Two articles caught my eye this morning.
The Military Is Collapsing Under The Weight Of Its Own Wokeness
The US Army discovers woke doesn’t win wars — but is it too late?
I've seen this dragon rear its ugly head before. When I entered active duty in 1976, the US Army was coming off 15 years of continual deployments and an ignominious retreat from Vietnam. The officers were demoralized and the NCO corps was exhausted. It was a poor time to be in the US Army.
Today, in 2023, the military is coming off 20 years of continual deployments and a disastrous retreat from the Middle East. It's easy to draw parallels. When we came out of Vietnam, we had a weak, ineffectual president. Today, we have a weak ineffectual president. In 1975, "political correctness" was the order of the day. In 2023, wokeness rules the agenda. Neither of these is helpful in cultivating a strong military.
In 1980, it took Ronald Reagan to break the military out of its doldrums. We need a leader like that today.
The high point of my military service was Desert Storm. We had the benefit of 10 years of good training and the benefit of clear mission orders. Eject Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. When we did that, we came home.
I have great confidence in our fighting forces. Properly led, the US had the greatest military the world has ever seen. If the military is struggling, find better generals.
I will note a other thing that helped tremendously in the 1980s: a well defined threat common to all services in the form of the USSR. I retired in 2016, and my last assignment was at TRADOC-ARCIC, the place that works up ideas for future warfighting.
ReplyDeleteI would argue that now we've got two threats: Russia (or at least, an operating environment like the Russia-Ukraine war) for the Army, and the ChiComs for the Navy and Marines. (The AF gets both.)
Also, to be fair, the Army in the 80s benefitted from the maturity of weapons systems in the 80s - Abrams, Bradley, Apache, Blackhawk, and MLRS - the started development under Carter in the 70s.