwhelming advantages in such competition. Just ask Israel, the Baltic states, Poland, Taiwan, and the Philippines among many others how modern war unfolds.
To the contrary, now is the time for exactly such a gathering of minds – but only if those same uniformed leaders have the courage of their convictions to recommend strategies and plans that convict the very lack of courage which got us here.
Even if, and especially if, that paucity of courage was exhibited by themselves.
Over twenty years ago, my first four-star boss used to say that the military’s job was to provide options for the President.
Yes, those options are well-informed with geopolitical insight, but they are not political in and of themselves. Above all else, those options need to have the advertised effect when called upon. That is why they are called options and not wishes or hopes.
No senior officer in this era is putting his or her stars on the table because of the failure of a program or platform, much less for conscience or their own convictions.
Too often, their vision ends at the one and a half or so years each one will occupy each rung en route to the next. Anything accomplished occurs either in hopes of their next promotion or their assumed place in the corporate (military contracting) world.
If the President and his Secretary feel that such a self-selecting, self-feeding bureaucracy will tend to try to wait them out, they are probably right.
It’s not (necessarily) personal. Such auto-immune behaviors as those exhibited in the Pentagon have been true of bureaucracies since the advent of the Industrial Age.
And as the President and Secretary are likely aware: the political environment surrounding senior military officer promotions (which are political themselves) has not appreciably changed for sixteen years, since President Obama took office.
President Trump’s first term interregnum did not affect the trajectory of appointments in the military branches, as he himself now realizes. Equity, rather than equality in measuring results, ruled during that term just as it did in the other three. We have been blind to the system that perpetuates our senior leadership, and thus our many disappointments in national security readiness, for far too long.
How our military prepares for global conflict – or better yet, to prevent one – hasn’t changed. If people are indeed the process, that is where the President must start.
Steve Deal is a retired naval officer who previously served as deputy chief of staff to the Secretary of the Navy and deputy chief learning officer of the Department of the Navy. He currently resides in St. Albans, Vermont.