CJCS to Military: Ditch the peacetime mentality…
Both Stuart Koehl and I have received our fair share of angry letters for suggesting that the military needs to lose the chickenshit attitude and rediscover the “damn the torpedoes” warrior ethos that has characterized America’s historical dominance on the battlefield. Now that the Chairman has gone on record saying what is in effect the exact same thing, I’m hoping that the administrative military takes a strong look inward. This war stops on a dime and changes direction in the blink of an eye. It is perhaps one of the fastest paced conflicts that we’ve ever had to fight, in that the military is forced to continuously reinvent the wheel so as to stay one step ahead of an enemy unencumbered by the administrative suck. The bad guys move fast, while the peacetime military–still prevalent in our ranks–has built career officers and NCO careers in a bureaucratic fashion straight out of the Dilbert comic strips. Focus groups and committees, risk aversion, bloated command structures and a disproportionate ratio of bosses to war fighters, all bring operations that should be fast-paced, flexible, and innovative to a screeching halt. That the top man in uniform has said “enough!” is one small step for the military, one giant leap for the war on terror. I’m eager to see Admiral Mullen’s vision translated into policy, and hope that step one in the implementation strategy is a force-wide ban on Microsoft Powerpoint. That’d do a hell of a lot more for military productivity than a ban on blogs.
