Episode 721: Reforming the Pentagon, with Gary Anderson

You could hop in there and during the course of the show, if you have some observations you want to share, or if there's a question you would like for us to direct to our guests, that's a great place to put it. We always appreciate your input and feel free to do that. You're more than welcome to If you don't already, I'll do my usual alter call that go ahead and find mid Rats on iTunes, Spreaker, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts, and if you don't already, go

ahead find us and subscribe. It's free, and that way we will be available for you if you can't make it live for a time that's more convenient to what you want to do. And today our discussion we're going to talk about change. Change is always good and reform is always good. And at the beginning of every administration there is a window and it can be short or it can be long, but it's usually to the short side where you can set the tone and start to reform things in year one and then spend the next

few years trying to operationalize it. It Congress on board, and we're at that point here a couple of months into the Trump administration, and when we look at the Pentagon, there's lots of options, lots of people with ideas. Is on some things that the new administration should look at on reforming in today's guest is the author of a recent article and you can find a link to it on the show page titled real military Reform? Will Pete

Hegseth be able to reverse our military decline? And our guest is Gary Anderson, Colonel the United States Marine Corps retired. He was the chief of Staff at the Marine Corps War Fighting Lab and he also served as a special advisor to the Deputy Secretary of Defense and adjunct professor at George Washington University. Gary, Welcome to Interraps.

was oney three and forty seven days. And I've always thought the link that we had fought World War two is useful in a couple of ways, sometimes humors to measure how we're being able to do things, whether you're talking about programs or personnel changes or things like that.

So one thousand, three hundred and forty seven days for the US to fight World War two, And when you look at the most recent significant inflection point in national security, that was the fall of Kabul, which you can measure as the thirtieth of August of twenty twenty one, that was one thousand, three hundred and thirty six days ago, ninety nine point one three percent of the time it took for US to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

And I know you're probably when you're saying some time it's a little longer than that, But time flies, and there's been a lot of problem appreciation, uh, consuming that time. So when you when you talk about that sometime, what timeframe are you looking at and what direction do you see that drift that concerns you the most.

him there. I can you know, cite other examples of failed reforms, and that goes back to the original, you know, to the question of since the fall of Kabul, you would think that we would have taken a step back and said we're doing something wrong here, something something went badly wrong about how we were dealing with Afghanistan and

perhaps the world in general. I personally think that a lot of it goes back over thirty years to the Goldwater Nichols quote military reforms unquote, that we're supposed to make us a lot better. I think we have been suffering. It took a while for us to really feel the

unintended consequences of the Goldwater Nichols Reform. But I think a lot of that has to do with what the unintended consequences of that particular that particular piece of legislation, and along with that the Skelton Military Education reforms that we kind of went hand in hand with it. So this thing, in my view that the rot goes back a long way. We're just starting to see the real results of it.

for quite some time. But it was originally designed to we have began back in the mid nineties a little thing we call the Experimental Unit that we grew out of our war Marine Corps Wargaming Center, which I was the director of, and was really designed to take a look at the future and emerging opportunity, emerging concepts and so forth, and see if we could integrate those into

the Marine Corps. It started out very small, with about fifteen people, but when General Charles Krulak took over his comment doant on the Marine Corps, he expanded the concept into a bunch larger, much more reasonably funded organization. Robustly Fundedzation I should say, grew to several hundred people, and it was designed to do exactly that, to try to try to look into the future and see if we could take some of these emerging technologies, emerging concepts and

integrate them into the Marine Corps. Marine Corps operating approach. One of our first, very first successes was General Tony Zen.

He took a group of unit of mostly Marines to evacuate the UN mission in Somalia when thing started to go really bad in nineteen ninety five, and having noticed that we were dealing with if you've ever seen that movie Blackhawk Down, were civilians and are masked are masked by masking enemy snipers and things like that to try to keep the to try to keep civilians away from

our forces with non lethal force. We had some emerging technologies that we looked at and he was able to use them and in a number of ways, a number

of innovative ways to help the operation go. And uh, those are the kinds, those are the kinds of things that we were looking at, things that maybe we could pull off the shelf very quickly in an emergency, but also to look long range down the pike and see if we could do some some good things with the Marine Corps from a standpoint just not just a technology, but some emerging concepts as well.

its and its maintenance procedures and so forth. I think we've gotten really off course with that, and I think it's hurting us from a standpoint of readiness, both of the Navy and the Marine Corps. And I am a little I am concerned with the overall state of the military education and the situation with the ability to promote war fighting competent officers up to general officer flag officer rank. And I think I go back to the go Water Nichols thing. I think that that has been, you know,

a major thing that got us soft. Course. Those are the kinds of things I was talking about the article.

Nichols came in. If you look at the timeframe, it's time. But when you talk to a lot of the leaders

in Congress that our knowledgeable system will, they'll nod their head. But when you look to your left and right, it's hard to find a modern Goldwater are Nichols. It's willing to invest the time to make that change, but it's critical because it was developed during the Cold War forty years ago. Somebody was asking for you just to ride on the back of a three x five card. You know, some of the top areas you think should be looked

at first to replacing Goldwater Nickels. What are those things that you really think stand out that's getting in our way either intellectually or operationally. Having a more optimized total force than what we have right now.

One of the things that go Water Nichols did to try to improve the quality of joint staffs because back then joint staffs were looked at, probably realistically as a dumping ground for mid grade to senior officers who didn't have a potential future in their various services. That may or may not have been true, but the quality of

the of the joint staffs was in question. So they made a decision to go ahead and make sure that every mid grade officer who aspired general officer or flag officer rank spent at least three years if he was selected to go to a to go to a joint staff, which most of them were actually quite small at the time, but to accommodate that huge influx of you know, of ambitious young officers with career promise, they actually mandated that they spend so much time in at least three years

on a joint staff. The problem with that was the size of the staffs at the time was reasonably limited, so they had to make the staffs bigger to accommodate all this access influx, and as a consequence, the staff became you know, the word I use is bloated. I think that's not unfair. I quite frankly don't see how you know a job for a major or lieutenant commander as the graves registration officer at Central Command is going to produce another Halsy or another limits, And I think

that's an accurate way of thinking about it. I've talked to a lot of people who've come out through that system, and many of them thought at that time their career was wasted when they could be honing their war fighting skills as fighter pilots, as battalion commanders, as operations officers, and so forth. As a consequence, that forces these people to develop what I would call a ticket punching mentality.

You know, I have to go to a Command of Staff college, and I have to do my joint staff tour. Then I have to do a command tour, and I have to go to the War College, and I personally think that this is causing a situation where we become jacks of all trade and masters are none. If that makes any sense.

tell the truth to him. Is there indeed, to have a council of colonels at the elbow of the Secretary of Defense to stop him from him to deal with all these political people who were ticket punching and actually tell him what needs to be helped, tell them to know what needs to be done to get back to warfighting. Well, the problem with that is where are you going to

get these colonels? In my view, Back in the day, when I was, you know, raising through the ranks, I was promoted to colonel and in nineteen seventy or nineteen ninety three, at that time, you would spend a certain amount of time in command at the battalion or the regimental level, and you would be bumped up once you finish that successfully to become a you know, to become maybe the chief of staff of a unit, the operations officer, and you would be seen as a guy with the

type of knowledge and that they could give the commander a good, honest shot. And then in many cases, if those guys got passed over for promotion or so forth and didn't just want to retire, they would, you know, they would become the cigar chomping old colonels who you know, who basically were your chiefs of staff, your operations officers, and they were the guys that could look the general in the eye, know and they weren't going to be

promoted and say, generally, you're all screwed up. But this, this is a this is a terrible idea. That's that's going away because of this ticket punching thing. Regimental commander now has to go to the ask to go do as joint staff tour or do something else other than become a sort of a graver beard for the commanders

and for the senior civilians. And I'm afraid that's kind of the that's a skill that Goldwater Nichols has got, as we do us out of I think too many, too many people if they get passed over for you know, for either colonel or for brigadier general rank, just say okay, fine, I'll you know, go out and make some money in

the contracting world and get out. And I think I think we've lost that corporate memory of you know, war fighting skills, and not just the ground forces, but in the Navy and probably the Air Force as well.

Part of it is and you're exactly right. I left active duty in nine and to Bob and weave through what I call the Millington dictat and the people in active duty I'll still talk about, they'll still talk with They talk about this as well, is you have all these requirements that don't make any sense to them, whether it's these huge staffs where you have very talented people doing busy work, but you also had with these joint requirements for people, many of them before they even are

looking at commander command. Is this everybody has to have as a master's degree has over the course of a few decades, it's warped what our war college is on. You talked a little bit about that part of the military education, what our war colleges have become. And in that fine out amount of time that you have these people's backsides and seats that the emphasis and the drive for the time they're there may not be the most optimized thing for that what the military needs them to do.

But it goes back to these incentives and disincentives and in theory the military controls, but it's reached the point that they are in many ways controlling them.

that goes into an academic master's degree. A lot of things like you know, amphibious planning for the Marine Corps, all sorts of other those little skills like being able to put together a coherent operation order, et cetera, et cetera, have to get scoped down or maybe even eliminated to give you the time to discuss such hurricane topics as the role of civil military relations and various various a lot of I took a look a couple of years ago at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College, a

curriculum ant of time, and I was appalled to see the short amount of time given the things like, uh, you know, amphibious operations, which used to be the Marine Corps bread and butter, and even some of the you know, the the military histories. I've been talking about, hard military histories, battle studies, and looking at you know, staff rights and things like that, we're quite frankly cut out of the curriculum to do a lot of the to get up.

Quite frankly, what I feel is a second rate master's degree from a third rate institution that should have been a war college or should have been a commanded staff college.

you know, capital ships and so forth. You know about shortly before, I well, shortly before, at the end of the Cold War, I was a fellow at the Naval War College for their Center for Naval Warfare Studies, and Newt Gingrich, who was at that time the Speaker of the House came up and gave us a talk, and he warned about the danger of what he called the

peace dividend. We were at the time watching the Soviet Union collapse, Berlin Wall had come down, and he basically told us that we would be making a very very serious mistake if we didn't at least keep the defense industrial base warm. And I think they at this point in time, we let that happen, and thirty year, you know, thirty almost forty years later, we see the chickens coming home to roost.

knows how critical our SSNs are. We've entered into August with Australia to eventually get them I think the latest number US saw was four at some period of time, but to get them to have a nuclear submarine capability, and yet We also have situations where our existing submarine fleet just we have boats sitting there for literally years just waiting for regular maintenance. What was the underlying cause?

Do you think that we waited so long until it's really reached the crisis point that we would talk about it, But there wasn't an effort for people to invest their personal and professional capital to say stop, this has got to be fixed, and we got to fix it now.

So we now find ourselves halfway through the physical year twenty five and you're not seeing the needle move in the direction you think it would be when you look at some of the briefs that we're getting on the threats that we have coming inside of a few palm cycles.

convinced ourselves that we were invincible. And as we were doing that, you know, the potential opposition has been taking notes, taking a look at the way we fight, ta look at the way we do things come back, and essentially, you know, they slowly, but you know, and not particularly overtly. We're quietly figuring out what we were doing, trying to match our technologies, and maybe they couldn't afford to do it as sophisticated as we do, but they looked at

other ways to get bad things and so forth. And I think we were basically living on our laurels. And I think we've gotten to a point where now we suddenly started to realize that the Chinese have got a pretty formidable you know, military arsenal all the way around to include space, and that we don't have the capability to keep up with them here in the near term.

So quite frankly, we've gotten to a point where our navy is so small, you know, our number of troops that we could put in the field or decrease and so forth. I think we need to really consider the fact that we we're going to have to do some short term catching up. But that may mean some innovation.

It may mean actually, you know, in the case of amphibious ships, where we're really in trouble right now, it might mean taking some of those ships that we put in the off balls and not turned into razor blades or turned into coral reefs, and investing a little bit and putting the black box is necessary to bring them up to speed. In the case of the Navy, old technology has not changed that much in the last probably

fifty years. What has you know has changed is electronic warfare, harming our ships with more sophisticated anti ship missiles or sophisticated air defenses. And I don't think it's that hard, although the shipbuilding industry, the entrenched interests will tell you

it's too expensive. I think it's a heck of a lot easier to strap some high tech black boxes ont a fairly old ship which still has good propulsion and so forth, and and get it back out there to the fleet and try to get us back up to the numbers we probably need to fight a real war.

supporting a force the way we did in World War Two, even a smaller force across the Pacific requires a level of shipping that I don't think we have right now, and I'm not sure where we're going to find the assets even in the Mothball fleet to uh to do to have the numbers we need. Do you do you see a similar thing?

the military. The ability to protect convoys and uh, you know, and get things from point A to point B in a contested environment is way down, and quite frankly, I think you may have had my colleague T. X Hands, another required retired colonel, who recently wrote an article about arsenal ships taking you know, older uh, you know, older commercial halls and putting a you know, putting aboard missiles and drone systems in that and then semi automating them

so you don't have to use so many seamen and use them to augment not only the ability to project power and so forth, but even to do things like escorting the convoys and things like that. I think that's a cost effective, potential solution to some of the problems

we have with building new ships. It's going to take a long time to rebuild that industrial base, so we're going to in my view, we're going to have to be innovative about in the interim about how we build up both our naval power and our our ability to even produced drones. Right now, I think the biggest problem we have and I hate the word drone. I think it's a terrible miss, you know, misapplication of the robotic

aerial technology. But the way we over engineer our drones is they make, they make, they almost price themselves out of the business. And in many ways Stalin was right when he says that quality has a quantity of his own. If you've got one super drone that can, you know, can shoot down twenty enemy drones, and the enemy can still reproduce you with cheaper, inexpensive thirty drones, you're still

going to get overmatched. In my mind, part of that is just this concept that we have to absolutely have the you know, the line of everything, even if we price ourselves out of business doing it.

It's what you can produce in volume that you're expected a fair bit of attrition, and you have to be able to have it operate in a highly contested electronic warfare environment to get there. And secondhand discussion, with some of the work that we've been doing recently with drones, some individual really is starting to see something that is not new. We've seen this before. It's your classic. You

have to have no happy talk. You have to have a really hard bit program manager that's willing to accept bad news and tell other people about it. But with a lot of the unmanned systems that we're bringing on right now, as they're operating with them, there's a big delta.

Forget the pricing point of view, but there's a big delt between what's on the industry power point and now that they're doing a fair bit of operational valuations with them, what they're actually able to do with them, and that delta between what the senior leadership is being promised vice what the operator are actually working at the initial operating email A huge problem are being able to operationalize that.

could do with it? I said, Well, we had a little at that time, a little uh On manned aerial vehicle you'd call it a drone that could be operated by an individual to go out, you know, far enough out to check out a bush sites and things to let a rifle company commander have much more situational awareness. The dierent thing was only costing. It had just had a cheap little camera in it and control device, and

it costs less than thirteen thousand dollars. And I said, you know, if you give the Marine Corps that money, and we can give you one of these little guys for each rifle company in the Marine Corps within the next year year and a half. So he made a

decision to allocate that money. Well, we changed generals and we got a new general and marine aviator who I won't mention his name, but he allowed some of his retired buddies to come in to show him an autonomous UAV that didn't need to be piloted all the time, that was would have two engines and all that sort of thing, and uh, you know was it had all the bells and whistles that probably a company commander didn't need. He decided to use that money for that. Well, I

think by the time, I think by the time I shortly after I retired, instead of having one for every price kept going up, instead of having one for every rifle company in the Marine Corps, we barely had one to give one to each regiment. That's the kind of that's the kind of ridiculous, uh fascination with better being the enemy of good enough that you run into I think somebody so much and he's and he's yeah.

with some of their stuff. But it also has an impact on things that we normally expect to be key elements of war on land where the it's not the although it is javelins and other weapons systems taking out a lot of Russian tanks, they're also using these these small drones and expensive drones to take out the logistics train. And you know, you can, you can, you can drive a tank for a while, but it's going to run out of gas and it's going to run out of AMMO.

And so which is the better way to deal with expensive equipment to attack the enemy's support base or these cheap drones, And these drones seem to be doing a pretty effective job and something we ought to be concerned about. And you know, I know you're interested in the amphibious warfare ships, but I have the same concerns about those.

Those ships were not designed they were designed to be protected by a large number of ASAAW ships and we don't have those, and that they most of those amphibs are not exactly designed for self defense against some of these smaller weaponses. They could be seriously damaged by by these inexpensive drone things, all those range limitation on most of these.

that is not given anymore. And certainly both the Russians and the Ukrainians have seen that happen, and they've really had a hard time supplying their front line troops and so forth due to the due to the unmanned aerial

environment and a number of other things that happened. They have a really difficult time not just only resupplying their troops, evacuating their wounded, evacuating their damaged equipment to be repaired, and so forth, and we just we have not dealt with that for so long that we need to really be thinking about it now. I think to some extent,

you know, robotics can can help there. We experimented quite a bit with using on manned vehicle convoys and so forth to resupply resupply isolated units and air dropping things from onmanned aircraft and so forth. But because we have operated for essentially two decades in a combat environment where logistics was assumed, but we've probably forgotten about how important

it is. There's always that old saying that professionals, you know, amateur's talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, and there's a lot to be said about it.

to have you flesh out a little bit as you you mentioned, and we've all seen it. Recently they announced the for all the services, the recruiting numbers are off the charts. But you stated at the end of the first paragraph in your article, quote, I have not seen such an uptake in morale among our uniform services since Casper Weinberger became Ronald Reagan's Secretary of Defense. Unquote. What are some of the things you think are driving that increase in morale that we're seeing.

and so forth. Most people don't remember this, but back in those days, the Carter administration was permitting serving officers working at the Pentagon from going to work in their uniforms except for one day a week. What kind of signal are you sending when you do that sort of thing. So an awful lot of that was just simply saying, Okay, we are not going to pander to anti military attitudes.

We're going to encourage kids to That's when you saw the Army go to the concept of, you know, we do more things before eight in the morning than most people do all day. Those are the kinds of things that started to pop up that were actually discouraged during the previous administration, and at that time we were coming out of the doldrooms of Vietnam and so forth. But I think just the I think a big part of that is and I've done it myself since since the

last election. I was I won't say I was actively discouraging, you know, young members of my family from going in the military, but I was certainly under the last administration, I wasn't going to encourage them to go in. And recently I gave a close friend of mine whose son is graduating from college, the advice that, hey, he might want to look he's a smart kid. The nuclear Navy is looking for you know, it's looking for people and so forth, instead of looking at going to work for Microsoft.

When I give him a chance to you know, hone his skills and up his resume by doing some time service. I would not have done it a year ago today, Yeah.

DEI quota. You know, you can just of yourself, what do I want to be in an outfit.

with the direction that he wants to go. Some of the changes that we've seen that has not been that out of the scope of what we've seen previous administrations do to get the people and the priorities that they want to have in a leadership position. Do you see anything outside of the normal for some of the resignations and reassignments that we've seen so far, or is this about in line with a new administration that really wants

to make some changes fast.

It's one thing to salute smartly once you've got once you've been given an order, all of us who are in the military, once you've stated your you know, your opinion and all that sort of thing, and the decision goes against you, to salute smartly and you march off and try to do the job as best you can.

It's another thing to slavishly play up to that. And I quite frankly think that the reason we've seen some of these firings and so forth is we've had too many officers that have that have drunk the kool aid, not just in things like DEI, but in many areas where you they they may have known that they were getting bad direction, and it was one It's one thing to go ahead and salute smartly and carry on. It's another thing to not just say, hey, let's think about this,

let's think about the unintense intended consequences. And I think unfortunately we've had too many senior officers in the in the past that have that have gone overboard to keep the civilian It's one thing to accept direction from the senior civilians, it's another thing to pander to it. And I think we've we've got too many officers, unfortunately, a couple of very sigure ones or marines who who went in that direction.

I was in the State Department at the time as a field advisor, and it was obvious to me that once we left that the army, the Afghan army that we had built in our image, was not going to be able to sustain itself out in the field, particularly in the very rugged areas like I was up near the Turkbanistan border, and we had to be resupplied totally by air, particularly during the winter months and so forth.

There was just no way to get to us. And there was no way that the Afghan Air Force, if we'd turned things over to them, would have been able to support that. And we were told that we were going to hand this, in my case a district that I was the district support team leader, over to the Afghans, and it was obvious that there was no there was no way that this was going to work. You know, there was no way they were going to be resupplied

as soon as we left. The entire security bubble that we'd created was going to collapse if it was just left up to the to the Afghans. But there was a political decision made in Washington that looked good on paper to be able to say, hey, we handed this province over to the you know, to the to the Afghans.

Nobody uh objected that. I can't believe. I mean, we sent a lot of memos up and so forth, both myself as the as a civilian reconstruction leader, commander of the Italian contingent was up there, the commander of the Marine contingent that was up there, Marine Special Operations Contingent. We all sent papers up and we're basically told, thanks for your interest in national defense, this is going to happen.

Get on with it. And I firmly believe that many of those generals, and a couple of them unfortunately were marines that knew that this thing was you know, it was going to collapse eventually, and it collapsed in my district much sooner than the nationwide. But you could see that, you could see that this thing wasn't working. But nobody had the guts to stand up and say, you know, we need to change direction. We need to create an Afghan army that could self sustain itself locally and so forth.

That could have been done, but nobody had the intestinal fortitude to stand up and say we're heading in around direct Yeah.

I love Marines. You guys are great. Y'all do kind of run with a pack, but you're innovative and you do like to argue and fight. And one of the argues in fights we've seen recently you engaged in on and that's on Force Design twenty thirty and you said something in your article that I knew had taken place, but I hadn't seen somebody and put it in writing, and that was quote, much of which has been discredited by legitimate gains conducted by CSIS as well as Marine

corpses and Wall Street Journal. Talk for a bit about how people can have this wonderful idea and this wonderful theory that they want to promote and they want to execute, but when somebody presents them a well run war game that raises some legitimate questions, how that can just be pushed in the side that sounds like what you're talking about.

about those games. The concept was pretty straightforward. You know. Okay, some of the ranges of weapons systems might have been classified, but the bottom line is this was put together by a small cotrait of the commandants closest advisors and quite frankly em betted by the wargaming division, which I ran at one time, and we were very proud of the fact that we ran an honest table when they did

war games. Quite frankly, we've had some of the people that were involved in the analysis that that did very critical analysis that was basically never showed up in the final reports. In other words, the books were cooked, and I believe that entirely. I think people, I frankly think people should have gone to jail over it. Billions of dollars have been wasted and spent badly as a result of these quote games that validated the concept war games

don't validate a concept. They basically will show you what the issues may be. When somebody tells you that a war game or a group of war games has validated anything, grab your wallet because you're being scammed. And that's exactly what happened.