spectator | (Ret.) Col. Doug Macgregor, writing in the American Conservative in October:
The generals always knew that the public admission of failure would not simply throw 20 years of graft and deceit into sharp relief; such an admission would expose the four stars themselves to serious scrutiny. To explain the rapid collapse of the U.S.-backed Afghan state and the inexcusable waste of American blood and treasure, the American people would discover the long process of moral and professional decline in the senior ranks of the Army and the Marines, their outdated doctrine, thinking, and organization for combat. For the generals it was always better to preserve the façade in Kabul, propping up the illusion of strength, than face the truth.
It was as if the Afghanistan debacle had finally ripped the last scab off the military’s role in the failed enterprise. Suddenly the superstar warrior/monk generals for whom the mainstream media had written endless paeans, before which members of Congress had bowed and scraped, were under the garish light of delayed circumspection.
As a result, there is plenty of talk about what went wrong and what shape the military is in for the future. And certainly just focusing on “the generals” would be shortsighted. This is about the institution — for which America’s trust is actually plummeting. So can the military really afford not to take stock of the cultural, institutional — and yes, political — changes that have swept over it in the last 20 years or more?
“My major concern is military effectiveness,” says (Ret.) Marine Corps. Capt. Dan Grazier, who served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan in a tank battalion and is now a military analyst at the Project on Government Oversight, “that in the rare event where the military does need to be deployed that we can be the most effective, lethal force possible when the situation calls for it.”
After interviews with several infantry veterans who served in the post-9/11 wars, The American Spectator picked up on a familiar theme as the main obstacle for rebuilding the forces and the faith: leadership corrupted by careerism and influenced by outside interests that don’t always coincide with the interests of the national defense.
The forces aren’t healthy: whose fault?
To Grazier’s mind, after 20 years of constant deployments the military is “going to naturally decay.” It’s impossible to sustain systems on a tempo of that measure without undergoing entropy. According to the most recent RAND Corporation study on deployments, 2.7 million service members have served in 5.4 million deployments across the globe since 2001. The National Guard and reserves account for about 35 percent of the total (as of 2015). In fact, thanks to COVID, wildfires, border patrol, and the extra security put on the nation’s capital in January, the Guard was used in 2020 more than any time since World War II. Missions peaked in June when more than 120,000 of its 450,000 members were on duty here or abroad.
Gil Barndollar, who served in Afghanistan with the Marines and is now a fellow with Defense Priorities, says retention will be a concern. These “citizen soldiers” have “become an operational reserve, not the strategic reserve they were originally intended to be,” he told the Spectator. “Manpower is a rollercoaster, the effects on recruiting and retention always have a lag after events and policy decisions.”
He laments that the Guard, of which he is currently a member, has been used to augment the active duty force so that it can maintain what has become protracted, unending overseas conflicts, often using resources and equipment that are needed stateside, particularly helicopters necessary to fight wildfires in western states.
“It hasn’t been just a long year, it’s been a long 20 years,” Army Maj. Gen. Bret Daugherty, commander of the Washington state Guard, said back in January. “I just want to focus on that. We’re all consumed with our domestic operations right now, but it is simultaneous with our overseas deployments, which have not let up one iota.”
Unfortunately, instead of pouring resources and energy into maintaining readiness, much of Washington’s zeal today is about throwing money at shiny new objects: big-ticket weapons systems, ships, and aircraft that either take years to build, become obsolete, or don’t work. A boon to the Beltway defense lobby, not so much for the fighting forces.
“The military has gotten into a lot of bad habits over the last 20 years. If you look at the amount of money that was thrown at the Pentagon, it’s created a lack of discipline,” Grazier charges. “After 9/11 the floodgates were opened wide. That played to the worst tendencies of the military industrial congressional complex.”
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