When it comes to military reform,
China appears to be doing it a lot better than the United States
US army 1LT Matthew Hernandez looks down the Korengal Valley
from a mountaintop outpost 24 October 2008 in the Kunar Province of eastern
Afghanistan. Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images
In the years after World War I,
British military strategist Captain B H Liddell Hart advocated a new fighting
concept that solved the problem of the static, set-piece nature of that
conflict that resulted in the pointlessly slaughter of millions. He advocated
for a force of coordinated armored, infantry, and air power fighting in mobile
formations, operating under the "indirect method".
Unfortunately, key leaders in London
and Paris rejected his theories because they had "won" the Great War
and didn't feel the need to change. Less than two decades later, a combined
British and French field army would be swept off the continent and into the
English Channel in a lightning war by a German army that had listened to and
incorporated some of Captain Liddell Hart's key concepts. Unless significant
changes are made, the modern-day US army could be half-way to suffering a
similar fate.
In an article
published today by the Armed Forces Journal in Washington DC, I
argue that the US army's generals, as a group, have lost the ability to
effectively function at the high level required of those upon whom we place the
responsibility for safeguarding our nation. Titled "Purge the Generals:
What it will take to fix the army", the article details how our senior
military leaders have amassed an unprecedented record of failure in major
organizational, acquisition and strategic efforts over the past 20 years.
The worst part is that senior
leaders are likely to repeat the mistakes of the past by readying the US army
for the wrong future; one in which the US could suffer an otherwise avoidable
military defeat.
The global strategic situation has
undergone considerable change in the past five years. Beginning in late 2007,
the US economy suffered its most significant economic downturn since the Great
Depression; recovery has been slow in coming and tepid since its arrival. With
the conclusion of the eight year war in Iraq
and the sun setting on the 12 year bleed in Afghanistan,
the US is being forced to reduce both domestic and defense budgets. Whether
anyone wants to scale back the armed forces or not, reductions are coming. The
question, then, is how those cuts are to be made.
According to the 8 July edition of
the Army Times, senior leaders have announced they will reduce the US army from
the current level of approximately 535,000 down to 490,000. The unequivocal
result: a smaller and less capable army. Many military leaders warn that these
cuts will have a hollowing effect "putting our national security at risk",
(pdf) as General Odierno told a Congressional panel in February 2013, and imply
there are no other alternatives.
That is not correct.
In 1997, then-lieutenant colonel
Douglas A Macgregor published Breaking the Phalanx: a New Design for Landpower in the
21st Century describing a military transformation that would result
in a smaller, less expensive force which would produce greater combat
capability than the larger formations it would replace. Unfortunately, US
officials rejected those new ideas, opting instead for incremental changes,
which left the field army little changed from the version that won Desert Storm
in 1991. One nation, however, did not reject Macgregor's ideas.
In 1999 two colonels from the
Chinese people's liberation army (PLA) published a strategic analysis called Unrestricted
Warfare. In this essay, they discussed the changing military environment
and ways China could modernize its force for future war. Regarding force design
and operating methods, they wrote: "In his book, 'Break the [Phalanx]
(sic),' [Macgregor] advocated simultaneously abandoning the systems of
divisions and brigades and replacing them with … battle groups of about 5,000
men each… [The book recommends the adoption of] building-block methods
according to wartime needs and put into practice mission-style group
organization."
These views apparently heavily
influenced PLA modernization theories, as one year later Breaking the Phalanx
was translated into Chinese. A decade after that, the US army's
Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) reported the PLA had incorporated
many of Macgregor's concepts. In the SSI's 2011 study Chinese Lessons from Other People's Wars (pdf),
the author noted
The PLA entered the 21st century in
the midst of a transformation from essentially an infantry based force into one
designed around combined arms mechanized operations. A decade into the new
century, the PLA is redesigning its forces into battle groups, using modular
force structures and logistics to support operations in high altitude and
complex terrains, conduct out of area operations, and develop the core for its
vision of a hardened and network-centric army.
Macgregor has recently updated his
concept to account for the past decade of US war experience. Whereas current
army plans call for reducing the force to 490,000, the Macgregor
Transformation Model (MTM) can produce an army with as few as
420,000 troops that actually has greater combat power than the force of 535,000
had before the reduction, but cost more than $10bn a year less. The MTM would
also produce a more strategically responsive army, and perhaps most
importantly, could be sustained at this high level of performance even in the
era of constrained budgets. The US
military leaders continue to reject MTM, while the Chinese have
embraced it and are years into the transformation.
Before the United
States shares a fate with 1940 Great Britain and falls victim to an
ignored reformer's ideas, we must reorganize the US army into a stronger force
while there is yet time. Logic affirms the reasonableness of such action.
Budgets demand it.
• The opinions expressed here are
those of the author alone and do not represent the views of the Department of
Defense or the US Army.
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