Real Military Reform Begins – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

America’s military has been adrift for some time. President Donald Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, appears determined to set it back on the proper course. So far, he appears to be on track. He has largely deconstructed the corrosive DEI culture that has hindered both morale and recruiting. He is emphasizing lethality over bureaucracy and is moving to demand accountability for the debacle that was the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Perhaps most importantly, he is committed to rebuilding our defense industrial base, particularly in regard to shipbuilding, naval maintenance, and the production of sufficient ammunition to fight a prolonged major war. I have not seen such an uptick in morale among our uniformed service members since Caspar Weinberger became Ronald Reagan’s secretary of defense.

However, much remains to be done. There are four critical areas that must be addressed. Each of these was allowed to deteriorate during the Biden–Obama years. In his first term, Trump was unable to adequately address them due to incessant legal and social pressure from the Left. But he now appears to be ready to tackle these challenges through Hegseth.

Making the Navy and Marine Corps Great Again

The two services that have suffered the most from the Biden administration’s neglect are the Navy and Marines. The new secretary of the Navy designee has promised to go line by line over existing and future contracts to ensure that the waste and corruption of the past decade are eliminated, but the rot runs deeper than that. Until the military-industrial base is revitalized, shipbuilding and maintenance must be subject to innovative solutions, even if that means temporarily outsourcing them overseas.

First, the attack submarine fleet must be expanded to the point that it can simultaneously deter a war with China, maintain commitments to NATO, and ensure freedom of the seas in the Persian Gulf.

Additionally, there are not enough large-deck amphibious ships to provide a 24/7 Navy–Marine Corps presence in the world’s most likely trouble spots (the Mediterranean, Persian Gulf, and the Indo-Pacific regions). The Marine Corps is equally responsible here, as it released the Navy from its commitment to maintain thirty-eight amphibious ships, reducing the number to thirty-one; this did not account for the chronic maintenance problems that now limit the Navy to twelve to thirteen operationally ready amphibious ships at any given time. A minimum of eighteen combat-ready amphibious ships are needed at all times — nine on station and nine working — to maintain the required 24/7 presence worldwide.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (Bill Wilson/The American Spectator)

The Marine Corps is a mess. The Biden administration allowed the last two Marine commandants to emasculate the Corps’ offensive warfighting capabilities in order to build a futile defensive maritime Maginot Line using nearly obsolete missiles that the other services already possess. This would all be based on islets and shoals in the South China Sea that no regional nation has granted us permission to use. To afford this travesty, the Marine Corps gave up tanks, heavy assault bridging capabilities, and wheeled artillery to the point that it could not meaningfully contribute to large-scale military operations.

The Marine Corps’ entire Force Design 2030 project, which aims to transform the branch “into a more agile, efficient, and technologically advanced force,” is based on questionable war games and shoddy analysis, much of which has been discredited by legitimate games conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies as well as the Marine Corps Times and the Wall Street Journal. Despite all this and the strong objections of virtually every former Marine Corps commandant, Generals David M. Berger and Eric M. Smith have repeatedly refused to revisit the flawed assumptions that underlie the concept. Unless Smith and the coterie of three-star generals who have enabled him are removed, the Marine Corps will degenerate from the world’s foremost maritime assault force into a bizarre combination of light infantry and coastal artillery.

Reforming the Goldwater–Nichols Act

The Goldwater–Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986 has not aged well. Its original intent of improving joint warfighting capabilities has yielded unintended consequences. For instance, its requirement that any officer aspiring to flag and general officer rank (FOGO) complete a tour has led to a bloated system, with far more FOGOs and staffs, even as the number of troops in uniform has been reduced.

Military education has suffered as well. Our command and staff colleges should be the places where majors and their naval counterparts learn the real skills of high-level military tactics. Today, due to the military education reforms of Goldwater–Nichols, these schools are more concerned with granting second-rate political science master’s degrees. Additionally, our war colleges place greater emphasis on civil-military relations than on strategy and military history. 

Continuing Dominance of the Skies in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Since the Vietnam War, the United States has maintained uncontested dominance in airpower. However, that is now changing. While American aircraft and aviators outclassed our adversaries in Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom, advancements in unmanned aircraft and artificial intelligence are beginning to challenge that superiority. 

If we have learned anything from the Russo-Ukrainian War in the sky, it is that quantity has a quality of its own. In the immediate future, the side that can best integrate human decision-making with swarms of armed unmanned aerial systems and inexpensive “kamikaze” drones will control the air. This is a competition we cannot afford to lose. Currently, the Russians, Chinese, and even the Ukrainians are producing large quantities of relatively cheap, “good enough” drones — far outpacing our overly engineered and expensive systems. In World War II, large numbers of cheap, easily produced U.S. and Russian tanks overwhelmed the smaller numbers of technologically superior German Panzers. A similar dynamic threatens to play out in the sky today, but this time, we’re on the losing end. We must rethink the production of unmanned aerial systems and develop tactics to effectively take advantage of AI.

Making Our Pacific Strategy Viable Again

This is a political-military challenge. With the combination of their Belt and Road Initiative and coercive diplomacy, the Chinese are challenging us for control of the Indo-Pacific Region, and they are making significant inroads. They are constructing resort hotel complexes with adjoining airfields (some of which we built in World War II) in Micronesia and Melanesia that can quickly be converted to military purposes. In the strategically significant Solomons, the Chinese co-opted the corrupt and authoritarian government to serve their interests while the Biden administration slept.

The U.S. has slowly begun to recognize the issue, but our military and diplomatic influence in the region has been severely under-resourced. As previously mentioned, the naval presence in the region has been scaled back due to the shortage of Navy ships. This reduction has led to fewer goodwill civil-military projects that once helped sustain American dominance in the region.

It will take more than four years to repair the Biden administration’s neglect of the military, but Hegseth appears dedicated to stopping the downward spiral. If he succeeds, he will have done a great service to our nation.

Gary Anderson retired as the chief of staff of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab. He served as a special adviser to the deputy secretary of defense. He is an adjunct professor at George Washington University.

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