It’s Time to Fix Incompetence in the Pentagon
As the evidence of incompetence among senior American military leaders in the Pentagon continues to mount, President Joe Biden and many members of Congress remain in denial. During his recent debate performance, Biden again stressed the overwhelming superiority of the...
The post It’s Time to Fix Incompetence in the Pentagon appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
As the evidence of incompetence among senior American military leaders in the Pentagon continues to mount, President Joe Biden and many members of Congress remain in denial.
During his recent debate performance, Biden again stressed the overwhelming superiority of the U.S. military — a superiority that has been steadily eroded over the last decade. Many will blame this on politicians, but they have merely been the enablers of a military that —like a drug addict — refuses to admit that it has a serious problem. That problem is its senior leadership.
Let’s briefly review what our senior general officers and admirals have done in the past two decades.
Blame ‘Perfumed Princes’ in the Pentagon
First, there was the defeat in Afghanistan. For two decades, our commanders in Afghanistan tried to build an Afghan army and air force on the American model that was unsustainable after U.S. forces left. The terrain and lack of roads meant that resupply on the ground to the remote districts where the Taliban were strongest would have to be by air. We failed to build an air force that could do the job. (READ MORE from Gary Anderson: What Will Replace the Marine Corps?)
The Obama administration can be faulted for trying to prematurely turn over whole districts and provinces to the Afghans, but not a single U.S. commander put his stars on the line by challenging the concept and insisting on a decentralized command and control and logistics system that would allow local Afghan commanders to live off the land as the Taliban did. As under-supplied Afghan commanders cut deals with the Taliban, the “perfumed princes” showed maps of districts and whole provinces under Kabul’s control.
The debacle of the U.S. withdrawal from the Afghan theater rests with the careerist generals who meekly acquiesced to the State Department’s insistence on using the Kabul airport rather than the more defensible Bagram airfield as an embarkation location. Anyone who could read a map should have seen disaster looming, but none of our supposed military leaders — including our inept secretary of defense who is also a retired general officer — had the moral courage to threaten to resign in protest. The result was 13 American service personnel and uncounted Afghans dead. To date, no one has been held accountable. (READ MORE: US Navy Works to Deter Full-Scale War)
Then, there is the Navy. Years of mismanagement and corruption have reduced the Navy to a level of unreadiness not seen since the dawn of World War II. Carriers and amphibious ships, once the backbone of forward presence, are in dry dock for months and sometimes years for needed repair.
Another egregious case of high-level military incompetence comes from the Marine Corps. In 2019, the former commandant of the Marine Corps embarked on a plan to put small Marine units ashore on the disputed islets and shoals in the South China Sea armed with anti-ship missiles that the corps did not yet possess. To afford the purchase of the missiles, he divested the corps of all of its tanks, its assault engineers capability, much of its artillery, and many aviation assets. What he forgot to do was to ask the nations whose territory he intended to occupy if they were willing to go along with the plan. None have so far signed up. Even the Philippines — our closest ally in the region — has indicated that she will not allow U.S. troops to mass there in a war over Taiwan. We have wasted billions of dollars on the whim of a zany and ill-considered concept.
Americans Are Ahead of Their Politicians
On this issue, the American public is ahead of politicians. Once considered the most trusted government institution, confidence in the military has dropped dramatically in recent years. According to a recent Gallup poll, public confidence in the military has fallen to a little over 60 percent. Despite this, the administration and Congress have remained remarkably unconcerned. That is not surprising for Democrats, given that they have run the Pentagon for four years and their woke policies are a large part of the decline in military recruitment among rural and southern areas that have traditionally provided the services with their most qualified recruits. They own the problem.
What is surprising is the relative passivity among Republicans. This should be a major campaign issue. President Trump did touch on it during the recent debate. But when Biden trumpeted his leadership of what he described as the greatest military on Earth, Trump did not challenge him with specifics. At that point in the debate. Biden had done enough damage to himself that Trump probably did not think he needed to follow up. He should at the next debate if Biden shows up. (READ MORE: Here’s How Biden Stays in the Race)
If the Republicans want to regain control of the White House and Senate and widen their lead in the House of Representatives, military reform should provide them with a “Reagan moment.” The great communicator blasted Jimmy Carter over his handling of national security and the bungled failure of the Iranian hostage rescue mission. The Democratic inability to properly get a handle on senior military incompetence should be a major campaign issue. So far all we have heard from the Republican National Committee is crickets.
Civilian control of the military is a key cornerstone of American democracy. If the civilians do not exercise that control, they abrogate it to the military. At this point, that control is in the hands of leadership that is at best incompetent, and corrupt at worst.
Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps Colonel. He served as a special advisor to the deputy secretary of defense and was a State Department advisor in Iraq and Afghanistan. He lectures on alternative analysis at the George Washington University’s Elliott Scholl of International Affairs
The post It’s Time to Fix Incompetence in the Pentagon appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.