As a second Trump term becomes possible (or even likely), the literary world of military pundits is ablaze with articles, recommendations, and ideas on how to reform the Department of Defense (DoD) in a second Trump Administration. As a retired U.S. Army colonel, I am encouraged to see such thoughtful analyses and deeply hope a new Trump Administration takes heed of these many excellent recommendations. However, one area of concern for which I have seen little commentary is how to halt the deep institutional rot associated with what I call the “civilianization” of America’s military. The military forces of the United States of America exist first and foremost to kill the nation’s armed adversaries. Historically, this understanding has underpinned the “Warrior Ethos” that has made our military so great, but somewhere along the way, we lost this ethos in favor of a politicized, more civilian approach to warfare. I believe this is due to certain dysfunctional and deeply ingrained institutional processes and structures that must be fully and radically reformed in order to restore our military to one that defends the nation effectively and does not merely defend its own budget.

There are four fundamental areas for institutional reform, and all involve the “de-civilianization” of warrior institutions:

1. The “interagency” process in the DoD. After 9/11, the DoD (and the federal government more broadly) placed a significant emphasis on better coordination between the DoD and other federal departments like the State Department and the CIA. The idea was simple and appealing enough: to produce better coordination across domains. Nowhere was this more important than in the intelligence community, where failure to crosstalk between agencies led to startling intelligence failures like 9/11. However, this “interagency” approach became unfocused across all of the DoD and all agencies and became a priority in and of itself, whether it related to, for example, supposed climate change, government acquisition, federal land and water management, or leader professional development. While the goal of burgeoning interagency processes was to improve efficiency, the actual and unfortunate effect it had on the senior officer warriors of the DoD was to civilianize their mindsets. Instead of the State Department becoming more like the DoD, the DoD started thinking like the State Department. Historically, there was a healthy tension between the State Department and the DoD. The new interagency emphasis made former warriors think the goal was to be like diplomats, and it turned too many of our senior officers into wannabe State Department grandees who get invited to the best Georgetown cocktail parties. That former healthy tension between State and Defense was destroyed, and the warrior ethos of so many officers with it. We see this today in the form of the many retired and political admirals and generals who view their devotion to the D.C. bureaucracy to be more important than their oath to the Constitution, and nowhere has this phenomenon been more apparent than the nefarious shenanigans of the infamous Lieutenant Colonel (Retired) Alexander Vindman, who deemed his allegiance to the interagency to be more important than the judgment of his Commander-in-Chief.
2. Civilian degree-producing programs for line officers. All of the military services send their promising O-4s, O-5s, and O-6s to advanced degree-producing programs at civilian universities, with the choicest schooling opportunities happening at Ivy League universities. (David Petraeus and H.R. McMaster are two well-known products of this process.) The idea of the “warrior scholar” is nice in the abstract, but in reality, what we did was infect our senior military leaders with DEI sensibilities and the same woke mind virus that has nearly destroyed America’s institutions of higher learning. While advanced civilian degrees are necessary for officer specialists like physicians, dentists, attorneys, chaplains, and officers serving in science and engineering fields, they do nothing but diminish the warfighting capabilities of line officers in tactical units, nor do they enhance the strategic abilities of our most senior officers. Even worse, we made possession of these degrees a positive criterion for promotion. The other negative consequence of this woke mind virus infestation is that it flows downhill—junior officers and NCOs emulate the successful senior officers above them, and the civilianization runs rampant, reducing combat effectiveness and focusing troops on all the wrong priorities.
3. Service academies and War Colleges emulating Ivy League universities. The institutional learning processes of our nation’s military are built upon a foundation of prestigious uniformed learning institutions. You probably know the service academies (West Point, Annapolis, and the Air Force Academy), but the service and joint service “War Colleges” (schools for O-5s and O-6s who are marked as having flag officer potential) are equally important in building military culture and skills. All of these once purely military schools now have large numbers of civilian faculty members, many of whom seek the “publish or perish” route so they can ultimately join the Ivies they so eagerly and enviously emulate. With this preponderance of civilian faculty come the civilian dogmas—DEI, the joys of the interagency, and the cancer of courses and majors that end in “studies.” When I attended the National Defense University as a promotable O-5, we even had a choice in uniforms—our usual duty uniform or a civilian coat and tie. That War College’s quest to look and feel like a civilian Ivy was palpable and very real.
4. Career SES civilians actually control the nuts and bolts of the military. The Senior Executive Service (“SES”) represents the senior ranks of civilian federal employees. There are “career” SES members and “non-career” SES members. The non-career SES ranks generally represent political appointees, and the career SES ranks serve and keep serving regardless of who holds the presidency. In the DoD, career SES members sit in some of the highest and most influential offices in the Pentagon and the military agencies, wielding enormous power over defense budgets, material acquisition, warfighting doctrine, personnel policies, and force structure. As their military bosses come and go every two years or so, they stay. If they don’t like what their military boss tells them to do, they can obfuscate, delay, bluster, and just generally wait until a new military boss shows up, then the cycle can start again. What’s worse is that most career SES billets are filled via the Senior Executive Service Candidate Development Program, which generally includes sponsorship and mentorship components that allow serving SES bureaucrats to ensure that their vision of how the bureaucracy should run will endure for decades. This bloated, careerist system of never-changing bureaucracy contributes immeasurably to the civilianization of the military and the diminishment of the Warrior Ethos and is a great inhibitor to meaningful structural change.

So how to fix these Four Horsemen of the Civilianization Apocalypse?

It won’t be easy, but here are some ideas:

I am entirely confident that the above recommendations can halt the civilianization of our military and serve as a great start to restoring an essential warfighting focus. I am also entirely confident that the DoD bureaucracy will fight every recommendation I made above tooth and nail and will in fact have a host of somewhat persuasive arguments as to why I am wrong. But here is the thing: this is like chemotherapy. Our military has a cancer, and drastic actions must be taken to cure it. Yes, some healthy tissue may get destroyed, but so will the cancer itself, and the patient will live.

Let’s build back an effective, lethal, efficient military that wins its wars for a change and leaves us all proud once again.

Cynical Publius is the nom de plume of a retired U.S. Army colonel, veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, and reformed denizen of the Pentagon who is now a practicing corporate law attorney. You can follow Cynical Publius on X at @CynicalPublius.