Defense Secretary Hegseth recently did much to reform our bloated military hierarchy when he recently directed a 30 percent reduction in the number of four-star general and flag officers (GO/FOs) of which there are currently 38. He left the decision of which billets and FO/GOs to eliminate up to the services and the Joint Staff. This bloat has gone on too long and has done nothing to improve the efficiency or effectiveness of our armed forces.
At one point in Afghanistan, we had more FO/GOs in that small country than we did in all the theaters during World War II. Fat lot of good it did; we still lost.
That reduction is a good start, but much remains to be done. The next step in reducing the bloat would be to order a 30 percent reduction in the number of personnel assigned to joint staffs, but Mr. Hegseth will need help with that because it would conflict with the Goldwater-Nichols (G-N) legislation that mandates officers hoping for GO/FO selection to spend three years on a joint staff. That started the bloat in the first place. Consequently, Congress would need to reform the G-N “reforms.”
Predictably, MSNBC squealed like a stuck pig when the initial reductions were announced, claiming the 16 four-stars and their staffs that will be lost would damage U.S. military readiness. There are two words to answer that … Iraq and Afghanistan.
Unfortunately, of all the GO/FOs fired so far in the Trump era military shake-ups, the one most deserving of being let go has thus far escaped the axe; that being General Eric Smith, the Commandant of the Marine Corps. Smith has blindly followed his mentor and predecessor in implementing a disastrous concept called Force Design (FD)
FD is the brainchild of General David Berger, the last commandant, but Smith has enthusiastically supported it. The concept envisions small units of marines armed with anti-ship missiles designed to help the Navy gain control of the South China Sea in the event of a conflict with Beijing. The idea is to fire a few missiles from one of the thousands of islands and sand spits in the region and quickly redeploy to a new island before the Chinese can develop a firing solution. To afford the new missiles, Berger divested the Marine Corps of all of its tanks, heavy engineers, and much of its other ground and air combat power.
FD will be obsolete before it is ever implemented. The NEMSIS anti-ship missiles are subsonic, short range, and are likely to be totally obsolete before the concept is scheduled to be fully implemented in 2030. Worse, the light Navy amphibious ships that would be needed to move the marines from island to island proved to be too expensive, The Navy has rewritten the requirement and the first keel has yet to be laid. This will likely push the whole program back to 2035.
Meanwhile, the Navy and Army have developed a supersonic anti-ship missiles with far greater range that will negate the need for the vulnerable, short range NEMSIS. They can be fired from existing facilities on Okinawa and Guam or by ships at sea. The fact that Smith has bet the future of the Marine Corps on a concept that is quickly becoming obsolete before implementation and is logistically infeasible alone should be enough to get him fired. Even more damning is the fact that, with the exception of the Philippines, no nation in the area whose islands would be used has agreed to the concept; in the case of the Philippines, its government will not let its territory be used to support a war over Taiwan.
Berger and Smith divested the Marine Corps of its traditional capability to be the nation’s 9-1-1 force in readiness to provide capability that is redundant, and largely unwanted by the regional nations that it is designed to protect. Smith has papered over these deficiencies, but his lack of credibility runs deeper than that. In the early days of the Trump administration, he misrepresented — I won’t use the word lied in a polite publication — the Marine Corps’ involvement in DEI to a group of reporters in January, even while he and his generals were frantically trying to erase evidence of their culpability from the service’s web sites.
The combination of incompetence and dishonesty that Smith has exhibited would get any corporate CEO fired by a responsible Board of Directors. If Mr. Hegseth does not relieve Smith soon and put the organization back on course, he will own the current problems of the Marine Corps. One can only blame the Biden administration for so long. It is a mystery that Smith has avoided the axe to this point. Maybe the Secretary is saving the best for last.
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The Military Recruiting Crisis Starts With the Leadership
Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps Colonel who also acted as a Special Advisor to the Deputy Secretary of Defense he is the author of Beyond Mahan; a Naval Strategy for the 21st Century.