The Army grows up

Gates is going to have a very interesting tenure. In the space of a week, he's taken some big swipes at the military-industrial complex, wasteful procurement, the Navy's force structure, the size of the civilian bureaucracy, and now the excessive number of flag officers. The latter called to mind two recent articles.

First, an article by Jenna Jordan, When Head's Roll. Her thesis is simply that assassination in counterproductive, based on case studies spanning nearly 70 years. It's tempting to say backlash, like the failed bombing in NYC this past week, is the price we pay for a winning strategy. We become our own collateral damage, to be avoided whenever possible yet understood as the cost of doing business on the path to victory. But Jordan makes the case that instead of decapitating a movement, assassination revitalizes violent, revolutionary groups, as the ossified old guard is replaced by younger, more dynamic leaders. With the change in leadership comes changes in tactics, technologies, and personal relationships. It also made me wonder where the inflexion point in an organization occurs before it becomes too old. That perhaps the people who should be in charge is senior middle management, not the boardroom.

Meanwhile, David Brooks wrote a fairly concise history of the development of the COIN doctrine. The piece is unsurprising to anyone familiar with the struggle, and a good enough synopsis for those tuning in. Some saw the summarization in "few hundred words facile", but what struck me most was Brooks' closing graf, wherein he identifies the tension between the old guard, trained "to use overwhelming force to kill bad guys" and the COINindistas who stepped outside the Army to relearn population-centric warfare. They went into academia, to private civilian schools, and they welcomed NGOs and tie-wearers into their deliberations. And, with very few (albeit very notable) exceptions, they were colonels and majors and captains. One of the most profound military theorists in recent memory, John Boyd, was an Air Force colonel.

In combination, the two articles make me wonder if the Army hasn't gotten too old, especially in an age such rapid technological change. Not knowing any generals personally, I can only speculate, and from what I've read of quite a few, they're a highly dynamic group. Still, my general impression is that the truly innovative wither and die just before flag rank, and only an extremely select few of an already highly restricted group are tapped. 1% of colonels make general (beat that Harvard). One of the few times the Army promotion system has broken into the mainstream was when (then) COL H.R. McMaster was passed over for flag rank in 2007, and it attracted a lot of vitriol from industry watchers; he has since been promoted. I'm not even going to guess on something that far above my paygrade. But reviewing my own auto-didactic library of RMA, COIN, and military innovation, I'm struck by the preponderance of (relatively) junior rank, both as authors and as citations.