Air University Review, September-October 1985
The Honorable Gary Hart, Member
United States Senate
THE defense debate in the United States is today undergoing a profound transformation. For many years, it was little more than a debate about the size of the defense budget. One group argued that the Soviet military challenge was growing and that to meet it we should give the Pentagon more money. Another group countered that we were overestimating the threat and that the Pentagon was poorly managed anyway, so we should spend less for defense. Neither paid much attention to the fact that the size of the defense budget is only one component (and often not the most important one) in determining whether a military or a nation wins or loses a battle, a campaign, or a war.
Today, the defense debate increasingly includes a third group of people, some of whom are politicians, some civilian defense thinkers, and some serving military officers, especially more junior officers. They are known as military reformers. Military reformers focus their attention not on the size of the defense budget but on the question: "What do we need to do to be able to win––and, therefore, deter––wars? Because the notion of winning is meaningless in a nuclear war, the military reform movement concerns itself only with conventional forces. However, it is beginning to transform the conventional force debate from one concerning budget size to a broader one focused on the art of war and the changes we need to make in order to develop military excellence.
Our recent military history makes it sadly clear that changes are needed. Our last clear-cut victory against a serious opponent was the brilliant and audacious Inchon landing. Vietnam, the Pyrrhic victory in the Mayaguez affair, the failed Iranian rescue mission, and the loss of almost 250 Marines to a lone terrorist in Beirut all attest to some deep-seated problems in the U.S. Armed Services. Even the Grenada operation, where we succeeded, raised more doubts than hopes when it took almost nine American battalions three days to defeat a handful of Cubans, most of whom were construction workers.
In seeking to determine where we have gone wrong, we must start by looking at the basic building blocks of any military: personnel, tactics and strategy, and hardware.
Personnel questions are usually discussed in terms of pay, service entrance tests, and so on. But these issues miss many of the most critical aspects of military personnel policy.
One such issue is unit cohesion, the psychological bonding between individuals that takes place within the small, basic unit––the fire team, the squad, the aircraft crew, or the ship's section. In the stress and chaos of combat, people fight less for "king and country" than for their buddies. If the persons next to them are not buddies but strangers, they are more apt to sit out the fight or break and run.
Cohesion can develop only when a unit contains the same people for long periods. It takes time for strangers to come to rely on one another. Today, we do not provide that time. Many U.S. Army combat companies have a personnel turnover rate of 25 percent every three months, the highest in the world. So our troops remain strangers to one another, and strangers do not fight well together.
In the last several years, the Army has moved to address the unit cohesion problem by instituting the Cohort program and by adopting a regimental system, both of which keep people in the same unit for extended periods. But the U.S. Air Force also has a cohesion problem. In combat, it will be vitally important that flight crews and ground crews see themselves as part of the same team, know each other, and work well together. Yet too often, relations between flight and ground crews are not good. The personnel do not intermingle much, and the two groups are organizationally separate––unlike in the Navy and the Marine Corps, where the maintenance officer is also a squadron officer. The unity of flight and ground crews should be a basic requirement, and organizational arrangements should reflect this cohesion, not impede it.
When we look at tactics and strategy, we find that here, too, basics tend to be ignored. Our doctrine for these important fields has long been based on a style of warfare known as "firepower-attrition," in which the object is to destroy the enemy, man by man, killing his troops and blowing up his equipment faster than he can do the same to us. We have fought this way for more than a century. The Union won the Civil War with firepower and attrition, overwhelming the Confederacy with more men and more guns, more supplies, and more firepower. We rolled over the Germans in 1918 and the Axis in World War II in the same way.
This style, however, is badly outdated. Firepower-attrition can work for the side with superior numbers, an advantage we no longer possess. We cannot overwhelm the Soviet Union with superiority in manpower and material. We need a different style of warfare––"maneuver warfare." Here, the object is to destroy the enemy's cohesion––and the opposing commander's ability to think clearly––by creating surprising and dangerous situations faster than he can cope with them. The German campaign against France in 1940 is a good example. So are most Israeli campaigns and Stonewall Jackson's Shenandoah Valley campaign during the Civil War.
In 1982, in a change of historic importance, the Army adopted maneuver warfare as doctrine and proclaimed it in a new version of its basic field manual, FM 100-5, Operations. While the Army still confronts a major challenge in translating the new doctrine from paper to the field, it is making a sincere effort to do so. Unfortunately, the other services have yet to follow the Army's lead. Strong support for maneuver warfare among younger Marine officers, and a few Marine generals as well, is meeting entrenched bureaucratic resistance from Marine Corps Headquarters and in the Marine schools at Quantico. The Air Force is still wedded to independent bombing, while maneuver warfare calls for the integration of air-to-ground action with the ground commander's scheme of maneuver. Recent Army-Air Force agreements have not changed the fact that the Air Force sees subordination of its activities to the needs of the ground commander as a threat to its institutional independence and its tremendous investment in centralized control.
A new way of looking at the nature of conflict that is central to the military reformers' thinking was developed some years ago in the work of an Air Force officer named John Boyd (USAF retired). While a captain, Boyd developed the basics for the system of air combat currently used by the United States. His ideas were influential in the design of the F-16, which, at least in the "A" model, is probably the world's finest fighter plane.
Conflict, Boyd argues, is a matter of "observation-orientation-decision-action cycles," which each contending commander consistently repeats. First, the commander observes not only with his eyes and ears but with his radar, reconnaissance, etc. Then he orients; that is, he forms a mental picture of his relationship to his opponent. On the basis of this picture, he determines a course of action––he decides. He acts. Then he begins observing again, to see the effect of his action.
The commander with the faster cycle will eventually win, because he is already doing something different by the time the enemy gets to the action part of his own cycle. The enemy's action becomes irrelevant. If one side is consistently faster, the margin of irrelevance keeps growing, until the enemy either panics or becomes passive. At that point, he has lost.
It stands to reason that rapid execution of the Boyd cycle requires commanders with boldness, imagination, and initiative. Yet by and large, this is not the type of person being promoted in our armed services today. The cycle puts a premium on decentralization, since rapid decisions can be made only by the officer on the scene. Yet we are busy centralizing our command systems with the latest technology so that the President or a general in Washington can direct a platoon halfway around the world.
The Boyd theory has implications for military equipment as well. In research and development and in the procurement of new weapons, the changes made must be quick and major, so as to make the enemy's equipment irrelevant. In our military establishment, the changes are far too slow. A major new weapon system can be ten to twenty years in development. Our procurement policy favors weapons so complex and expensive that we must keep them in service for decades to get our perceived money's worth. The Navy, for instance, has built itself around the big aircraft carrier for more than thirty years.
And much of our equipment is too complex to work well on the battlefield. A good example is the Air Force's LANTIRN program. No technology, not even the human eye (which is much better than any device we can build) can do what the Air Force is asking of LANTIRN: locate and identify individual tanks in terrain that includes trees and other cover while flying low at 400-500 knots. Tests where old American M-41 or M-47 tanks, which have much greater thermal signatures than Soviet tanks, are put out in the middle of the desert for LANTIRN to "find" are so unrealistic as to be no tests at all. And if the technology did work, what would LANTIRN demand of the pilot? It would require him to fly straight and level directly above enemy air defense guns and missiles. Those pilots who survived their first attempt to do that would not be eager to make a second run. Equipment that makes impossible demands on its operators is not likely to be effective in combat.
Pentagon spokesmen have taken to calling this a debate between quality and quantity. They portray the services as supporters of quality, wanting only the finest weapons for our soldiers, sailors, and airmen. These spokespersons also argue that this concern for manpower necessarily leads to very costly, very complex weapons––the M-1 tank, the F-15 fighter, the big nuclear aircraft carrier. By contrast, they label the military reformers as people who are willing to accept inferior weapons in order to buy more of them––or, sometimes, simply to save money.
In fact, the real debate is between two different definitions of quality. The defense establishment defines quality in technical terms: high technology equals quality. The military reform movement defines quality tactically, in terms of the characteristics that are most important in actual combat. That definition leads the reformers to emphasize such characteristics as:
The same characteristics that give a weapon tactical quality––small size, simplicity, ruggedness––also tend to make it cheaper. Thus, the real choice is not between quality and quantity but between technological quality in small numbers and tactical quality in large numbers. In other words, in most cases we can choose between a small number of weapons quite likely to be ineffective in actual combat and a large number of effective weapons. Current Pentagon policy prefers the former.
Where have these misguided policies come from? To answer that question, we must confront some serious problems in the military education and promotion systems.
All organizations need a balance among several different types of abilities––leaders, to motivate other people to overcome obstacles; managers, to organize procedures and processes; and theorists, to determine what the product should be. In a military service, the theorist's role is particularly important; it is the theorist, more than the leader or manager, who understands the art of war as a whole.
Unfortunately, in our armed forces today, these three roles have gotten badly out of balance. Our military educational institutions too often stress management, not leadership or theory. A cadet can graduate from the U.S. Air Force Academy with only a one-semester course in military history plus a few courses in "military studies."
The U.S. Army is leading the way in reforming military education. It has established a small second-year course at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The entire year is devoted to military history, campaign analysis, and war-gaming, with the goals of teaching the operational art as well as tactics and helping officers learn how to think, not what to do or what to think. After graduation, the students are guaranteed a billet in the G-3 (Operations) shop of a division or corps, where they can apply what they have learned and further improve their skills. The new course is similar in many respects to the excellent interwar Kriegsakademie of the German Army, and like that school, it is centered not on formats and procedures but on the essence of the art of war. It is a major and important step in the right direction if our goal is military excellence.
But in other schools, students are likely to pass through the entire curriculum without even hearing about issues such as style of warfare. Two years ago, at the Air Command and Staff College, so few students signed up for an elective on the Vietnam War that the course had to be canceled. Courses on using a personal computer and preparing for a Pentagon assignment have been more popular. A hopeful sign, however, was that last year both the Vietnam War elective and the Air Force history course were filled through three semesters. Neither computer courses nor electrical engineering nor management courses are likely to help produce new George Pattons. General Patton, a lifelong student of military history, once wrote to Maxwell Taylor, then superintendent of West Point: "I am convinced that nothing I learned in electricity or hydraulics or in higher mathematics or in drawing in any way contributed to my military career. Therefore, I would markedly reduce or wholly jettison the above subjects."
The promotion process reinforces the problems created by the present system of military education. "Efficiency" and "zero defects," the hallmarks of the successful manager, are the best tickets to success. The leader and the theorist seldom meet the zero defects test. Their imaginative approach to problems naturally leads to some mistakes, and the promotion system punishes them for these mistakes without rewarding them for innovation. So problems persist and grow, with the underlying reasons often unrecognized and the proffered solutions largely conventional and uninspired.
How did this situation come about? To some extent, the question answers itself: If the military schools do not provide an education in the art of war and if those who educate themselves and act on their knowledge are not promoted, there will be few at the top to see the need. But that is not the whole problem. We must look deeper still, into how our armed services function as institutions.
There are essentially two institutional models, the bureaucratic and the socialized. In bureaucratic organizations, individuals focus on doing their jobs, defined in narrow "in-box, out-box" terms. This model has become typically American. We see the attitudes it produces in the paper-pushing bureaucrat, the congressman or senator interested only in getting more grants for his own district or state, the assembly-line worker who watches the clock instead of the quality of his work, and the executive seeking laws to throttle foreign competition instead of improving his product. And we see it in the military. Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., the former Chief of Naval Operations, has described some of the ways it works in the navy. For the last quarter-century or more, he writes,
... there have been three powerful "unions," as we call them in the Navy––the aviators, the submariners, and the surface sailors––and their rivalry has played a large part in the way the Navy has been directed. . . Whichever union a commander comes from, it is hard for him not to favor fellow members, the men he has worked with most closely, when he constructs a staff or passes out choice assignments. It is hard for him not to think first of the needs of his branch, the needs he feels most deeply, when he works up a budget. It is hard for him not to stress the capability of his arm, for he has tested it himself, when he plans an action.
The bureaucrat's narrow focus leads him to believe, that the success of his small group within the organization is more important than the goals of the organization as a whole.
The socialized model, on the other hand, defines an individual's job quite differently. It seeks to persuade all who work within the organization to focus on its overall objectives. This is the approach used by such successful corporations as Toyota, Datsun, Sony, and I.B.M. A professor from the University of Tokyo gave an example in a talk at Stanford. He told of a San Francisco bank that had been doing poorly and was bought by a Japanese bank, which sent in new Japanese management. The American employees said, "Tell us what to do differently." The Japanese set forth the values and goals of their bank. The Americans said, "That's all fine, but tell us what to do." The Japanese continued to explain the values and goals of their corporation. The Americans, who wanted detailed instructions, were resentful at first, and productivity fell still further. However, finally they came to understand that they were to use their own intelligence and initiative––not only within their narrow jobs but in everything they could do to further the bank's goals and values. Productivity rose dramatically, and the bank became one of the most successful in the city.
Bureaucratic behavior lies at the core of America's military inadequacies. It is a far more fundamental problem than the budget level of any given year. War demands rapid change, to present the enemy with the baffling and the opaque, resolving quickly into the surprising and dangerous. But change is bureaucratically uncomfortable; it upsets the existing arrangements, the traditional fiefs. In industry, bureaucratic behavior leads to bankruptcies like that of Penn Central. In government, it leads to massive waste. In war, it leads to defeats such as Austria's humiliation by Prussia in 1866 and France's collapse in 1940.
Early in this century, the British navy underwent a series of dramatic and very controversial reforms at the hands of Admiral Sir John Fisher. In his 1923 book The World Crisis, Part I, 1911-14, Winston Churchill wrote of these reforms:
There is no doubt whatever that Fisher was right in nine-tenths of what he fought for. His great reforms sustained the power of the Royal Navy as the most critical period in its history. He gave the Navy the kind of shock which the British Army received at the time of the South African War. After a long period of serene and unchallenged complacency, the mutter of distant thunder could be heard. It was Fisher who hoisted the storm signals and beat all hands to quarters. He forced every department of the Naval Service to review its position and question its own existence. He shook them and beat them and cajoled them out of slumber into intense activity. But the Navy was not a pleasant place while this was going on.
The Pentagon may not be a pleasant place while we reexamine and reform our military services. But, as in Fisher's time, we can hear the distant thunder. It is far less pleasant to confront the new realities for the first time on the battlefield.
The time for reform has come.
Washington, D.C.
The Honorable Gary Hart (B.A., Bethany Nazarene College; B.D., Yale University School of Divinity; L.L.B., Yale Law School) is the senior U.S. Senator from Colorado in the United States Senate, where he has served for ten years and currently is a member of the Senate Armed Services, Budget, and Environment and Public Works committees. His public service began with the Department of Justice. Later he moved to the Department of Interior and practiced law in Colorado. In 1972, he directed Senator George McGovern's presidential campaign; and in 1984, he was a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president. Senator Hart was a cofounder and the first cochairman of the Congressional Military Reform Caucus.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.
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