President Trump, SECDEF, Mr. Musk and DOGE,
I am the host of Chasing Ghosts: An Irregular Warfare Podcast and WarNotes: A Conflict Podcast.
You are about to embark on a dark journey to discover the existential mismanagement and beggared martial imagination of the military mandarins at the Pentagon. You have to prepare to do savage bureaucratic combat with the most financially well-endowed military machine in the history of mankind whose penchant for defeat and stalemate has an unblemished record since 1945. Bureaucratic knife-fighting and Machiavellian combat is the only martial skill they possess.
I have distilled the ten objectives that may finally bring the Pentagon closer to being an effective fighting modality.
1. You must utterly lay waste to the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS) is a process used by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to determine the requirements for military weapon systems. This acquisition system has managed to spend trillions on exquisite platforms and weapons systems that are always a day late and enormously and ruinously expensive. Exhibit A is the aircraft carrier which is the cross and chariot of the 21st century. If the Soviets designed an acquisition system, it would look like ours.
2. 21st century warfare is characterized by three essential characteristics: robotics, autonomous targeting and the employment of hyper-velocity weapons systems.
Robotics from mud to space will not only dominate military conflict in this century through a rolling cascade of Revolutions in Military Affairs that will dwarf such forward momentum in past history but democratize the employment technology to the poorest countries to challenge the first world employment of exquisite platforms.
Autonomous targeting will be a necessity to remove humans in the loop because of the speed and high density of munitions aloft.
Hypersonics are not new (ICBMs and IRBMs have been hypersonic since the 1950s and the world still has no defense against them once they have tipped at apogee and return to earth) and the employment of high parabola weapons (missiles) and shallow parabola glide vehicles like the Fractional Orbital Bombardment Systems (FOBS) are the future whether the US and its weak allies agree or not. Employment and defense against them is Priority One from a species perspective and the Pentagon has failed miserably. I have catalogued hundreds of instances of this here at my blog entries at the Libertarian Institute where I am the Smedley D. Butler Fellow for Military Affairs.
3. The role of the infantry soldier is changing in a way it has never faced in the history of manned conflict for millennia where the technology is delivering weapons that can target individual soldiers or groups of them in a cost-effective fashion. And they can’t escape their fate. And no, there will be no Heinlein-inspired armored suits for super-soldiers, it makes no sense to do so when robots will fill the bill.
4. The US has utterly failed in aggregated fires synchronization systems that align sensors and effectors seamlessly to deliver neutralization and destruction in a peer conflict (there is no near peer conflict anymore; Yemen has proven to be a peer competitor to the US). The Russians have broken the code and the US has not.
5. Global hegemons always fail and fall even in a unipolar world because nothing concentrates the mind on surviving peer conflict than defensive arrangements left of bang. The Chinese and the Russians have a distinct martial advantage as regional hegemons concentrating on both offensive and defensive stratagems synchronized together. The US cannot defend its homeland from military threats, full stop.
6. The entire Professional Military Education (PME) system from A to Z must be ruthlessly gutted and remade in the image of a system that builds fighting men encouraged to embrace risk assumption instead of risk aversion and promulgates a Prussian culture of disobedience that rewards character, initiative and mission command from the lowest ranks (see Auftragstaktik). Burn all DEI influences to the ground, soldiers’ lives literally depend on their aggressive elimination with extreme prejudice.
7. A complete reassessment and rebuilding of the military personnel performance system and a drastic reduction in the number of flag officers and their useless bloated staffs that have been responsible for the perfect and unblemished cavalcade of calamities, failures and stalemates since 1945. Mr. Donald E. Vandergriff has the blueprint ready to go to fix the broken system.
8. Make eccentricity great again in the armed forces. ADM Rickover and the likes of TE Lawrence, Orde Wingate, John Boyd and Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck would not have a prayer in the modern armed forces promotion circus.
9. Create vigorous red teaming & “Tenth Man” entities through all the services and the Joint Staff whose sole purpose is disruption, uncomfortable questions and extrapolating the second and third order effects of every aspect of operations left of bang and after commencement of kinetic operations.
10. Last but not least, force the Department of Defense to take a knee and make defense of the homeland the first priority in everything. Considerations of defense fix the mind in a fashion that assesses heretofore unidentified gaps in knowledge and inquiry.
I have other ideas but this is a good start. Your examination of the DoD is literally a life or death consequence for America, make it count.
Good luck and Godspeed.
