From Gregory H. Murry, Small Wars Journal: “Led by General William DePuy, TRADOC would take the army back to the basics. Deciding that there was nothing to be learned from the army’s experiences in Vietnam, he discarded those lessons and focused on a NATO conventional war scenario in Western Europe with the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact. DePuy was in a hurry. He believed soldiers should be told how to fight and created a comprehensive program of training, doctrine and equipment procurement that would rebuild the shattered army.”
The On-Going Battle for the Soul of the Army
From Gregory H. Murry, Small Wars Journal: “Led by General William DePuy, TRADOC would take the army back to the basics. Deciding that there was nothing to be learned from the army’s experiences in Vietnam, he discarded those lessons and focused on a NATO conventional war scenario in Western Europe with the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact. DePuy was in a hurry. He believed soldiers should be told how to fight and created a comprehensive program of training, doctrine and equipment procurement that would rebuild the shattered army.”
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Archimedes' Feet From Christopher Ellis, Strategy Bridge: “Starting small, there are numerous models to depict the makeup of a person. Examples include the Eight Dimensions of Wellness, the Elements of Wellness, the Wellness Wheel, and for the Army’s Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness: the Five Dimensions of Strength. With some variation and expansion in these models, the dimensions are: social, physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual.” President-elect Donald Trump comes to the office promising some of the biggest military force increases in recent history: a fleet of 350 warships, compared with the current Navy goal of 308, and 36 active Marine Corps infantry battalions as opposed to today’s 24, to name two figures. But while these goals are in line with the right-leaning Heritage Foundation’s projection of what it would take to address today’s global threats and conflicts, building the force to meet those goals would not be a fast or easy process, defense leaders said Wednesday. – DOD Buzz Rebuilding America's Military
From Paul Scharre & Lauren Fish, CNAS: “Military power is not organic or constant. It requires investment, innovation, and maintenance. Deploying military power degrades it and requires later revitalization. Adversaries adapt to the most advanced equipment and effective tactics. New threats emerge while old ones wane. Military leverage stems from warfighting advantage, which encompasses two simultaneous requirements: the ability to project military power abroad and to protect the U.S. homeland." Sequestration Damages Military's Trust of Political Leaders From Jacqueline Klimas, Washington Examiner: “A new study on military families released Thursday found that sequestration is more than just a Washington buzzword. More than a quarter of the troops, family members and veterans who responded to the Blue Star Families 2016 Military Family Lifestyle Survey said they "felt changes in benefits, budget cuts and sequestration illustrated that commitments are not being kept for those who serve." Only 19 percent of military families say they would recommend serving in the military to others "if the current trend of cutting benefits continues.""
Donald Trump has chosen retired Marine Gen. James N. Mattis to be secretary of defense, the president-elect announced Thursday, selecting a former senior military officer who has said that responding to “political Islam” is the major security issue facing the United States. – Washington Post
Gitto’s story is one of many about Mattis that, along with his bluntness and success on the battlefield, have made him perhaps the most popular senior officer of the modern generation with his own troops. – Washington Post’s Checkpoint
Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Friday that Donald Trump’s nomination of retired Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis to the Pentagon’s top post was a “terrific” decision, joining the choir of bipartisan voices who back the president-elect’s latest Cabinet pick. – Washington Free Beacon Despite his brawler reputation, retired Marine Gen. James Mattis actually tried hard on the battlefield to avoid fights, Commandant Gen. Robert Neller said Saturday. – Military.com Editorial: [T]here is a tradition of former generals, such as Brent Scowcroft or Colin Powell, serving presidents with honor, and the Senate set a precedent for waiving the defense rule when it approved George C. Marshall for the secretary’s job in 1950. The extreme circumstances of the Trump presidency-to-be — including a commander in chief who is both ignorant of military and international affairs and prone to impulsiveness — strengthen the case for a Mattis exception. – Washington Post Editorial: Gen. Mattis has seen the cost of wars enough to want to deter them, but he also knows that if you fight them you need to do so with the force and will to win. As he said in a letter to a colleague: “‘Winging it’ and filling body bags as we sort out what works reminds us of the moral dictates and the cost of competence in our profession.” Mr. Trump has made a reassuring choice. – Wall Street Journal (subscription required) FPI’s Mark Moyar writes: High representation of former U.S. military officers in the Trump administration will have salutary effects after eight years during which the president gave the military short shrift….The presence of retired generals will help prevent further such wrongdoings and enable the administration to undo the damage that can still be undone. – National Review Online Kori Schake writes: Civil-military relations in America remain an unequal relationship, though: political leaders have a responsibility to seek unvarnished military counsel, but they are under no obligation to take that advice. We elect national leaders to aggregate our societal preferences, including whether to go to war, and how much of blood, treasure, and effort to expend on these wars. Mattis not only has a deep understanding of the norms of American civil-military relations, he has consistently upheld them. – Foreign Policy The Missile Defense Agency and Raytheon will soon fire fire a new SM-3 missile variant into space to destroy an approaching enemy missile target - as a way to develop a new interceptor better able to detect and destroy ballistic missile threats approaching the earth’s atmosphere from space. – Scout Warrior
Read the Heritage Foundation’s 2017 Index of Military Strength – Heritage Foundation
Jerry Hendrix writes: Twelve carriers, 350 ships, and a longer ranged carrier air wing should be the basis for the United States’ grand strategy going forward. We are a maritime nation. We have always been a maritime nation since our founding, and now there is a commitment to make the investments needed to execute a new maritime based national security strategy. – The National Interest Seth Cropsey writes: With his personal support, President Trump can change the Pentagon from an over-centralized, red-taped and unaccountable bureaucracy into an efficient organization that applies dollars saved to increased security for the nation. The new president will need the help of an experienced and knowledgeable Secretary who can transform the Commander-in-Chief’s ideas into facts. That would be Randy Forbes. – Real Clear Defense Air Force Chief of Staff General David Goldfein writes: War in the information age will continue to rely on a foundation of trust and confidence across the joint and combined team. The relationships we have built over the past quarter-century of conflict at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels set the table now for a revolutionary approach to future combined arms. In the end, it will be our ability to achieve decision speed and the operational agility to lift and shift forces and capabilities across all domains and functional components simultaneously that will produce not only a warfighting capability our enemy can’t hope to match, but also a lasting deterrent in the 21st century. – Defense One
Mackenzie Eaglen writes: A modest budget deal will be hailed as a success in providing budget stability and predictability for Pentagon officials. This will also reveal that what truly ails the Defense Department is not that politicians wait until the last minute to revise the spending law, but that the US military simply isn’t getting enough money to do the job. – Breaking Defense
Mackenzie Eaglen and Rick Berger write: A repeal of the Budget Control Act and a substantial investment in the military now seem imminent. What remains to be seen is whether Republicans can pursue meaningful entitlement reform to render such a buildup sustainable. As a candidate who spoke favorably of leveraging debt, Trump could simply increase defense and infrastructure spending by increasing the debt. In that scenario, the sky is the limit – War on the Rocks
For several years, the Pentagon has been blocked by Congress in its request to begin another round of Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC). Now, facing an expected wave of modernization bills in the next decade, a top DoD official has suggested the building needs to look for alternative ways to shut down excess infrastructure. – Defense News Why Senator John McCain May Be Wrong In His Assessment of Acquisition Problems
The decision to force Lockheed Martin to accept the government’s price for the ninth Low Rate Initial Production batch of F-35s is a “symptom” of wider problems with the Pentagon’s acquisition system, Sen. John McCain said in a statement today. But is the Senate Armed Services chairman right? – Breaking Defense Retired Gen. David Petraeus says defense cuts have gone too far and the "threat" of sequestration must be eliminated. – The Hill The driving concept behind the Pentagon’s Third Offset Strategy comes down to : If we’re not changing, we’re losing to “pacing competitors” like Russia and China in conventional warfare. – USNI News U.S. Special Operations Command is making progress researching, developing and testing a next-generation Iron Man-like suit designed to increase strength and protection and help keep valuable operators alive when they kick down doors and engage in combat, officials said. – Scout Warrior The current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford, and the former uniformed leader of the Air Force were viewed as "great leaders but weak on strategic thinking," according to a Pentagon official detailed to the National Security Council. – Associated Press
The new aircraft, engineered to succeed the 5th-generation F-35 Joint StrikeFighter and explode onto the scene by the mid 2030s, is now in the earliest stages of conceptual development with the Air Force and Navy. The two services are now working together on early conceptual discussions about the types of technologies and capabilities the aircraft will contain. While the Air Force has not yet identified a platform for the new aircraft. – Scout Warrior Lieutenant General David Barno, USA (Ret.) and Nora Bensahel write: DEF is not a panacea for all of the Pentagon’s predicaments, but it is an innovative grassroots model for connecting and empowering the most innovative and forward-looking parts of the defense community to help address them…DEF is a ray of hope that new thinking and new minds can help lead the way to long-term reforms that are desperately needed. – War on the Rocks
The evolving relationship between the United States and India in terms of trade and security presents “a tremendous opportunity to the next administration,” the National Security Council’s senior official for South Asia said Wednesday. – USNI News
India has begun a fresh program to acquire single-engine fighter aircraft to be built in India on the basis of foreign technology, as invitations have been sent privately through Indian Embassies to "some overseas participants" to partake in the program, according to an official at the Ministry of Defence (MoD). – Defense News The Indian army said a three-day standoff with suspected rebels ended Wednesday after government forces killed two militants inside a building in the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir. The building was extensively damaged in the fighting. – Associated Press
The battle for ISR primacy continues between the venerable U-2 and the unmanned Global Hawk, but the Northrop Grumman drone took another step forward Oct. 6 in its quest to do what its manned competition does, and more. – Breaking Defense
“Outranged and outgunned” by Russian and Chinese missiles, the US Army wants a new long-range artillery rocket of its own. – Breaking Defense The U.S. military can no longer count on dominating any domain of warfare against near peer enemies and instead must aim for “local and temporal domain superiority”– making efforts to tie together weapons and sensors in a cross-domain web more important than ever, the Navy’s deputy chief of naval operations for warfare systems (OPNAV N9) told USNI News. – USNI News The Army needs to radically overhaul its equipment, training, and even its culture for chaotic future conflicts against high-end adversaries like Russia and China, the largest service’s top leaders said today. But its modernization budget is up to $40 billion below the other services’. – Breaking Defense
Marine Corps budgets in the coming years may be more focused on the company, platoon and squad levels, with the service trying to empower lower echelons that will operate with more independence in dispersed operations. – USNI News Milley has warned before that “we are on the cusp of a fundamental change in the character of ground warfare,.” (The nature of war remains eternally brutal and chaotic). But yesterday at the Association of the US Army’s annual Eisenhower Luncheon, the notoriously blunt general laid out his vision of future combat in more and grimmer detail than I’d ever heard — detail that suggests he’s informed by an intensifying program of secret wargames. – Breaking Defense After a generation spent fighting guerrillas, the Marines have just rolled out a new concept for high-tech combat against a nation-state — a concept they’re developing in unusually close concert with the Army and Navy. – Breaking Defense The Marine Corps today released a new operating concept that updates its 2014 Expeditionary Force 21 to include a renewed emphasis on maneuver warfare, while retaining an emphasis on operations in an urban littoral environment against a technologically sophisticated enemy. – USNI News The Marine Corps wants to change how troops get from ship to shore. And they’re willing to consider just about anything to do it. – Military.com On the battlefields of eastern Ukraine, Russian-backed infantry and artillery units have used more than 16 types of drones to identify enemy positions and deliver fire, often within minutes. That’s given Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, the decorated tank commander who runs the U.S. Army’s Capabilities Integration Center cause for concern. – Defense One There’s no doubt in the Army’s Capability Integration Center chief’s mind that the Army must hone its close-combat skills, even as some have suggested America will fight future wars from a safe distance using mostly long-range strike weapons. – Defense News Navy Reform The Navy deep-sixed all of its 91 enlisted ratings titles Thursday, marking the beginning of an overhaul of the rigid career structure that has existed since the Continental Navy in a radical shift sure to reverberate through the fleet and the veterans community beyond. – Military Times The Pentagon’s new Defense Innovation Board had its first meeting Thursday, but it was clear the 15-member panel had been busy over the previous months. – Defense News Interview: In two separate interviews just prior to the Association of the US Army’s annual conference, Defense News sat down with the top Army acquisition leaders – acquisition chief Katrina McFarland and her military deputy Lt. Gen. Michael Williamson -- to talk about how the service’s effort to reform acquisition is taking shape and its procurement priorities based on a concentrated assessment on the present and future threat picture. – Defense News The Navy and the Marine Corps are studying installing a vertical launch system in its San Antonio class of amphibious warships that would allow the ships to field larger offensive missiles, service officials told USNI News this week. – USNI News
Brad Carson and Morgan Plummer write: The Pentagon just doesn’t work very well, despite having a plethora of talented people both in and out of uniform…Much of the bureaucratic pathology has to do with the organizational design. Everyone seems to know this, but few have the ambition to identify the problems clearly. But if the next secretary of defense is going to have a fighting chance at rare success, the first move must be against a system that simply can’t deliver on its promise. Tough work to be sure, but it’s the free world at stake. – War on The Rocks Daveed Gartenstein-Ross writes: Unfortunately, a look at the intersection of analytic error and policy failure leaves us in the same place where we were 15 years ago. The United States does not understand the enemy well enough, and this impedes our ability to craft effective policy. Good policy can only emerge from a solid understanding of the adversary. We still do not have that. – New York Daily News
Example: The B-21 Bomber Mackenzie Eaglen writes: It’s time for a fundamental re-evaluation of how the national security community thinks and talks about the new B-21 bomber. The stealthy, long-range, modular bomber will aptly replace old and outdated systems. But, equally importantly, it will enable the Air Force to adapt to the changing nature of aerial warfare. As a result, the Air Force can rebuild its traditional ethos as a hotbed for innovation and service leader in the new doctrine, fresh concepts, and cutting-edge technologies to ensure American air superiority for the next generation. – Real Clear Defense Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford on Wednesday previewed a soon-to-be-finalized National Military Strategy, saying that developing international alliances and projecting power to faraway places will be the two key tenets of the classified document. – Defense News
The Pentagon’s new Defense Innovation Board had its first meeting Thursday, but it was clear the 15-member panel had been busy over the previous months. The board came out with a series of rough recommendations for Secretary of Defense Ash Carter — or his successor — that they believe will lead to injecting a culture of innovation into the Pentagon. – Defense News In the movie Eye in the Sky, a joint U.S.-British military operation puts an insect-sized drone inside the house of a terrorist. The live feed allows the onlookers in Washington, London, and elsewhere to verify the target and collect data that would be inaccessible from a sensor ball mounted on a Predator flying overhead. A San Diego company called Shield AI is bringing that vision to life. – Defense One The US Navy is test-firing and upgrading its arsenal of Trident II D5 nuclear-armed submarine launched missiles designed to keep international peace -- by ensuring and undersea-fired second-strike ability in the event of a catastrophic nuclear first strike on the US. – Scout Warrior
Navy SEALs infiltrating by sea are about to get more lethal. SEALs will soon have new underwater vehicles delivering them to targets that officials say will make a huge difference during missions. – The Hill |
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DOD ACQUISITION REFORM![]()
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