A brave lieutenant colonel speaks out: why most of our generals are dinosaurs

"why isn't this guy a brigadier general by now, charged with moving the Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) into the 21st century? And while I'm at it, why isn't H.R. McMaster moving from division to corps command about now?"

Because they can actually have more of an impact where they are. Yingling has helped transform the way we handle detainee ops, and turned them into an asset instead of a liability. He'll be a hell of a brigade commander, and the sooner, the better.

McMaster is actually at TRADOC right now, doing exactly what you say. Shove him into a division command right now, and you lose 80% of a potential impact.

This is a perennial problem for large organizations of all sorts. The basic concern is that the more effort it takes to adapt to the complex environment of the large organization, the less room is left to adapt to the outside world.

Looking for ways to impose higher standards on officers cannot help much -- to meet higher standards the officers will have to work toward passing the particular tests that let them advance, and so they have less room to do anything else.

Rumsfeld had an adequate idea for how to change things. First you build the new structure in parallel with the old one. Then when you're sure the new one works, you let the old one wither away. But he tried to use iraq as a test case for his mostly-special-forces army, and it didn't work well. It particularly didn't give a good way to do a large occupation. Special forces were very good for that in limited missions, but it would have taken a whole lot of them to do the whole thing. Maybe the particular transformation Rumsfeld wanted to do wasn't a good one. Maybe his special forces are worth having but not as the main thing.

Yingling didn't say anything particularly brilliant. Ask any teacher who works for the Los Angeles Unified School District -- a bloated bureaucracy that exists only to perpetuate itself while the teachers (just like soldiers in the field) learn to get their job done not because of but in spite of the "help" they get from their "generals." 'Twas ever thus. Bureaucracies exist to feed themselves. The military is mostly bureaucracy, with a small contingent of people who actually do the dirty work. Surprise, surprise that the softies who run things largely have their heads up their collective asses.

Lt. Col. Yingling is a standout thinker. But agility and adaptation cannot stop with a single Service or the uniformed military.

The depth and width of civilian expertise for planning, execution, and assessment are at least as in need of reform as the Army.

And 21st century conflict cannot be waged, even less waged to a successful end, without a permanent surge in the quality and quantity of US Government civilians.

I just thought of something; it might be old hat to real military thinkers.

The methods that won the last war are battle-tested. If you assume that things have changed enough to make them obsolete, the best you can do is make something up and try to test it with theory and field exercises etc. You won't find out what's really wrong with it until you, ah, test it for real.

So a lot of the time, the old methods might be the best you can hope for. You know they worked once. You don't know that about anything newer. If you don't train to fight the last war, what's better? The one before that? If you train to fight the last war and the next one is somewhat similar, at least you have something to adapt from that used to work.

In a fistfight it's more important to do something quick than to do the right thing. If you wait and study the other guy's moves to figure out how to react, it's too late. But with a war you can hope to last awhile and improve. You can't really depend on doing things right the first time without actual testing. But you can learn from your mistakes and fix things, if the military as a whole can survive those mistakes.

So maybe the point isn't so much to preadapt to the changes you think you'll need. The point is to adapt quickly in realtime. (Or you could try new training with relatively small units, and try them in action and improve on them even while you spread the new doctrine.)

So you want to be able to do new training very quickly, even at or near the battlefield. How can you speed up the training? A shorter OODA loop at that level....

If they can disrupt your communication then it's harder to learn what to change. You want multiple kinds of backup communication methods so they can't disrupt them all.

One of the minor lessons from iraq was that we weren't prepared for lots of small enemy teams with RPGs, far from the front. We had problems with attacks on transport etc far behind the lines even during the active hostilities, and later it got worse. So for example we had a whole lot of HMMMVs that were easy targets, and it took time to uparmor them, and the only nonclassified source I found about the topic said that an uparmored HMMMV got about 2 mpg. You really don't want that armor when you don't need it, but sometimes you have to have it. You want a design that's easy to install and easy to remove? In the next war will there be lots of small enemy units roaming wherever they want, attacking whatever weak targets they find? Will we do that in their rear areas? Can you prepare for that and still be ready to use the advantages you get from not having to do it when they aren't there after all?

I get the impression the navy is at a big disadvantage on this front. Everybody knows that somedays aircraft carriers will become obsolete. And you have to plan ahead for that, because you can't build a replacement for an aircraft carrier in a few months. But how can you plan ahead? If the enemy can destroy aircraft carriers, what surface ships can survive? (Not to mention that admirals stay in carriers, and it's hard for them to think about what happens after they're dead.)

And that puts the marines at a disadvantage. Imagine the exercise -- you've done an amphibious assault and you have more than a beachhead, things are going pretty well, and all of a sudden a carrier somewhere else in the world is in enough trouble that your own carrier group is ordered to move 800 miles farther away. Maybe you can still get supplies but the round trip is a lot slower and somewhat riskier. Everybody who was getting air support has got less of it, except for the carrier group itself. How do you respond? Every marine officer who might someday face that ought to get training for it. I don't know whether they do.

We need a quicker weapons acquisition cycle. Twenty to thirty years is just too long. But on a different level we need very quick training. Currently the idea is to train and overtrain so that soldiers know exactly what to do and can do it immediately without stopping to think. That's superb if it's the right training, and if there are flaws in the training it's still better than being slow.

To adapt quicker we need quicker ways to train soldiers, and to retrain them. We mostly don't want them coming up with creative solutions on the battlefield, although if they succeed at that you'd want to know what worked. We want to be able to quickly retrain them in new incompatible habits, when needed. I'm guessing that that is the limiting factor now. If you can retrain your people fast enough then some other limiting factor will show up, but probably this one is the slow step right now.

Summary: You won't really know what you need until you go to war and find out what isn't working this time. When you get a new plan then there's the question how slow it is to try it out. The quickest new response you can make is to rearrange your units tactically like pieces on a chessboard. Nothing real new there. The second-quickest new response involves training people to use the same resources a new way -- retraining people who have already been trained the old way. The faster you can do that, the better. Giving them new resources is slower. So find ways to speed the retraining time, and also find ways to speed the R&D cycle, etc.

Each military Service is composed of communities. Each community and its members are wed to the status quo for that community - change, redirection, reorganization, transformation threaten what the community members hold most dear: advancement to higher ranks. And each community has its own suite of gear - heaven forfend that gear should change lest the unknown occur.

These are tribes, with tribal rules and tribal loyalty. Loyalty to the Service and to the military mission come only after loyalty to the sub-groups that determine assignments and promotions.

Navy: surface, submarine, aviation. Air Force: rated and non-rated; buff-drivers, trash-haulers, fighter jocks, space cadets. Army: infantry, armor, artillery, rotary wing. (Marine Corps: does not apply - every Marine is an infantryman and even the fighter jocks are well integrated into the Corps. Marines alone have and show the agility that should be the norm in the Services.)

Until the Services take on their tribal cultures, change is slow and resisted.

As a current active duty Army field grade officer, I agree with LTC Yingling. My view on the current officer promotion system is that we promote to the last level of incompetency while retaining an "up-or-out" philosophy. We select for promotion based upon potential at the next level. While the process sounds goods, it has huge pitfalls. Every individual officer has a limit on a level on which they will be successful - be is LTC and BN-CMD through 4 Stars and a combatant commander. However, with the up-or-out policy our current officer promotion structure does not allow one to raise their hand and say I want to continue to serve, but I don't want to go up another grade. Let me stay to 30-40 years in a line of successive lateral positions. However, in order to let this be successful, the HRC must allow for positions below the "priority cut line" to be filled. Another item is we have derailed current key developmental time for non-branch specific positions for Captains with the double "below-the-zone" promotion to Major. Now instead of having 2-3 years after command and before CGSC and S3/XO time to experience something outside of the tactical force, to teach at the Schools, to bring the knowledge to the institutional Army, we are promoting years quicker to fill the vacant field grade positions because of incorrect policy decisions from the mid-1990s. Finally, gone is the "cut line" at Major. With the "No Major Left Behind" policy of 100% attendance at ILE, we have removed a critical decision point for the potential to groom to senior command leadership positions. I recommend that we return to the 50/50 selection rate for full ILE vs the 15-week version. I do not believe anything says you can't have a successful career without being an S3/XO and a BN/BDE CDR. The officer development process is still too rigorously tied to the key developmental job completion instead of the what can the officer best provide to Army system.

Second, the issue is that there are many that believe transition teams have become the "holy grail" to success. So if last rotation we used 8 transition teams, they the next rotation needs 12,13,14. It has gotten bloated to where other organizations (specifically, the institutional Army) must rely on contractors and GS civilians to fill the vacant positions. Now you have entered another of LTC Yinglings paradigms that these contractors and GS civilians have an large incentive to retain these positions when the conflicts are able to scale down their requirements. Is the AFGE going to allow these positions to cut and/or revert back to a uniform position.

Finally, it is all over our Army today, officers and senior NCOs wanting a rush to return to so-called 'core competencies.' He is true that when the current conflicts recede into memory, our hard-won adaptations not may, but will be lost in many branches because they have been hard and difficult to figure out -Table 8 and Table 12 are easy compared to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Incentives and motives are the right place to look to explain behavior. Yingling is right about that. I'm not sure about some of his proposals.

If rapid adaptation is the goal, we'll need to be careful about the sort of "durable" reform we seek from Congress. The actions of Congress are so durable, I think they are more often a hindrance than an aid to adaptation.

If incentives guide behavior, shouldn't we consider the incentives that guide politicians before we substitute them for the incentives guiding senior officers?

I note that embedded in several of Yingling's proposals is the recognition that there are some things that ought to endure and not adapt too rapidly.

As we institutionalize learning from the bottom and the outside, let's not turn our backs entirely on the wisdom that exists among experienced professionals within, lest we marginalize the likes of LTC Yingling too soon.

Finally to the age of great generals -- are we adaptable enough to consider the possibility that what made generals great in history prior to the time of J.F.C. Fuller might not be what makes them great now or in the future?