Military – James W. Vizzard

To Serve or Not to Serve

This post first appeared on the Center for Security Policy Studies blog https://csps.gmu.edu/2020/03/09/to-serve-or-not-to-serve/ on March 9, 2020.

Prospective national security professionals may be forgiven for avoiding the federal government in the current political climate. Watching President Trump, members of Congress, and cable TV personalities impugn the integrity, competence, and patriotism of national security officials does not paint a picture of a happy, fulfilling career. Disapproval of administration policies, like family separation or the President’s pardoning of accused war criminals, further discourages recruiting. Nevertheless, young people with talent, integrity, and an interest in national security should pursue opportunities to serve.

National security professionals recognized early that President Trump’s approaches to both national security and the federal workforce would pose staffing challenges. Dan Drezner wrote four Washington Post columns on the subject (see here, here, here, and here). Eliot Cohen initially encouraged people to seek positions but to “keep a signed but undated letter of resignation in their desk” to remind themselves of the requirement to identify their ethical redlines and to resign if required to violate them. He quickly reversed himself after deciding the administration would make honorable service impossible. Benjamin Wittes argued s enior professional staff should stay on to ensure high quality professional advice unless ordered to do something unethical.

What has happened in the three years since these questions began circulating?

Nothing good.

The number of applicants taking the Foreign Service exam dropped by 34% in 2017 and a further 22% in 2018. President Trump appointed a high percentage of political supporters to ambassadorships, and Trump-appointed ambassadors are removing their career deputies at an alarming rate. Career prosecutors at the Department of Justice quit the Roger Stone case in response to political pressure, and the Attorney General initiated investigations of the FBI and Hillary Clintonwhile cooperating with the president’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, to produce political dirt on Joe Biden. The president personally attacked career diplomats and military officers who obeyed congressional subpoenas.

This hostile climate is exactly why talented young people of high ideals and integrity should seek careers in national security now and why more senior public servants should encourage them to do so. The most important feature of the U.S. national security apparatus is its non-partisan professionalism, while the most dangerous feature of the current administration is its disregard for the norms of American governance.

The antidote to personalization of the bureaucracy is not abstention or “deep state” resistance. National security professionals can best ensure the continuation of America’s proud tradition of non-partisan service by maintaining high professional standards while remembering Eliot Cohen’s exhortation to identify redlines. National security professionals who value our professional norms should be seeking out talented young people and recruiting them to serve.

Administration hostility is creating vacancies as more senior people choose to depart, giving young staffers opportunities to serve in responsible positions at younger than normal ages. Public service attracts people who value making a difference over personal gain, but that does not mean public servants lack ambition. Rather, their ambitions often focus on achieving good policy outcomes along with personal advancement. The former may be difficult in an administration that does not value professional expertise, but that difficulty can, paradoxically, help young staffers develop greater expertise. To have any chance of making good policy, their proposals will have to be more tightly reasoned and carefully supported than might be the case with friendlier political appointees.

Indeed, serving under a difficult administration may actually have positive side effects. New professionals can build the habit of executing policy dispassionately, at the direction of elected leaders, as well as the courage to explain and advocate policies that may not be popular with superiors. Professional staffers serving inexperienced and erratic decision-makers can unlearn some of the bad habits that their elders adopted, like presenting throwaway courses of action to limit superiors. A national security professional who begins in this environment and endures with her integrity intact is likely to be a formidable policy-maker in the future.

Finally, nobody should ever enter public service without a sense of duty, and duty does not end because the administration is hostile or incompetent. If anything, weak political appointees increase the duty of competent public servants to do their best within their ethical boundaries. Anyone hoping to have a career in national security should understand that she will have to serve in administrations with which she disagrees and under leaders of whom she disapproves. A young graduate entering public service in 1980 during the Carter administration and serving 40 years would have also served under Presidents Reagan, GHW Bush, Clinton, GW Bush, Obama, and Trump. Secretaries of State would have ranged from Al Haig to Madeline Albright. Given that broad diversity, any public servant could expect to disagree with some or even many of the people she would have to serve and policies she would have to implement. New staffers, however, have more to gain and less to lose in the current environment. Even with accelerated responsibility they will be farther from the political appointees than their more senior colleagues. Signing that letter of resignation in the desk drawer will cost them less than a mid-grade staffer who is halfway to retirement.

People who value rational, evidence-based, morally defensible national security policy can either enter the arena with their eyes open, or they can cede those entry level positions to people of lesser qualifications and greater ethical flexibility. Today is the perfect time to join, knowing that it may be a trial by fire.

The Cost of Service in a Partisan Age

This post appeared originally at the Center for Security Policy Studies blog https://csps.gmu.edu/2019/11/09/the-cost-of-service-in-a-partisan-age/ on November 9, 2019

Delegation (left to right): Alexander Vindman, Joseph Pennington, Kurt Volker, Olena Serkal, Volodymyr Zelensky, Rick Perry, Gordon Sondland, Olena Selenska (First Lady), Ron Johnson at Zelensky’s Presidential Inauguration, 2019
Photo from Wikimedia Commons

The Trump administration has challenged American norms of civil-military relations. Candidate Trump signaled that he would reverse established law and attack commonly held norms when he promised to reauthorize waterboarding, and he further challenged tradition by appointing an unusual number of serving and retired generals to senior positions and referring to them as “my generals.” In this hyper-partisan environment, the military has struggled to maintain a non-partisan position. Maintaining it became unexpectedly harder last week when a serving military officer, LTC Alexander Vindman, was drawn into the impeachment inquiry, and the president subsequently attacked him personally.

Faced with this challenge, the military’s priority is to remain outside the partisan fray and maintain its position as a trusted national institution. Political actors, including the president, are attempting to use the military’s prestige to bolster their positions. This prestige, however, rests on the tradition of non-partisanship.

Decisions about when and how to go to war are inherently political because they have political consequences, but the military has traditionally provided advice on matters with political implications while scrupulously avoiding any participation, even indirectly, in the partisan contestation of elections. In a time when every question is contested on a partisan basis, every answer becomes partisan. The military must tread an extremely narrow path to fulfill its obligations without straying any further than necessary into partisan conflict.

Testifying truthfully before Congress should not be a partisan issue, but there is no way to avoid appearing partisan in modern politics. Refusing to testify is perceived as partisan by the one party; agreeing to testify is perceived as partisan by the other. Assertions that LTC Vindman could be court-martialed for testifying are far-fetched, but he has been vilified in the conservative media and will likely retire at his current grade despite his stellar credentials.

LTC Vindman’s situation presents a dilemma for military leaders attempting to sustain non-partisan norms. So far, senior military leaders have neither criticized nor defended Vindman. There are no grounds for criticizing him, but to defend him would place the military establishment in direct conflict with the president and create the appearance that the military is taking a side in the impeachment debate. For military leaders, the priority should remain protecting the military’s non-partisan legitimacy. This may, unfortunately, include tolerating unfair treatment of one of their own. Up to a point, the institutional legitimacy of the military is more important than the mistreatment of one individual.

Opponents of the president may be tempted to make Vindman into a heroic symbol of resistance. They would be wise to resist the temptation. Conservative adulation of Lt. Col. Oliver North after he testified to Congress regarding the Iran Contra Affair in 1987 reinforced the growing perception at the time that the military was closely aligned with the Republican Party, which subsequently undermined the military’s credibility and prestige. [1]

The real test will come if the president and his supporters continue to attack Vindman publicly or attempt to take legal action against him. Retiring as a lieutenant colonel may be unfair, but it is a small price to pay for defending the norms of civil-military relations. If Vindman testifies in open hearings, the president and his supporters are likely to engage in public character assassination in order to undermine his testimony. The president has already shown his willingness to intervene directly in military legal proceedings.

Military leaders can be excused for accepting some costs to Vindman in exchange for protecting the military institution, but they cannot allow him to be prosecuted or maligned publicly by the president in a way that could make him a target. If the president pursues his standard playbook of innuendo and harassment, he will place military leaders in a lose-lose situation – either publicly contradict the president in a highly-charged partisan matter or publicly abandon an officer to be persecuted for his honorable service. The president should understand that unfounded public attacks risk reluctant repudiation by his senior military leaders, and those leaders should privately signal their willingness to do so before it becomes a public spectacle.

Senior uniformed and civilian military leaders must prioritize the military’s non-partisan integrity in a highly partisan environment, but they must realize that they risk the same dilemma as LTC Vindman. Whether he chose to testify or not, his actions were bound to be seen as partisan. Now, military leaders will face the same problem if the president forces them to choose between defending Vindman or abandoning him. The president and his supporters will view the former as partisan resistance, and Democrats will view the latter as partisan acquiescence. The president should avoid creating that dilemma, and military leaders should let him know now, before it again bursts into public view, that they too will speak truthfully and publicly if forced.

[1] Peter Feaver and Richard H. Kohn, Soldiers and Civilians: The Civil-Military Gap and American National Security (MIT Press, 2001).

Islamic State and the Sahwa

I cannot recommend too highly Dr. Craig Whiteside’s ICCT research paper, “Nine Bullets for the Traitors, One for the Enemy: The Slogans and Strategy behind the Islamic State’s Campaign to Defeat the Sunni Awakening (2006 – 2017).” For those of us who fought the war against the various incarnations of Daesh from 2003-2010, it is eye-opening to see what we did not see at the time. I personally operated in a senior targeting position with the main-effort U.S. division in Baghdad during the height of this fight, and much of what Dr. Whiteside details was unknown to me. It should not have been. We did a poor job of monitoring our enemies’ information operations and too often saw the fight in purely tactical terms–cut off the head to kill the snake. Among his other interesting ideas, Dr. Whiteside makes a plausible argument that Abu Musab al Zarqawi was uniquely unsuited to deal with the Sahwa movement, implying that his death in 2006 may have been a gift to the enemy. This dynamic played out on the Shi’a side in 2008 when we failed to kill both Arkan al Hasnawi in Sadr City and Abu Sajjad in al Rashid. Both men attempted to run their organizations from exile, creating significant opportunities and preventing the rise of more effective local leaders.

In the conclusion, Dr. Whiteside explicitly ties the resurgence of the Islamic State following the Sahwa movement to its “defeated” status now. He makes a cogent argument that recent setbacks should not be assumed to mean complete and enduring defeat. Clearly, this question is critical in light of the President’s decision to withdraw all U.S. forces from Syria.

The implication need not be that we must retain U.S. forces indefinitely. Indeed, if U.S. boots on the ground are the only way to sustain a victory over enemies like Daesh, than that would tend to argue strongly against engaging in military action in the first place. The U.S. cannot sustain a decisive ground presence forever in every place it may want to fight.

It does imply that a precipitous withdrawal without a deep understanding of the current dynamics and a strong plan to sustain gains through allies will almost certainly lead to at least a local disaster. Before U.S. forces withdraw, we should be completely clear about the strengths, weaknesses, and likely future course of Daesh, and we should determine the ways and means required to continue the momentum toward their eventual destruction as an organizing force. Such an approach, with the close cooperation of our Iraqi partners, the Kurds, and the leaders of any Syrian groups required, along with clear commitments to provide those resources going forward might go a long ways towards mitigating the understandable sense of abandonment among those who have fought alongside us, in some cases for decades.

Casual Lies and the Military Profession

The Wall Street Journal published an account of American soldiers fighting in Russia (paywalled) at the end of World War I to commemorate the centenary of the armistice. Leaders were unable to explain to the soldiers why they were in Archangel fighting Bolsheviks when they had been drafted to fight Germans. Things became even more tense once the Germans surrendered and supplies ran short just in time for the Russian winter.

Initially commanders did what commanders do–they assured their higher headquarters that all was going well and morale was high. It wasn’t and it wasn’t. Eventually the senior officers had to acknowledge that troops were on the verge of mutiny.

Looking back at the Polar Bear Expedition in light of yesterday’s dog and pony show on the Mexican border highlights an age old problem for militaries, one we would do well to fix. The first officer to tell his masters, uniformed and civilian, that things are going badly will almost certainly be first ignored, then relieved, and finally besmirched. Only when word gets back to the home front and politicians face angry families, or when military disaster becomes undeniable, will senior officers drop their insistence on optimism and positive news.

The WSJ story makes it clear that is what happened in Archangel. I recently rewatched A Bridge Too Far, in which the intelligence officer who predicted disaster was cashiered before the operation. Phil Klay published a brilliant reflection on his own Iraq service in America on Veterans Day that recounted the disgrace of the PSOD (read it for yourself–it is well worth the time). Finally, yesterday, we got to witness commanders on the ground assuring the Secretary of Defense, himself a distinguished combat commander, that soldiers laying wire along the Mexican border to defend the mightiest nation on earth against a few thousand tired migrants were both deriving great training value and maintaining sky-high morale. As usual, the soldiers themselves were not having it, and we are left with the uncomfortable acknowledgement that field commanders are more likely to say what their bosses want to hear than to tell the truth. That military professionals just accept this practice as a necessity of promotion (and I do not exempt myself from this criticism) says nothing very good about the military profession in America in 2018.

American soldiers are not Roman centurions and they are not the French Foreign Legion. The citizen soldiers of a democracy deserve better. Our society lavishes praise on the “heroes” who lead our military, but we collectively are not worthy of such praise if we can breezily lie when it suits us. Leonard Wong and Stephen J. Gerras identified the problem in a well-regarded paper, but senior leaders have not made fixing it a priority. We should not be surprised–everyone in a position of authority rose through the system in which casual and obvious dishonesty was required. It would be surprising if they turned on a culture that has rewarded them so greatly. The tragedy is that these are not evil men and women. In my experience, most of them are scrupulously honest in their daily lives. They do not lie to their spouses. They would not cheat on their taxes or steal a candy bar. The military has placed certain areas outside the bounds of normal rules for honesty.

We have developed a leadership culture that views positivity and optimism as fundamental characteristics of leaders, and to some extent they are. Nobody will follow a sad-sack. The danger is that it is far too easy to conflate optimism with happy talk. Telling superiors that morale is good when it is clearly not is not optimism or positive leadership–it is lying. The mutineers of Archangel showed where it leads. Secretary Mattis should never have asked a commander on camera how morale was–answering with anything short of “excellent” would have been career suicide. In asking the question, the Secretary was essentially soliciting a lie for public and presidential consumption on national television. In doing so, he signalled every uniformed leader that such casual dishonesty was not only acceptable but expected.

I should point out here that I am not assuming that morale is bad. Perhaps it is great, although I doubt it. The point, rather, is that the colonel’s answer moves us no closer to knowing the state of morale at Camp Donna than we were before the Secretary asked the question. If we ask ourselves the simple question, how would the colonel’s answer have differed if morale were good or bad, we recognize the problem. The U.S. military has been fortunate not to face an existential threat since about 1944. Since the turning points of World War II, we have faced some terrible combat at places like Chosin and Khe Sanh and Falluja, but no military leader (outside a few watch officers at NORAD) has faced a decision on which the fate of his nation hangs. Officers have been free to answer with their careers in the forefronts of their minds, knowing that the immense national power of the United States would mitigate any negative consequences. Even when troops rebelled, as they did in Archangel and on occasion in Vietnam, the consequences were unlikely to be disastrous.

Only a culture of radical honesty, fostered from the top, will overcome the cost-benefit analysis that leads officers to tell “little white lies” that in the aggregate are neither little nor harmless. When I was a young captain, my battalion commander used to say, “don’t [urinate] on my back and tell me it’s raining.” When military senior leaders start responding that way to obvious happy talk from ambitious colonels, we’ll be on the right path.

Review – The General by C.S. Forester

The General by C.S. Forester. Kindle Edition, 321 pages, Published September 14th 2017 by William Collins (first published 1936)

I picked up The General after reading several mentions that Gen (Ret) John Kelly rereads it every year to remind himself of the pitfalls of hubris and intellectual stagnation. While Gen. Kelly’s performance in civilian life has been distressing, his descriptions of the book were intriguing. It did not disappoint.

Lieutenant General Sir Herbert Curzon is the very model of a modern British Lt. Gen., at least as seen from the interwar vantage point of 1936. Curzon is courageous to a fault, ambitious, loyal, innately suspicious of education, novelty, and dissent, disdainful of the lower classes, and utterly free of self-awareness, Through stupid luck he becomes a minor hero as a subaltern in South Africa and is perfectly positioned in 1914 to rise rapidly thanks to the opportunities born of death and the search for scapegoats. A fortunate marriage, good timing, and an unshakeable belief that his duty lies in supporting his superiors in all matters and at all times results in his rapid advancement from major to lieutenant general. His willingness to blindly expend the lives of working class British men in order to uphold the honor of the empire and maintain his own reputation ensures that he advances when others are sacked.

Curzon is an amalgam of the British regulars who led a generation to their miserable deaths on the Somme and at Passchendaele, and he embodies nearly all the stereotypes that the embittered survivors harbored. It is to Forester’s credit, then, that he occasionally acknowledges both the value of men like Curzon and the lack of reasonable alternatives. Like Colonel Tall in The Thin Red Line, Curzon’s less attractive qualities are also seen as necessary. War is a hideous business, and few wars have been as hideous as the western front. Curzon’s boundless energy results in a highly trained division that is able to ship to France in time for First Ypres. His pig-headed refusal to give an inch of ground or consider the lives of his soldiers makes it possible to hold the German advance and prevent an even greater disaster. The only alternative is defeat, and Curzon mitigates his lack of humanity by invariably sharing the dangers of combat with his men. The officers whom he finds wanting are indeed more intelligent and more willing to face the reality of the war than he is, but their greater intelligence does not provide them with any better solutions to the fundamental problem.

Later, when Curzon is behind the lines commanding by telephone, his reactionary stubbornness becomes more dangerous and less defensible. The true tragedy comes when he repeatedly convinces his superiors and his father-in-law (a government minister) that the war can be one with the same techniques if only they will throw in more men, more guns, more munitions. The horror of the truth caused the generals of the Western Front to grasp instead at the illusion that victory was possible if they just did more. At one point, as civilian leaders are losing trust in the generals, Curzon stages a demonstration for visiting officials to convince them that soldier morale remains high, and then gloats without any sense of shame or discomfort that the army has put one over on the civilians. Finally at Saint Quentin, the reality hits home. Despite his best efforts, the line breaks and it seems clear that Britain will go down to defeat. In despair, he buckles on his sword and rides to the front for a heroic death only to be hit by a shell en route and badly wounded. Despite the inglorious conclusion, he retires to acclaim and comfort as a hero.

The General is a harsh indictment of the officer corps produced by the pre-war British army, and it is worth considering whether any institutional army, blessed with a long period of general peace can do better. The British generals of 1914-1918 were no more benighted than the American generals who opened the Civil War. It is possible that they were no more benighted than the 17 commanders who have led U.S. forces in Afghanistan since 2001. An officer who rises through the institutional army is unlikely, in the face of an unexpected circumstance, to acknowledge that his talents and training are insufficient to the task. To do so is an indictment of the institution that put him in a position of power and in which he has been marinating for decades. Before we condemn the Herbert Curzon’s, we would do well to ask what choice they had and whether we would do any better.

Advisers, Mercenaries, and “Authorizations for the Use of Military Force”

Loren Dejonge Schulman has an interesting piece in The Atlantic examining the proliferation of undeclared and semi-declared U.S. military deployments in light of the death of four U.S. soldiers in Niger last month. While the seemingly endless deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan garner the bulk of the public’s shrinking attention, the military has quietly dispatched thousands of soldiers to over 100 countries to “train, advise, and assist;” “build partner capacity;” and otherwise attempt to build up the forces of allies and partners so they can do the dirty work of fighting nascent terrorist and insurgent organizations without requiring large U.S. forces. As Schulman notes, “this approach has grown more popular—and for good reason: It’s seen as a sweet deal.” The embedded link is telling, pointing as it does to Mara Karlin’s article in Foreign Affairs arguing that such assistance programs, particularly when they focus solely on military capability and capacity building, at best disappoint and at worst undermine partners’ security and stability.

Meanwhile, Eric Prince is still peddling his scheme to equip an American “viceroy” in Afghanistan with a mercenary army and get the U.S. military out of the nation building business there entirely. While Hell will freeze over before I support Prince or his plan, he may recognize a problem that more conventional thinkers refuse to acknowledge. We are so dazzled by the lasers and computers and precision capabilities of the modern military that we miss its parallels with more ancient forms of martial organization.

The Industrial Revolution enabled rapid leaps in technology for general consumption, but for that very reason, the defining feature of industrial age armies was not technological dominance but rather the proliferation of cheap, simple technologies to hundreds of thousands and then to millions of soldiers. The vast size of industrial armies was both enabled and necessitated by the low cost and simplicity of military hardware. While more primitive in an absolute sense, the crossbow of the medieval mercenary was both more expensive and more technically demanding than the bolt action rifle of the doughboy. As late as the Korean war, technical disparities between the opposing sides were marginal, with the North Koreans fielding everything from long arms to jet fighters that were equal or even superior to U.S. equipment. Production capacity mattered far more than technical capability. By the 1960s, the U.S. began fielding remote sensors, night vision devices, and precision munitions that exceeded the technical capabilities of their enemies. in the 1990-1991 Gulf War, that trend came to full fruition and the U.S. with its allies was able to defeat an Army of roughly equal size with friendly casualties despite the historical advantages of the defense.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have demonstrated that the trend towards technical dominance continues. While there were individual instances of intense, bloody combat (Fallujah, Wanat), overall U.S. and allied casualties have remained extraordinarily low. After 16 years of war, U.S. deaths in Afghanistan have only slightly exceeded the U.S. deaths on Omaha beach on D-Day. Small U.S. losses do not reflect a lack of lethal action but rather extraordinary capabilities in intelligence, long-range strike, and force protection. The deaths are overwhelmingly on the other side. In turn, high tech weapons require highly trained specialists to employ them. The U.S. military recruits a tiny percentage of its population–approximately 1% v. 11% in World War II–pays them quite well, and trains them for many years. In return, it expects them to serve for decades and to deploy repetitively in what are effectively colonial wars. Modern American soldiers fight without the mobilization of the population at home, without the implicit promise that they can return home permanently upon victory, without even the prospect of anything resembling victory. The advisory missions that Schulman discusses may be undertaken on behalf of corrupt, repressive regimes that rob U.S. soldiers of the soothing mantra that they are defending “freedom.” Repeated calls for national service tend to miss this fatal impediment–the country does not need anywhere near that many soldiers, and we could not train, pay, or employ them if we had them.

We may be entering a new era of warfare that looks an awful lot like an old era of warfare. Perhaps we will graft the national loyalty of the industrial era onto the mercenary compensation and expertise of the late middle ages, but I doubt it. If Eric Prince were ever to get a shot at his mercenary army in Afghanistan, you can rest assured he would not be able to man it entirely with American ex-servicemen. Market forces would drive such a force to recruit worldwide. Moreover, I know a number of retired U.S. soldiers currently serving as “consultants,” “contractors,” and other convenient euphemisms from Donetsk to Angola to the Philippines. Schulman is correct to question the legal basis and organizational ambiguity of U.S. advise and assist missions, but the problem may be far greater than simply obtaining some form of definitive, and therefore limiting, congressional authorization. It may be that “light footprint” operations are the way of the future in a world with vast technological disparities and the escalatory threat of nuclear war in almost every corner. If so, then our industrial age organization, laws, values, and processes will need to adapt.

A Message to Pershing

Yesterday Benjamin Runkle posted a short essay on the leadership lessons of George Marshall in War on the Rocks. The essay is worth reading, as is just about anything regarding Marshall, for those interested in military leadership in strategy. What stuck with me, however, was the dissonance of the framing device–the initial meeting between Marshall and his mentor General John J. Pershing in 1917–and both my own experience as an officer and much of the literature that the Army uses to teach leadership.

For those who have not read the story before, Marshall first met Pershing in 1917 when Marshall was the acting chief of staff of the First Division and Pershing was the commander of the American Expeditionary Force. Pershing was under enormous pressure to provide U.S. soldiers as individual replacements to the overstretched allies, and he correctly assessed that the best way to resist such a disastrous and irreversible course of action was to get U.S. units into the fight. His previous inspection of the First Division had not gone well, and following his second, he lit into the division commander, Major General William L. Sibert in front of the assembled division staff officers. As Runkle puts it:

The division showed little for the time it had spent in training, Pershing snapped. They had not made good use of the time, and had not followed instructions from AEF headquarters at Chaumont regarding open warfare formations. Pershing excoriated Sibert, questioning his leadership, his attention to details in training, and his acceptance of such poor professionalism.

Marshall stepped forward and challenged Pershing, even grabbing his arm to prevent him from leaving before Marshall had enumerated to him all the shortcomings in training and logistical support from Pershing’s own headquarters. Rather than crush him, Pershing admired his forthrightness and courage and proceeded to elevate him to positions of greater responsibility and authority throughout the war and beyond.

It is a great story, illustrating the importance of A. having your facts straight, B. speaking the truth to superiors, even–or especially–when they are angry, and C. valuing tough feedback from subordinates. It all worked out brilliantly as Marshall–as close to the indispensable man as it is possible to imagine–rose to be the Army Chief of Staff at exactly the moment when his talents were required to save the free world.

The problem with the story is A Message to Garcia. Written in 1899 by Elbert Hubbard, it briefly refers to Lieutenant Andrew Rowan and his mission, during the Spanish-American War, to carry a message to a Cuban insurrecto leader. It has been a perennial favorite on military reading lists at least since I put on a uniform and, I’m sure, long before then. The author’s apparent intent was to extol the virtues of initiative and determination, with which nobody could quibble. Unfortunately, the essay as written extols Rowan’s failure to ask any questions about the mission and his devotion to completion of the task regardless of the purpose, difficulties, or encompassing situation. In short, it is the opposite of the story of Marshall meeting Pershing. If Major Rowan had been the chief of staff of the First Division, he would simply have turned back to his training schedules, redoubled his efforts, and quite likely driven the men of the division to achieve Pershing’s desires regardless of,

the promised platoon manuals that never arrived and had set back training; the inadequate supplies that left men walking around with gunnysacks on their feet; the inadequate quarters that left troops scattered throughout the countryside, sleeping in barns for a penny a night; the lack of motor transport that forced troops to walk miles to the training grounds.

So which is it? Is our ideal officer the one who accepts the task with its attendant unreasonable expectations and accomplishes it without questioning the purpose or the cost? Or his he the truth-teller who challenges the general in the bubble and confronts him with the very real material challenges that his units face? It is possible, of course, that he is both. Leadership is situational. The man who sends another man to his near-certain death may be a monster or a hero depending on the time and place, but the basic premises of the two stories are diametrically opposed. In one, the subordinate accepts the mission without question and sets out to accomplish it at any cost. In the other, the subordinate challenges the leader’s expectations and insists that the general provide as much as he is demanding of his juniors.

My own experience leads me to believe that A Message to Garcia has had a far greater impact on our current Army than the story of Marshall and Pershing or the near-contemporary story of the young Dwight Eisenhower antagonizing the Chief of Infantry with his advocacy of an independent tank arm. In the mid-1990s I commanded an MLRS battery at Fort Bragg. To reduce costs, the Army decided to arbitrarily cut the number of spare parts units could keep on hand. The initiative stemmed from the Army’s periodic infatuation with commercial best practices untethered from the realities of the military. Just in time logistics was all the rage, and the Army was onboard. Units had radically different spare parts requirements–I commanded a mechanized unit surrounded by light units–and different opportunities for cross-leveling if they were stationed by themselves versus with a number of like units. Predictably, our readiness plummeted as our launchers steadily died. When I addressed the issues with my commander, he assured me that the Army knew what it was doing, and my battery–along with the other batteries–was just failing to execute proper maintenance.

A few years later new generals came along and denounced the completely unworkable spare parts policy. They changed it back to the prior method, and readiness increased. My commander had imitated Lieutenant Rowan–the Army gave him a mission and he was determined to succeed without question. I took the Marshall route and laid out the impediments to and requirements for success. Let us just say it did not enhance my career prospects.

Lest we come down entirely on the side of reasonableness, there is something to be said for unreasonable expectations. Steve Jobs was notorious for imposing ridiculous requirements on his team and refusing to accept less than perfection. There is a good chance you are reading this on an iPhone or an iMac as a result. In war, the requirements may not always be reasonable. Sometimes military leaders must order subordinates to do the seemingly impossible, and sometimes, under the stress of unreasonableness, those determined young leaders succeed. Then we write books about them. Other times they fail, and we mourn their loss or excoriate them for not speaking up in an environment where their voices were not wanted. Either way, war is not fair, and we should not expect every order given to be perfectly informed, carefully considered, and completely reasonable.

We should, however, decide what stories we will use to mold our young officers. Should they grab the general by the arm and force him to listen to their shortfalls, or should they say “yes sir” with a crisp salute and head off into the jungle? It seems only reasonable to pick one or the other.

Insanity = Expecting Different Results

“Bureaucracy Does Its Thing: Institutional Constraints on U.S.-GVN Performance in Vietnam.” by R.W. Komer. Rand Corporation, August, 1972. https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reports/2005/R967.pdf

Readers who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan, but particularly Iraq, would be wise to lay in a stock of their favorite adult beverage before diving into Robert Komer’s first-hand study of institutional inertia in the Vietnam War. In his final chapter, Komer makes the accurate and vital point that the past does not provide a foolproof template for the future. That said, the past often provides a far better sense of what will not work that what will. Iraq veterans are likely to respond to Komer’s study with a fair degree of rage.

Known as “Blowtorch Bob” for his direct, unfiltered manner, Robert Komer served in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968 as head of the Civil Operations Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) program. Having served on the National Security Council before Vietnam, including a stint as interim National Security Adviser to President Johnson, he was appointed Ambassador to Turkey in 1968. Though his in-country tenure was brief, it covered a critical period in the Vietnam War and followed years of direct involvement in Vietnam policy in Washington. Although CORDS was responsible for the “hearts and minds” campaign, Komer was no soft-hearted do-gooder. CORDS had both military and civilian staff, fell under Military Assistance Command – Vietnam, and was responsible for over 20,000 deaths through the Phoenix program of targeted assassinations.

In 1971, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, through the Rand Corporation, commissioned Komer to write a study of the ways institutional constraints and characteristics affected U.S. and Vietnamese prosecution of the Vietnam War. Komer’s overwhelmingly caustic and pessimistic assessment is even more remarkable for having been written three years before the final collapse of the South Vietnamese government. Nobody reading this study in 1972 should have been the least bit surprised when North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon.

Komer made four observations that should give pause to anyone advocating for direct U.S. involvement in a civil war or insurgency in a distant country with an alien culture.

“[T]o a greater extent than is often realized, we recognized the nature of the operational problems we confronted in Vietnam, and…our policy was designed to overcome them.” (v)
Official U.S. policy directed a counterinsurgency response that never fully materialized on the ground; both U.S. and Vietnamese military leaders employed conventional military tactics regardless of policy guidance.
“[The U.S.] did not use vigorously the leverage over the Vietnamese leaders that our contributions gave us. We became their prisoners rather than they ours; The [Government of Vietnam] used its weakness far more effectively as leverage on us than we used our strength to lever it.” (vi)
The various agencies operating in Vietnam, regardless of the circumstances and guidance, performed their “institutional repertoires” with disastrous results.

Along the way Komer provides important insights into the questions of organization, civil v. military authority, and other tactical and procedural issues that played a role in the final outcome.

In the years since the end of the Vietnam War, a common picture has emerged of falsified or rose-colored reporting, inappropriate metrics (i.e. body counts), and relentless, unjustified optimism on the part of military leaders in Saigon. Komer strongly challenges that picture. While there are any number of examples of false or misleading reporting, and while the public benchmarks for success were unquestionably inappropriate, Komer makes a compelling forest/trees argument predicated largely on the record in The Pentagon Papers. Sure, battalion and brigade commanders may have inflated their body counts and pencil-whipped reports on “pacification,” but Komer argues that policy makers in Washington were well aware of the deteriorating situation in Vietnam, and that they recognized the causes of that situation. No matter how many fake trees may have been reported, the White House knew the forest was on fire.

Aside from accentuating the positive, official reporting tends to suffer from an obsession with quantification. Consequently, the government privileges indicators that can be quantified without regard to their relevance. In campaigns like Vietnam and Iraq, where there is no clear enemy order of battle, information that can be counted is often meaningless, and the most important information is often subjective, intuitive, and constantly shifting. When public support is the key to success, effective polling is the obvious measure of choice. Unfortunately, effective polling relies on a whole suite of conditions that do not exist in a war zone–accurate census data and security for pollsters first and foremost.

The situation is further aggravated when the metrics change constantly. Following the Vietnam War, the U.S. military reached the obvious conclusion that individual replacement every twelve months shattered unit cohesion, deprived the force of institutional knowledge, and created vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, DoD was unwilling, or politically unable, to come to grips with the implications of those observations. While the military eliminated individual rotations, it simply replaced them with unit rotations, thereby improving the unit cohesion problem at the expense of making the institutional knowledge problem even worse. At least under individual replacement, only about 1/12 of the force rotated in a given month. Under unit replacement, nearly all institutional knowledge would depart a given operational area within a week.

The rotation of units, combined with the careerist pressures of the military, caused each incoming unit in Iraq to select a largely new set of metrics to assess progress. Incoming units established new metrics, determined that their predecessors had left a mess, then spent 12 (or later 15) months working to improve the new metrics, at which point they rotated out and the cycle repeated. Ironically, this cycle of mismeaurement and misinformation did not require unethical or inaccurate reporting by anyone. Incoming units really did find a mess because the situation was generally deteriorating. They not unreasonably determined that their predecessors were both failing to improve the situation and measuring the wrong indicators. In setting new indicators, incoming units were careful to select factors that they could both affect and measure, knowing that failure to accomplish their goals would be career-ending for their commanders. Units were therefore able to improve their metrics while the situation around them worsened.

Komer’s articulation of similar dynamics in Vietnam over three decades earlier raises the obvious question, and accusation, why did we not learn? Why did we repeat the errors of our fathers?

This brings us to the central premise of Komer’s study and his most valuable insight. Large, bureaucratic organizations do what they are organized, resourced, and trained to do. They are generally very good at dealing with clearly defined, recurring problems. They are not good at adapting to new, poorly defined problems. Even when the characteristics of a new problem become clear and the solution is visible, existing organizations will not adapt unless shaken by a disaster and threatened with destruction–sometimes not even then.

To understand the military’s failure to adapt in Vietnam it is essential to bear in mind both its antecedents and its contemporaries. The generals who led in Vietnam mostly began their careers in World War II, a conflict of firepower, linear tactics, and large-unit engagements. They followed World War II with Korea, where effective conventional tactics eventually worked to achieve a stalemate that favored the U.S. and its South Korean allies. The highly superficial commonalities between Korea and Vietnam–wars against Asian Communists from northern rump states–caused U.S. military leaders to make a category error. Meanwhile, the war in Vietnam was never the main show for the U.S. military. Throughout the conflict, the U.S. military’s primary role remained deterrence of the Soviet Union, necessitating highly conventional force design, training, equipping, and doctrine.

This is the point that Komer drives home again and again. Bureaucracies “perform their institutional repertoires” and the institutional repertoire of the U.S. military, particularly the U.S. Army, was big unit wars against conventional enemies.

Komer’s study focuses primarily on the U.S. bureaucracy and the Vietnamese bureaucracy through the lens of its interaction with the American, and he clearly believes at a very basic level that better performance would have resulted in better outcomes. Nevertheless, he acknowledges the possibility that the problem was unsolvable and articulates the fundamental dilemma of great power counterinsurgency over and over.

The GVN’s performance was even more constrained by its built-in limitations than that of the U.S. In the last analysis, perhaps the most important single reason why the U.S. achieved so little for so long in Vietnam was that it could not sufficiently revamp, or adequately substitute for, a South Vietnamese leadership, administration, and armed forces inadequate to the task. The sheer incapacity of the regimes we backed, which largely frittered away the enormous resources we gave them, may well have been the greatest single constraint on our ability to achieve the aims we set ourselves at acceptable cost. (vi)

Quite simply, if the local government were not a complete mess, it would not need great power intervention in the first place. There is a disparity of motivation between the great power and the insurgent, but there is an equally large disparity between the great power and the supported government. A “victory” that requires the ruling class to surrender its power, wealth, or ideology is not a victory in their eyes, but civil wars and insurgencies rarely gain traction in societies with equitable distribution and representation.

Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan will see clear shades of Baghdad and Kabul in Komer’s assessment of the GVN. Indeed, T.E. Lawrence’s 15th article points to his understanding of both the inherent problem and the difficulty, for effective soldiers, in overcoming it:

Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is. (http://www.pbs.org/lawrenceofarabia/revolt/warfare4.html)

Lawrence was uncharacteristically humble in circumscribing his advice to the culture he knew well, but the same basic dynamic was at work in Indochina. The frustration of watching poor or corrupt performance is simply too much for the average western military professional, and yet poor and corrupt performance will be the standard in any nation requiring outside assistance. It is a paradox understood by experienced counterinsurgents (and parents of teenagers) that providing less assistance can engender better performance. Komer points out that President Johnson’s limitations on troops and bombing following the “Tet shock” forced “the GVN and ARVN at long last to take such measures as manpower mobilization and purging of poor commanders and officials. After Tet 1968, GVN performance improved significantly” (142). Komer’s observation of bureaucratic behavior and limitations combined with the paradoxical realities of counterinsurgency pose a cautionary tale for anyone contemplating intervention.

The U.S. military of 1965 (or 2001) was an enormous organization, run through almost comical levels of bureaucracy by necessity. There is simply no other known method of organizing and operating a worldwide organization requiring millions of people and billions of dollars. Contrary to the mythology of Hollywood and Washington, DC, bureaucracies are not made up of or run by mindless drones, imagining new forms to require so they can be left in peace to enjoy their donuts and cigarette breaks. Bureaucratic leaders tend to be thorough, energetic, optimistic, and ambitious, and they are generally highly reliant on rules and order. They advance by closely following established procedures and avoiding embarrassment. When intervening in a civil war or insurgency, we place such leaders in a chaotic situation in which they have little control over actions or outcomes and are surrounded by people whom they see as incompetent, corrupt, and deceitful. Because their careers depend upon providing measurable results and avoiding embarrassing failures, they have strong incentives to gain control of the immediate tactical situation and to emphasize areas in which they can control the variables. In other words, they are exactly the wrong people to operate in the roundabout, oblique manner that Lawrence recommended.

The problem is aggravated by the mismatch between rhetoric and reality. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. government claimed that maintaining a friendly South Vietnam was a vital U.S. national security interest, but it never acted in a way that supported that claim. In both the Civil War and World War II, the U.S. Army enacted tectonic shifts in its manner of operations, admittedly facing resistance at every turn, because the unprecedented threats provided the impetus to overcome bureaucratic inertia. The Army’s approach to Vietnam (and Iraq and Afghanistan) demonstrated that its leaders did not believe their own dire assessments of the war’s importance. The Army failed to alter assignment policies or organization in ways that would have materially improved its efforts, even when those changes were identified. Moreover, the Army’s inertia may have been a rational response to the situation. The U.S. faced the Soviet Union in a peer competition that threatened the destruction of human civilization, while the 1975 collapse of the South Vietnamese regime with almost no significant consequences for the United States proved that the threat there had been badly overblown. Organizing to fight a conventional, mechanized war against regular units was precisely what the United States should have been doing in the 1960s.

Recent work by Walter C. Ladwig, III (“Influencing Clients in Counterinsurgency: U.S. Involvement in El Salvador’s Civil War, 1979–92,” International Security, Volume 41, Number 1, Summer 2016, pp. 99-146) raises the possibility of alternative approaches that do not rely so heavily on the adaptability of rigid military bureaucracies and do not commit U.S. prestige so decisively. Inherent in the more indirect approach, however, is the willingness to fail. While “failure is not an option” is rarely actually spoken in the military, the phrase “we don’t plan for failure” is common. Planning for or accepting the possibility of failure is anathema to the successful military officer in the same way that standing by and watching local partners accept bribes or perform incompetently is. However, the willingness to fail is a basic necessity for U.S. intervention in wars of choice if we do not wish to keep repeating the mistakes of Indochina, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Once we accept the premise that the outcomes in places like Vietnam and Iraq can be desirable without being essential, we can correct the category error that has led us to excessive, but ultimately failed, full-scale military intervention. A civil war in a strategically useful but not essential country on the far side of the world may be a war for the people who live there without being a war for the United States. That is not to say there will not be violence or U.S. casualties–both occur often without being deemed a war–but they will not require mobilization of the nation or national commitments of prestige to the point that the U.S. cannot accept failure. Rather than view them as wars, U.S. decision makers can view them as investments, and just as with an investment they can define what risk they are willing to take and build an alternative plan for failure.

Komer describes the failures of the various command structures throughout the Vietnam conflict. Despite the recognition that the conflict was primarily political, the military always ended up in charge because it provided the bulk of the resources. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge was allergic to managing, and Ambassador Maxwell Taylor, who seemed to be the perfect “civilian” to merge the various efforts and subordinate the military, instead deferred to the generals and the military command structure from which he had sprung. In his conclusion, Komer argues that ad hoc organizations may be superior to repurposing existing organizations because they will not be so wedded to “institutional repertoires.” He maintains that such ad hoc organizations were generally effective in Vietnam, but it is worth noting that the Coalition Provisional Authority that nominally ran the early campaign in Iraq was a conspicuous failure. Theory and common sense would tell us that a strong ambassador is the right person to head such an effort, but history gives us reason for caution. This dynamic might be more functional in an environment with less military presence–the overwhelming resource disparity lends power to the military chain of command that civilian agencies find hard to overcome. A more indirect approach might reduce that inequality by lowering the requirement for and value of military contributions.

Regardless of the command structure, it is essential to identify measures of both performance and effectiveness, determine the indicators and resource collection, and then follow the evidence to legitimate, no matter how unwelcome, conclusions. Komer devotes extensive space to assessing the assessments and reaches the conclusion that an external review is a necessity. In Vietnam the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) conducted, in Komer’s view, excellent analysis, but the Joint Chiefs of Staff formally objected, twice, to OSD analyzing military performance in the field. In Vietnam, MACV consistently analyzed the wrong data because their theory of the war was wrong. In line with fighting a conventional war, they developed conventional order of battle metrics that failed to capture meaningful information. This is one lesson the U.S. military learned between 1975 and 2003 but did not follow to an effective solution. In Iraq, U.S. forces attempted to measure factors they associated with counterinsurgency, but DoD and the theater commanders never agreed on a standardized set of metrics, and they never resourced collection of the most relevant, and difficult to collect, data regarding public opinion. Consequently, incoming units frequently designed new metrics and started from new baselines, providing a hodgepodge of data covering 12, 15, and 9-month increments but useless for long-term comparisons.

While the ideal command arrangement is open to debate, the need for external, objective analysis is clear. In future, an honest broker, unbeholden to the chain of command, must collect and analyze relevant data across the entire duration of U.S. involvement in any conflict. Such an organization must be resourced to collect the necessary data regardless of cost or difficulty. Just as a venture capitalist would not commit funds to an enterprise without identifying indicators of success or without access to vital information, the U.S. cannot blindly commit itself without the ability to judge its own performance. Such an independent analytical organization, paired with an effective “red team” to challenge assumptions about the opposition might provide leaders with the necessary information to make hard decisions.

It is certainly true that history does not repeat itself–one of Komer’s key points is that each national situation is unique–but history does highlight institutional weaknesses that can operate similarly across multiple situations if not corrected. Bob Komer’s study of institutions in Vietnam is likely to strike a chord with anyone who has spent more than a week working in a bureaucracy, and it is likely to resonate painfully with those who watched the U.S. military flounder in Iraq and Afghanistan. It often leaves the impression that U.S. counterinsurgency theorists skimmed his chapter on possible viable alternatives without bothering to place it in the context of the entire report. Komer’s observations provide a devastating view of the inherent obstacles to great power intervention, and the history of such adventures since 1972 offers little reason to believe we can overcome them.

Review – The Bedford Boys: One American Town’s Ultimate D-day Sacrifice by Alex Kershaw

The Bedford Boys: One American Town’s Ultimate D-day Sacrifice. by Alex Kershaw. MJF Books, 2003. ISBN: 978-1-60671-135-4. 274 pages.

In The Bedford Boys, Alex Kershaw tells the story of one Virginia National Guard infantry company that was virtually wiped out on D-Day. Because of the extraordinary sacrifice of the small town of Bedford, Virginia, it was later chosen as the site of the National D-Day Memorial. The Bedford Boys is second- or third-rate history, a chapter or long magazine article stretched out to book length without much added.

Kershaw tells the story of the soldiers and their families struggling through the Depression and joining the National Guard for the steady employment and the camaraderie. In focusing on the human stories–so similar to millions of other stories from thousands of small blue-collar communities all over the United States, he misses the opportunity to do more valuable work. Why, in 1941, did the United States rely so heavily on geographically recruited National Guard units to fill out its ranks? As David Johnson pointed out in Fast Tanks and Heavy Bombers, the problems of mass mobilization dominated American military thinking between the world wars. The United States had successfully recruited a mass army between 1861 and 1865 but had then botched it badly in 1898.

Early in World War I, the British Army had recruited “pals battalions” of young men from small villages, schools, or even single factories as a way to encourage enlistment prior to the imposition of conscription. The results were devastating when those same battalions were cut down in waves by German machine guns on the western front. Because casualties in war are so disproportionately distributed, recruiting infantry units from small communities can devastate individual communities. The United States had experienced the same phenomenon in the Civil War. Nevertheless, military planners viewed rapid recruitment and induction as their primary challenge without much thought for the social effects. Combined with America’s militia history and sensitivities over states’ rights, the National Guard provided a convenient solution.

The results were devastating for small towns with high National Guard participation, and none more so than Bedford. Company A of the 116th Infantry Regiment was assigned to the first “suicide” wave at Omaha Beach. Not one soldier from the company commander’s landing team returned home. In fact, it is likely that all died within the first ten minutes of the landing. Thirty-seven young men from Bedford, Virginia were serving in Company A on June 6, 1944. Twenty-two died in the Normandy campaign. Only six of those who actually made it to Omaha Beach also made it home. None of the survivors served as a rifleman throughout the campaign–their casualty rate was 100%.

Military Transition

I have now completed my first full month as a defense contractor, words I never expected to write. Anyone who thinks he can spend two and a half decades in an institution and walk away without disorientation is fooling himself, but I must admit that I’ve been caught off guard by the extent of disorientation. Ten months without a job and four months of true unemployment did not help matters at all. Anyway, here are some observations for anyone getting ready to make the jump.

The Army is not what you do, it is who you are. If that is not true for you, then I do not know how you could give it 20+ years. There are simply too many times when it is not worth it on a strict cost:benefit basis. The About Me section of this blog lists the four things that anyone knows about me within five minutes of meeting me–I put being a soldier on a par with my marriage and my children. Chances are that when you leave the military–particularly to go into a contracting gig–you will do your job rather than be your job. If you want deep meaning from your work, then plan well in advance and set yourself up to go into public service, teaching, non-profit work, or something else that really fires your passion because those jobs will not come along naturally, and they will entail significant modifications to your lifestyle (more on that later).
None of the above implies that defense contracting is bad or evil or even particularly venal. You can do work that is both challenging and valuable to our national defense. A single good day at my current job could save soldiers’ lives, make our Army more effective, or save enough money to pay for my entire program many times over. It is valuable work. The difference between what I’m doing now and what I did before, or what I might be doing, is that I don’t have any authority to make decisions, and I am inherently operating from a profit motive. My company exists to make money by doing good work. In theory, government employees do good work for the sake of the work and get paid just enough to keep them doing it. Everyone at my company cares about the quality of our work and the value we provide to the Army, but we would stop working immediately if they stopped paying us. That’s not a bug, it’s a feature. It’s how capitalism works. Just be prepared for a little soul searching after decades of pride in your personal sacrifice.
And about that sacrifice…. Sure you risked your life and you spent years away from home and you dragged your children to eight different schools in 10 years. Those were all very real sacrifices. Beyond that I buried people I loved when they were far too young. I know people who sacrificed their health, their limbs, even their sanity. Those sacrifices are real. But if you’re a senior officer, chances are you did not sacrifice as much financially as you think you did. Odds are you do not pay state income taxes because at some point you were stationed in Texas or Washington or Florida or Tennessee or Alaska or California or Kentucky or some other state that either has no income tax or doesn’t charge military out-of-state income tax. You also receive a housing allowance every month that Uncle Sam not only did not tax but factored into your sales tax calculation–instead of taxing you on that very large amount of money, he actually gave you a tax deduction for it. I don’t know about you, but that was worth about $50,000 per year to my family. My contracting salary is 25% larger than my military salary, but my take-home pay is 1/3 less. With my retirement pay I am still money ahead, but I am not nearly as far ahead as the raw numbers would make you think. Be grateful for what you get as a career soldier, and be prepared for a reality check when you join the rest of the tax-paying country.
The path to defense contracting is a rut, and it’s deep. There are reasons so many retirees find themselves right back in the Building or at Camp Swampy, doing largely what they did in uniform. First, the military dependence on contractors has grown substantially over the past 30-40 years. Republicans hate government employees but like military spending and love private-sector profits. Democrats like jobs in their districts and don’t much care if they are contractors or government employees. At least contractors pay taxes (see 3. above). The result is a growing number of contracting jobs and a static or shrinking number of government jobs. Of course military retirees do not have to sell their services to DoD in any form, but then we run into factor 2. Military experience often does not translate that well into the true private sector. Senior military officers are mostly generalists with lots of leadership and management experience but few hard skills. To the extent we do have hard skills, they are in areas like delivering fires, military logistics, organizing defense of a forward operating base, etc. There are companies that want those skills–defense contractors. Civilian companies want supply chain managers, personnel managers, IT specialists, sales managers, marketing managers–and they are not impressed with the military analogues. Apple and GE will not learn much about marketing from the Army. My current job requires both a deep and broad understanding of how the Army runs. You could hire a more junior contractor, but he would not be able to do the job. Government employees with years of experience in the Army staff would be just as good and cheaper, but the Army is cutting its staff, not growing it.
The other option for retirees is the meaning route. Become a teacher, work for a charity, go into the clergy, work in politics. These are valid and viable options that offer a similar sense of purpose to your military career. They pose two surmountable but real obstacles–they do not pay much, and they’re just as hard to enter as the non-military corporate world. Some of these roles–teaching and clergy–require credentials. After you retire is not the best time to get them if you have a mortgage or tuition payments to cover. Others, like politics and non-profits, tend to hire young idealists and then promote from within. They rely on a high degree of inside knowledge and experience. Moreover, they may not want you even if you’re prepared to start at the bottom. Those doing the hiring are understandably leery of older, experience leaders accustomed to high salaries. They may worry that you think you are willing to start at the bottom but will quickly become disillusioned with the low pay or will expect a much larger voice in decisions than your entry-level merits. They may worry that three decades of military life have left you ill-suited for the non-profit culture. If you want to go this route, start volunteering well before your actual retirement and be prepared to wait for an opportunity. Arrange your life on a very austere budget and commit to substituting meaning for remuneration.

I am incredibly grateful that a former colleague sought me out when he had a job opening. I am incredibly grateful to the company that hired me. I am incredibly grateful that the military’s generous retirement pay and benefits gave me the freedom to wait months for an offer rather than lowering my sights in desperation. The world is full of opportunities for those leaving a military career, but better planning would have opened those options up to me more fully. Whenever I counseled soldiers who planned to leave the military, I told them to be sure they were running to something and not just from the Army. That was good advice, and I probably should have followed it a little more closely. I got lucky and everything worked out, but I do not recommend my course of action.