Episode 721: Reforming the Pentagon, with Gary Anderson

With each new administration, there is opportunity for change and reform. In the new Trump Administration, reform isn’t seen as a secondary effect of a leadership change but as a requirement.What reform options should the new Pentagon leadership explore under the Trump Administration?

Joining us to discuss this and related topics is Gary Anderson, Colonel, USMC (Ret.). 

A starting point for our conversation will be his recent article in The American Spectator, Real Military Reform Begins: Will Pete Hegseth be able to reverse our military’s decline.

Gary 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.

Summary

In this episode, Sal and Mark engage with Gary Anderson to discuss the current state of America's military, focusing on the need for reform and the implications of the Goldwater-Nichols Act. They explore the challenges facing the Marine Corps and Navy, the importance of revitalizing the defense industrial base, and the recent uptick in military morale and recruitment. The conversation also critiques the Force Design 2030 initiative and emphasizes the need for a more effective military education system and logistics support.

Takeaways

• America's military has been adrift for some time.
• The rot in military effectiveness goes back decades.
• The Goldwater-Nichols Act has had unintended consequences.
• Careerism and ticket-punching are detrimental to military readiness.
• Morale among military personnel is currently high.
• The defense industrial base needs revitalization to keep up with adversaries.
• Military education has shifted focus away from essential warfighting skills.
• Logistics has been neglected in recent military operations.
• War games should not be used to validate military concepts without scrutiny.

Chapters

00:00: Introduction to Military Reform and Change
02:35: The State of America's Military
10:42: Challenges in Military Education and Careerism
18:36: The Need for Honest Feedback in Military Leadership
26:16: Revitalizing the Defense Industrial Base
29:15: Addressing the Crisis in Submarine Maintenance
32:12: Revitalizing the Fleet: Innovative Solutions for Shipbuilding
36:18: The Drone Dilemma: Quality vs. Quantity in Warfare
41:04: Logistics in Modern Warfare: Lessons from the Past
45:17: Morale in the Military: A Shift in Attitude
51:15: Leadership Changes: Navigating New Directions
54:00: Accountability in Military Decisions: The Need for Integrity
58:44: War Games and Military Strategy: The Importance of Honest Analysis

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:30):
Welcome to mid Rats with sal from Commander Salamander, an
Eagle one from Eagle Speak at Seer Shore. You're home
for a discussion of national security issues and all things maritime,
and welcome board everybody to another edition of mid Rats.
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(00:52):
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(01:14):
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

(01:36):
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,

(01:57):
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.

(02:21):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:34):
Good to be here, thank you, great.

Speaker 1 (02:36):
To have you on board, Gary, and to get things
rolling here. The opening sentence to your article had me
pondering a bit. It's America's military has been a dress
for some time. And I had realized that if you
measured the length of time that the US fought in
World War Two, from Pearl Harbor to VJ Day, that

(02:57):
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,

(03:21):
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

(03:45):
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.

Speaker 2 (03:57):
Yeah, that's it's a good question. But let me go
back to statement you made at the beginning of the
broadcast that military reform, that reform is always good. I'd
kind of take exception to that because it takes imaginal
line and the concept that the French developed was radical
military reform, and that didn't work out very well for

(04:19):
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

(04:43):
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

(05:08):
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

(05:30):
results of it.

Speaker 3 (05:31):
Well, let's I have a question that first, what is
the Marine Corps war Fighting Lab and what does it do?

Speaker 2 (05:37):
And Yeah, now you know, I've been far away from
the Marine Corps war Fighting Lab for a number of
years now. I retired back in twenty two thousand and
then I spent a little time working for the Lab
as the director of the Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities,

(05:57):
And so I haven't been associated with with the Lab
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

(06:19):
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

(06:40):
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

(07:00):
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.

(07:21):
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

(07:41):
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

(08:03):
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,

(08:25):
but some emerging concepts as well.

Speaker 1 (08:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (08:28):
Well, as in your in your article that we've been
talking about here a little bit you you coul do
do it look downrange. You see a lot of things
that have changed in the in the Marine Corps and
the Navy that you've kind of taken to task. Talk
a little bit about about your what you see as
things that need to be reformed or re reformed or
re regenerated from the way things used to be or

(08:49):
where where the future should be should be driving it.

Speaker 2 (08:51):
Yeah, there were I think, uh, if I remember properly,
there were a number of of things that I suggested.
I I think personally that the Marine Corps went off
in the wrong direction in twenty eighteen with a concept
that they call force design, and I think that was
a very dangerous thing, and I think it's hurt the core.

(09:13):
I think the second thing I was talking about, if
I remember properly, was the need to get the Navy
squared away as far as both of its shipbuilding and
its and its maintenance procedures and so forth. I think
we've gotten really off course with that, and I think

(09:34):
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.

(09:58):
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.

Speaker 1 (10:08):
It's funny the I can almost see my co host
creating right now is the one of the trigger phrases
for me, at least for a long time, has been
Goldwater Nickels. And we're coming up on the fifth anniversary
of Goldwater Nickels, and we've talked about it on a
regular basis for over a decade here about the need
to reform if nothing else. When you look at the

(10:29):
time from the was it forty seven or forty nine
they did the big Pentagon Reform Act and then Goldwater
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

(10:52):
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

(11:16):
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.

Speaker 2 (11:26):
Yeah, I think there would be three bullets. Ticket punching
and cruism. The bloat of staffs caused by this ticket
punching cruism thing that the Goldwater Nichols did, And I
think the other thing is a misunderstanding of what was
attempted and what actually occurred. I think those are the

(11:47):
three things that stick out in my mind, and I
think the first and most important is it encouraged crurism
and ticket punching. Now, I mean, you know, expand on that.
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

(12:10):
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

(12:32):
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

(12:52):
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

(13:13):
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

(13:34):
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

(13:58):
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

(14:20):
makes any sense.

Speaker 3 (14:21):
It makes a lot of sense. One of the emphasis
that the new Secretary of Defense is set out is
he wants to get back to war fighting as the
primary consideration for many things in the services. And I
was really fascinated to see that Admiral McRaven, the four star,
advised him to assemble a council of colonels, apparently because

(14:42):
the unpromotable ones, because they're the only ones who would
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,

(15:05):
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

(15:26):
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

(15:46):
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,

(16:08):
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

(16:29):
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,

(16:52):
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.

Speaker 1 (17:08):
Sometimes going back to the concept of time is where
over twenty three years away from the events of nine
on them. So the guys that are strapping on six
right now, they've known nothing but the post nine to
eleven world and that institutional knowledge. All they know is
what they know and what they've experienced. And I think
you described a bit those secondary effects from Goldwater Nickels

(17:32):
and the incentives and disincentives that came along with it.
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

(17:56):
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.

(18:17):
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.

(18:38):
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.

Speaker 2 (18:48):
Yeah, I absolutely agree, because one of those ticket punching
steps is of course they go to Command and Staff College.
Now to go to Command and staff college due to
the goal of the Skelton military very reform things. For
some reason, they got it into their heads that all
masters degree would somehow make you militarily smarter and so forth.

(19:09):
Quite as a matter of fact, I think that's had
the opposite effect to make room for all the academic
and I won't use the word, but the academic bs
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

(19:30):
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

(19:51):
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,

(20:14):
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.

Speaker 3 (20:33):
Well, among the other things that we've seen coming down
the path is the is the sudden increase and interest
in revitalizing the American shipping shipbuilding industry, and even some
reaches outreaches to some of our allies like the South
Koreans and the Japanese to help us maybe help us
build and develop our own shipyards as well as build

(20:54):
some ships perhaps in their in their yards. That is
that a positive movement? You're in your way of thinking.

Speaker 2 (21:00):
Well, I think revitalizing the entire military defense complex is
really critical, and trying to keep up with the Chinese
who were outbuilding us at least five to one, and
you know, capital ships and so forth. You know about

(21:20):
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

(21:40):
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,

(22:04):
thirty almost forty years later, we see the chickens coming
home to roost.

Speaker 1 (22:08):
It's amazing that people appreciated that problem and had seen
it for so long, to a point that it's we've
run out of time in miny regards to address that.
And one thing you brought up that I think is
one of the worst examples of it is, you know,
you emphasize our submarine levels and how important our submarines are,
and anybody who looks at the fight in the Pacific

(22:28):
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

(22:49):
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

(23:09):
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.

Speaker 2 (23:25):
I think part of the problem is we read our
own press releases. So we the military, we the United States,
have advertised ever since essentially Desert Storm, that are technological
overmatch of potential enemies as such that we really didn't
need to build a lot of ships, build a lot
of you know, more tanks. We you know, we basically

(23:48):
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.

(24:08):
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

(24:29):
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

(24:50):
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

(25:11):
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,

(25:34):
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

(25:55):
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.

Speaker 3 (26:08):
Well, the logistics problems that we have, you didn't really
address it in your In your Peace very much, you know,
other than low on ammunition and other things, but just
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,

(26:29):
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?

Speaker 2 (26:40):
Well, yeah, absolutely. Our maritime industry is in many ways
in the same boat as our as our combatant navy
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

(27:02):
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

(27:23):
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

(27:45):
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

(28:06):
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,

(28:28):
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.

Speaker 1 (28:50):
I align with you fully on that. It's one of
the frustrating things that I've seen, especially again they all
want to call it everything what they are the loyal wingman,
when you actually look at what they're proposing. They're almost
as expensive as a manned aircraft over engineered, and one
of the lessons from the Russio Ukrainian conflict is the

(29:13):
most exquisite drones aren't really what's winning the fight for you.
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,

(29:35):
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.

(29:57):
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

(30:19):
email A huge problem are being able to operationalize that.

Speaker 2 (30:23):
Yeah, I'll give you an example. And I'm going back
a number of years now, when I was still chief
of staff at the War Fighting lad My commanding general
couldn't go to a meeting with the Secretary of the
Navy one day, and it was close to the end
of the fiscal year. The Secretary of the Navy was
mister Danzig at the time. Said Hey, I've got a

(30:43):
I've got a million dollars burning a hole in my pocket,
and I gotta I've got to commit it before the
end of the fiscal year. What do you think you
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

(31:06):
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

(31:28):
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

(31:50):
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.

(32:11):
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

(32:36):
the enemy of good enough that you run into I
think somebody so much and he's and he's yeah.

Speaker 3 (32:42):
I think one of the other things about about unmanned aircraft,
unmanned vessels, whether they're service or sub service. Is I mean,
you're right that the cost is should be lower because
just the Ukrainians managed to sink some quite a few
Russian ships or really damage one off your Russian ships
with some of their stuff. But it also has an
impact on things that we normally expect to be key

(33:05):
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.

(33:27):
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

(33:48):
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.

Speaker 2 (34:08):
Small US Well, I think part of the problem is
since nine to eleven, the wars we've fought are uh,
you know, against enemies that are not capable of seriously
interdicting our logistics. I mean, you know, gorillas are going
to uh ambush supply columns and things like that. But

(34:30):
we've essentially been operating in a permissive environment logistically, and
we've taken for granted the fact that they're you know,
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

(34:50):
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

(35:14):
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

(35:37):
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.

Speaker 1 (35:56):
Yeah, kind of greatness, like the old staff we need joke. Okay,
now the J four is going to tell the J
three why he can't do what he wants to do.
It's it's true. I think the loggie maybe should speak
a little earlier than he usually does. We've we've talked
a little bit about a lot of it about problems,
but there's also some positive news that you one of

(36:16):
the items that you raised in your article, I want
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

(36:37):
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.

Speaker 2 (36:46):
Yeah, I think it was, you know, and having lived
through that period, I was at Vanderbilt University as an
ROTC Naval ROTC instructor at that time, and you could
see the turnaround from the attitude of the Carter administration
towards the military to you know, to you know, the

(37:08):
kind of support we were getting. I saw an uptick
within the year between seventy nine and eighty one of
you know, just recruiting on campus for the ROTC program
and so forth. Most people don't remember this, but back
in those days, the Carter administration was permitting serving officers

(37:34):
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

(37:57):
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

(38:17):
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

(38:38):
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.

(39:00):
I would not have done it a year ago today, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (39:02):
I was.

Speaker 3 (39:03):
I was leaving active duty about the time of the
transition between Harder and Reagan, and I remember going to
a meeting with one of the Assistant Secretary of Defense
where some of the sailors were complaining about the conditions
that they were working with and they and this guy's
response was, and I remember it well, was well, then
vote with your feet, which you know is an absolutely
terrible way to treat people who are serving their country.

Speaker 2 (39:25):
Yeah. You know, I think a lot of a lot
of that has to do too with the discouragement of
or the doing away with a lot of these UH
DEI programs and so forth. You know, if you're a
if you're a kid that going in the military and
you think you might get knocked out of a uh

(39:47):
you know, get knocked out of a potential promotion slot,
not because you weren't qualified, but because there was a gay,
pregnant whale who who needed that slot to fill a
DEI quota. You know, you can just of yourself, what
do I want to be in an outfit.

Speaker 1 (40:02):
Like that that has been one of the big and
dramatic changes that we saw, and a lot of the
strongest advocates forward in uniform were were invited to to
pursue excellence elsewhere, so to speak. And some people have
taken taken umbrage to that. But it is not uncommon.

(40:25):
And you have a professional scope of seeing multiple administrations
coming in that a commander in chief he should have
in his uniformed leadership the people that are best aligned
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

(40:47):
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.

Speaker 2 (41:05):
Well, I think if you've you know, if you have
been major mark in the last five or six years,
you know, falling in line with you know, with some
guidance that you don't necessarily believe in, I think that
that has a tendency to you know to to discourage
you know, people that you know that that believe that

(41:28):
things are going in the wrong direction. It's one thing.
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.

(41:49):
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

(42:10):
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

(42:33):
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.

Speaker 3 (42:50):
Well, you started off kind of talking about the failure
in Afghanistan withdrawal and maybe the tall twenty here experience
to a certain extent, talk a little bit one of
your other pieces. You talked about what some of these
senior rosters should have done rather than just gone along
with the flows. Should we have seen more resignations by
people who knew that things were going down the wrong path.

Speaker 2 (43:12):
It should have been obvious to I mean, when I
was in Afghanistan in two thousand, two thousand and eleven
to twenty twelve, it was obvious to us that whatever
we were, to those of us who were lower level.

(43:34):
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

(43:57):
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,

(44:18):
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

(44:39):
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

(45:04):
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

(45:25):
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,

(45:46):
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.

Speaker 1 (46:00):
I mean, we could do two hours on this. I
was on the isaff staff and the couple and eight nine,
and we outlined exactly what would happen if we did
what happened to you in twenty eleven of call for years,
we need something like a truth and reconciliation committee meeting
of some type about what we did especially in the

(46:21):
last decade in Afghanistan, but that may never happen. I
would feel remiss if I didn't at least get this
question and before we were done it the hour, because 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

(46:43):
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

(47:06):
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.

Speaker 2 (47:19):
That's absolutely, in my view, that is what happened. Now
I can't prove that because the former commandant that put
together Force Design very cleverly classified all the wargames. So
I don't you don't the Washington Times or the Washington
Post or the Wall Street Journal doesn't have the need

(47:40):
to know what went on. That's the parts of bull
There was nothing classified. There shouldn't have been nothing classified
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

(48:02):
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

(48:23):
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

(48:44):
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.

Speaker 3 (48:55):
Well, I know you've had some thoughts on this other
stuff in your work at American ex American Spectator. Is
there other places we can look for your future works?
Do you have anything else in the in the mix?

Speaker 2 (49:07):
I do quite a better writing for Real Clear Defense,
occasionally for the Defense Post, and sometimes for military dot Com,
So you can google those things and they'll pop up
and so forth.

Speaker 1 (49:19):
Well, Gary, it's been a great hour. We really appreciate
you taking some time to spend with us. It's been
a great conversation. I know our listeners are really going
to enjoy it, and I hope you have a great
twenty twenty twenty five look forward the next opportunity to
have a conversation with you.

Speaker 2 (49:34):
Well, thanks for having me, I appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (49:36):
Yeah, thank you for joining us, and thank you everybody
for joining us for another edition of mid Rides. And
until next time, I hope you have a great Navy
and Marine Corde cheers.

Speaker 4 (49:56):
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for you being to blame for long family love me,
silly faulting your tame. It's a long way to dimperary.

(50:20):
It's a long way to it's a long way to dipperary.
Between gorb becdill farewell lestwell. It's a long long way

(50:42):
to Differay's but my my na