Quote:When USMC Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller first got news that an explosion had rocked one of the gates at the Kabul airport on Aug. 26, killing 13 U.S. service members and 169 Afghan civilians, he decided to post a YouTube video with his reaction — knowing it could kill his 17-year career and current post as a Marine advanced infantry battalion commander.

“I’m making this video because I have a growing disconnect and contempt for perceived ineptitude at the policy level,” said Scheller, donned in his Marine fatigues and looking a bit shell shocked. “The reason people are so upset right now … they are upset that senior leaders let them down and no one is raising their hands and saying we messed this up.”

He pointed to Secretary of Defense Austin and other senior civilian and military leaders who had assured Congress in May that the Afghan Security forces would be able to withstand the Taliban sweep when American and NATO forces withdrew. He questioned the decision to evacuate the fortified Bagram Airfield in early July.

“Clearly they were wrong,” he said, noting he was fielding emails questioning whether fellow Marines had died in vain over the last 20 years. “What I’ll say is, from my position, potentially all those people did die in vain if we do not have senior leaders who own up, who raise their hands to say we did not do well in the end. Without that we are just repeating the same mistakes.”

Scheller was relieved of his command, jailed briefly, and court-martialed, but a largely sympathetic military judge gave him a reprimand and $5,000 fine (much to the consternation of the prosecution). While the military community was split over his punishment for violating code, there was clearly something more powerful going on. Scheller’s decision to put his career on the line to demand accountability became a mantra, not just about the August evacuation — but a reckoning of the last two decades.

(Ret.) Col. Doug Macgregor, writing in the American Conservative in October:

The generals always knew that the public admission of failure would not simply throw 20 years of graft and deceit into sharp relief; such an admission would expose the four stars themselves to serious scrutiny. To explain the rapid collapse of the U.S.-backed Afghan state and the inexcusable waste of American blood and treasure, the American people would discover the long process of moral and professional decline in the senior ranks of the Army and the Marines, their outdated doctrine, thinking, and organization for combat. For the generals it was always better to preserve the façade in Kabul, propping up the illusion of strength, than face the truth.

It was as if the Afghanistan debacle had finally ripped the last scab off the military’s role in the failed enterprise. Suddenly the superstar warrior/monk generals for whom the mainstream media had written endless paeans, before which members of Congress had bowed and scraped, were under the garish light of delayed circumspection.

As a result, there is plenty of talk about what went wrong and what shape the military is in for the future. And certainly just focusing on “the generals” would be shortsighted. This is about the institution — for which America’s trust is actually plummeting. So can the military really afford not to take stock of the cultural, institutional — and yes, political — changes that have swept over it in the last 20 years or more?

“My major concern is military effectiveness,” says (Ret.) Marine Corps. Capt. Dan Grazier, who served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan in a tank battalion and is now a military analyst at the Project on Government Oversight, “that in the rare event where the military does need to be deployed that we can be the most effective, lethal force possible when the situation calls for it.”

After interviews with several infantry veterans who served in the post-9/11 wars, The American Spectator picked up on a familiar theme as the main obstacle for rebuilding the forces and the faith: leadership corrupted by careerism and influenced by outside interests that don’t always coincide with the interests of the national defense.

The forces aren’t healthy: whose fault?

To Grazier’s mind, after 20 years of constant deployments the military is “going to naturally decay.” It’s impossible to sustain systems on a tempo of that measure without undergoing entropy. According to the most recent RAND Corporation study on deployments, 2.7 million service members have served in 5.4 million deployments across the globe since 2001. The National Guard and reserves account for about 35 percent of the total (as of 2015). In fact, thanks to COVID, wildfires, border patrol, and the extra security put on the nation’s capital in January, the Guard was used in 2020 more than any time since World War II. Missions peaked in June when more than 120,000 of its 450,000 members were on duty here or abroad.

Gil Barndollar, who served in Afghanistan with the Marines and is now a fellow with Defense Priorities, says retention will be a concern. These “citizen soldiers” have “become an operational reserve, not the strategic reserve they were originally intended to be,” he told the Spectator. “Manpower is a rollercoaster, the effects on recruiting and retention always have a lag after events and policy decisions.”

He laments that the Guard, of which he is currently a member, has been used to augment the active duty force so that it can maintain what has become protracted, unending overseas conflicts, often using resources and equipment that are needed stateside, particularly helicopters necessary to fight wildfires in western states.

“It hasn’t been just a long year, it’s been a long 20 years,” Army Maj. Gen. Bret Daugherty, commander of the Washington state Guard, said back in January. “I just want to focus on that. We’re all consumed with our domestic operations right now, but it is simultaneous with our overseas deployments, which have not let up one iota.”

Unfortunately, instead of pouring resources and energy into maintaining readiness, much of Washington’s zeal today is about throwing money at shiny new objects: big-ticket weapons systems, ships, and aircraft that either take years to build, become obsolete, or don’t work. A boon to the Beltway defense lobby, not so much for the fighting forces.

“The military has gotten into a lot of bad habits over the last 20 years. If you look at the amount of money that was thrown at the Pentagon, it’s created a lack of discipline,” Grazier charges. “After 9/11 the floodgates were opened wide. That played to the worst tendencies of the military industrial congressional complex.”

He points specifically to the F-35 fighter, which reached its 20-year anniversary in October and is the most expensive military project in history at $1.7 trillion in lifetime costs. One Air Force Secretary called the industry cost overruns in the program a “poster child for acquisitions malpractice.” And it still hasn’t passed full mission testing, mostly because its super-advanced technological bells and whistles have created a maintenance nightmare. The tragic irony? It’s likely to become obsolete. Yet Congress keeps buying more. Lockheed Martin, the F-35’s primary contractor, has spent $76 million in lobbying over the last five years alone, so it’s sure to get its money’s worth.

Then there is the Littoral Combat Ship, which was based on strategic planning in the 1990s. After spending $500 million for 21 ships, the Navy has decided the early designs are largely obsolete, particularly for “great power competition” with China. So it’s already decommissioned one ship — after only 13 years of service — and plans to take several more offline rather than spend the $2.5 billion upgrading them. Today there are still 31 built or under construction.

(Ret.) Army Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, who also served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, blames the influence of private industry, particularly its cozy relationships inside the Pentagon for the dysfunctional nature of procurement and acquisitions. Private defense firms spent $1 billion lobbying Washington since 2001, and in return received some $7 trillion in taxpayer funds over the course of the post-9/11 wars — that’s half of the $14 trillion spent overall.

Davis says this amount of money sloshing around has created enormous boondoggles that leave the forces ultimately high and dry (and the contractors fat and happy). Chew on this: the Air Force now wants to cut more than 87,000 pilot training hours because aircraft sustainment costs soared to $1 billion this year.

A favorite example of the lunacy, Davis says, is failure of the Army’s Future Combat Systems, which in 2003 promised to replace the M1 Abrams and M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles by 2010. It was canceled in 2009 after $18 billion spent and without a functional prototype.

In 2010 the Army announced the new Ground Combat Vehicle. That was canceled in 2014. Then the Army proposed the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle. This had to take a “tactical pause” in 2020 after a poor showing by contractors. As of today the program is back to square one, with five vendors sharing $244 million for the initial design phase, with full production by 2027. That’s a nearly quarter-century saga. Unfinished.

“This is a service-wide failure of the highest order,” Davis tells the Spectator. “The Russians started their own vehicle modernization program and started making production units of tanks and infantry fighting vehicles in a total of six years, yet the vaunted U.S. Army with all its alleged brilliance, has started multiple new programs since 1999 — and has yet to produce even a single prototype.”

Davis and Grazier say the problem is too much money and industry influence going on the E-Ring to get at it. Thus the revolving door: one POGO report from 2008 to 2018 found that 280 high ranking officials became lobbyists, board members, executives, or consultants for defense contractors within two years of leaving the service. Military officers going through the revolving door included 25 generals, 9 admirals, 43 lieutenant generals, and 23 vice admirals.

And then they come back. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper was a Raytheon lobbyist ($27 billion in federal contracts in 2020); Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan came from Boeing ($21 billion), Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy bounced over from Lockheed ($74 billion), and current Secretary of Defense Austin was a paid member of the Raytheon board after leaving the service in 2016.

Ethics rules are notoriously weak and the culture within the Pentagon incentivizes what many call “cronyism” or “rent seeking” inside, in which the top five companies get a third of all federal defense contracts, crowding out competition and making programs — like the F-35 — notoriously inefficient. Grazier says service members are conditioned early on to believe that industry interests are one in the same with the country’s interests (and to act accordingly), but that is not always true.

“I remember going through the quad in the Pentagon, it must have been late 2012,” said Davis. “I remember being disgusted by the fairs that defense companies would hold. It looked like the circus had come to town … it was all ‘buy this, buy that.’ There was nothing about how this might accomplish our strategic objectives; it was all about buying cool stuff. Find a place to make it fit.”

No Pattons or MacArthurs here

Barndollar sees the “careerism” that has overtaken the officer ranks over the last two decades as an even bigger issue. To his mind, this has led to a culture of risk avoidance and “CYA” (cover your ass) among the ambitious, where often blind loyalty and the ability to play politics play second fiddle to merit and competence on the path to higher promotions. In order to stay on that upward trajectory, one has to keep his or her head down, play the game.

Critics say this tends to produce ineffectual, mediocre commanders, and that can lead to serious leadership failures.

Barndollar points to the two Navy ship collisions in a span of months in 2017 which actually left 17 sailors dead. “Officers (and civilians) at the top refused to listen to warnings and bad news,” leading up to the accidents, said Barndollar. An official Navy report confirmed that leadership issues were rampant and both events were “avoidable.”

“It’s easier to see this in the Navy because they are running massive equipment in a tougher environment,” but it is happening in all of the services, said Barndollar.

On the greatest level, you see it manifest in the failures of the war strategy, the generals telling Congress only what they wanted to hear for 20 years, the inability of officers to stand up and say no, we aren’t doing this right. “When you see moral cowardice from the general officers, that’s about careerism. It’s a failure to speak truth to power and call out the institution and its problems.”

If the zeal with which the prosecution wanted to punish Stuart Scheller is any indication, it’s going to be very difficult to turn this particular ship around. The rank and file may be ready for the truth, but until the leadership is provided different incentives beyond cozy industry sinecures and stars, critics say the military is headed for more hurt than healing.

Quote:WASHINGTON, D.C.—The modern military takes on a lot of duties. There’s meeting diversity quotas. There’s Critical Race Theory training. And there’s helping the environment. Also, thrown in there are some requirements to protect the country. Well, the Pentagon has announced a new policy that will help the U.S. military meet some of those goals: They’re now switching all weapons to swords and bows.

“We have a deadly enemy out there,” announced General “Sparkles” McKenzie, “and it’s called carbon. The problem with modern-day weapons is that they take a lot of carbon to make. But if we get some nice bespoke swords or bows and arrows, that will help us stay carbon neutral, and you can all sleep safe at night.”

The Pentagon outlined many advantages to swords and bows other than their environmental impact. For one, it helps the military get rid of the M-16, a rifle they had wanted to stop using for a while, since it resembles the AR-15 preferred by right-wing nutjobs. Also, swords and bows don’t make loud noises, and loud noises have been known to trigger more sensitive soldiers.

There are some problems with the new policy, though. Some military simulations have shown that swords and bows do put the military at a disadvantage against armies that still use irresponsible gunpowder and explosive weapons. “We have a modern weapon for that,” explained McKenzie. “It’s called the hashtag #StopTheBang. Everyone get on Twitter with that, and I’m sure we can shame our enemies into doing the right thing.”

Quote:In a press briefing on November 10, Pentagon spokesman retired Adm. John Kirby gave further evidence of the Biden administration’s incoherent national strategy. He refused to distinguish between China and “climate change” as threats to U.S. national security.

In response to a question of “which is a bigger threat, the climate or China?” Kirby said, “You’ve heard the secretary talk about the climate as a — a real and existential national security threat . . . And we considered China as the number one pacing challenge for the department. Both are equally important. Both are — are challenges that the secretary wants the senior leadership at the Pentagon to be focused on, as well as many others, too.”

Kirby’s answer was a bit of a muddle. He first described China as “the number one pacing threat.” But he then immediately added, “Both are equally important.”

The questioning reporter then sought clarification: “So if you were to rank the two, climate or China, which would be first?”

Kirby could only say, “I think I answered your question.”

Others are more clear-headed. Despite Kirby’s refusal to clarify his comments, President Biden’s director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William Burns, has not hesitated in naming China as our “most significant threat [and] challenge” throughout the foreseeable future and said that “[o]ut-competing China will be key to our national security.”

The outgoing vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Hyten was brutally direct in recent comments reported by CNN. “Calling China a pacing threat is a useful term because the pace at which China is moving is stunning,” Hyten told reporters at a Defense Writers Group roundtable last month. “The pace they’re moving and the trajectory they’re on will surpass Russia and the United States if we don’t do something to change it. It will happen. So I think we have to do something.”

Burns’s and Hyten’s warnings are backed up by China’s aggressive military build-up, which leaves no room for doubt that its strategy is one of expansion and aggression. In 2020 the Department of Defense reported to Congress that what “is certain is that the CCP has a strategic end state that it is working towards, which if achieved and its accompanying military modernization left unaddressed, will have serious implications for U.S. national interests and the security of the international rules-based order.”

As part of that modernization, China’s navy has surpassed the U.S. Navy as the world’s largest. Its recent leap ahead of us in the development of a hypersonic nuclear-capable missile sent shockwaves through the military and intelligence communities.

Given the strategic threat posed by China, Kirby’s refusal to distinguish between the threats posed by it and “climate change” raises the question, “Why does Admiral Kirby still have a job?” The answer is because Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Commander-in-Chief Joe Biden approve of what he said.

A Monumental Change in Military Strategy
The American public needs to be aware that the Biden administration’s position, as reflected in Kirby’s refusal to distinguish between our principal military adversary and “climate change,” represents a monumental change in U.S. military strategy. It is yet more evidence that the military is faithfully following the so-called “progressive” agenda instead of sharpening its focus on winning our wars. It is of a piece with Gen. Mark Milley’s focus on “white rage” and his classification of “thousands” of demonstrators at the Capitol on January 6 as domestic enemies who were trying to “overturn the Constitution of the United States of America.”

Under Austin, the Department of Defense has embraced the climate change religion. In October, DOD proclaimed the crisis and stated it would take immediate action to elevate the climate as a national security priority and, among other things, reduce our carbon footprint.

In DOD’s “Climate Adaptation Plan,” Austin attempts to justify the change by claiming that events such as hurricanes and flooding are part of “climate-related extreme weather [that] affects military readiness and drains our resources.” He bows to a Biden executive order that requires the DOD “to prioritize climate change in all our activities and incorporate its security implications into analysis as well as key strategy, planning, and programming documents.”

Assessing the Weather
Now, it is important to note here that assessing the enemy, terrain, and weather has been part of military commanders’ battle planning for centuries. War planning for Norway differs from that for Iraq.

Gen. Dwight Eisenhower’s access to superior weather forecasts was a major part of his ability to achieve tactical battlefield surprise on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Before that, the Duke of Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo by taking advantage of heavy rains that hampered transportation, limited the use of artillery, and forced Napoleon’s Imperial Guard to attack uphill through the mud.

The radical difference in the Biden administration’s approach is its refusal to distinguish between extrinsic factors that should be considered in operational planning, such as terrain, weather, and climate, and rational, strategic actors, such as China, who challenge our national security.

The cause, extent, and effects of “climate change” are the subject of considerable scientific debate. Some believe that man-made “climate change” threatens the very survival of civilization, while others disagree, relying, among other things, on the history of unfulfilled doomsday predictions of a new ice age by 2000, the disappearance of polar ice caps, and cities inundated by rising seas.

General MacArthur’s Charge
On the proper role of the military, Biden and Austin would do well to heed the eloquent charge given to the West Point cadets by Gen. Douglas MacArthur in 1962:

We deal now, not with things of this world alone, but with the illimitable distances and as yet unfathomed mysteries of the universe. . . We are reaching out for a new and boundless frontier. We speak in strange terms: of harnessing the cosmic energy; of making winds and tides work for us . . . of controlling the weather for a more equitable distribution of heat and cold, of rain and shine . . .

And through all this welter of change and development your mission remains fixed, determined, inviolable. It is to win our wars. Everything else in your professional career is but corollary to this vital dedication. All other public purposes, all other public projects, all other public needs, great or small, will find others for their accomplishment; but you are the ones who are trained to fight. Yours is the profession of arms, the will to win, the sure knowledge that in war there is no substitute for victory, that if you lose, the Nation will be destroyed, that the very obsession of your public service must be Duty, Honor, Country.

To the military: Listen to MacArthur. Your mission is to win our wars. All else is a corollary. The survival of the nation depends upon it.

Quote:Somewhat lost in the outrage over Joe Biden’s unforgivable Afghanistan withdrawal was Marine Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller Jr., who put his career on the line in late August 2021, when he called out his chain of command over the disastrous efforts to evacuate the war-torn country.

Lt. Col. Scheller was imprisoned, court-martialed, and ultimately relieved of duty.

In an opinion piece published at Human Events on Thursday, Scheller absolutely told it like it is, blasting the Armed Forces of the United States, as decimated by their “commander” in chief Joe Biden, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, and Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — the proverbial Three Stooges, hellbent on crippling America’s fighting forces with more emphasis on so-called “critical race theory,” gender self-identification, pronouns, and LGBTQIA+ (LMNOP) rights than maintaining combat readiness.

The bottom line, declared Scheller: “The American military is promoting cowardice.”

Scheller began with his imprisonment:

Following the Afghanistan evacuation, I was imprisoned for publicly challenging military leadership. Nearly a year later, Americans still don’t appreciate the dire implications emanating from foundational issues in the U.S. military. During critical moments when military leaders should be standing for American values, we instead find impressively dressed old men nodding “yes.”

When that unconditional obedience leads to disaster – as it did in Afghanistan and Benghazi – military leaders focus on managing political narratives to save their own careers. In doing so, they miss timely assessments of failure, and inadvertently squander the sacrifices of selfless young servicemembers.

Austin and Milley — the “wokest” of the “woke” were shamelessly unavailable for comment. Speaking of woke generals, Scheller took a different tack — and blasted the lack of moral courage.

Some blame the problem on “woke generals.” But that’s a catch-all term misdiagnosing the root problem: the American military is currently led by senior general officers lacking moral courage. Most Americans don’t understand how this quality is actively filtered out by the military promotion system.

Officers are easily influenced, focusing on pleasing superiors for high markings on subjective evaluations. When senior military leaders focus on pleasing their bosses for forty years (the time required to make four-star general) it’s not surprising they consistently acquiesce to political whims at the expense of building effective combat power.

In practice, they tolerate, even incentivize, silence during military failures. Thus, it’s not surprising that General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and General Kenneth McKenzie, the theater commander, remain entrenched in their position that the Afghanistan evacuation was a success. To say otherwise would end their career, or worse, threaten lucrative post-service positions within the oligopoly of government contracting firms.

Incidentally, as many of us observed at the time, Biden’s Afghanistan debacle was never about leaving Afghanistan; it was about how he left it, including leaving an untold number of American civilians behind the lines of the most brutal terrorist organization on the planet.

Scheller also took a couple of well-aimed shots at Gen. James Mattis and the aforementioned Lloyd Austin:

General James Mattis went from General Dynamics to Secretary of Defense and then back to General Dynamics, impervious to scrutiny due to the supposed greatness of his military policies – which contained many failures.

Secretary Lloyd Austin followed a similar path: from four-star to the board of Raytheon to Secretary of Defense. When the media (beholden to their own corporate interests) cover this at all, they often focus on irrelevant problems, only scratching the surface of the deep rot.

While a growing number of patriotic Americans understand, to varying degrees, the failures of the military under Biden, Austin, and Milley, the question is, how to fix it? What must be done to refocus — from the top down — America’s energies on combat readiness, first and foremost, and away from the continuing metastasizing of the left’s woke, crock-of-crap, nonsense?

As Scheller sees it, not top-down — the stringent M.O. of the U.S. military and the federal government alike — but bottom-up.

Reform must come from the ground up. Simply replacing “woke generals” doesn’t correct the system producing hollow military leaders. Fortunately, America has two decades of combat warriors, the best young talent, and the finest training facilities on the planet.

The next generation of generals could potentially break the cycle of working just to impress their boss. Instead of people-pleasing and nepotism, competitions illustrating performance in warfighting should earn officers the fast track to promotion.

But these reforms won’t get anywhere if the military is not held accountable to itself and to the public. The Afghanistan evacuation exemplified military failure, but America failed to hold anyone accountable.

Accountability forces acknowledgment that in addition to pleasing superiors, senior military leaders must fight wars effectively. If nobody demands effective warfighting, the demoralizing failures will continue.

At the end of the day, it’s still all about “real leadership,” Scheller admonished:

Without real leadership, the cracks in the military foundation continue widening. The obvious problems cannot go unidentified much longer without great risk to the American people. Americans desperately need courageous leaders willing to confront and reform our deeply flawed systems.

Fix the leaders, fix the culture, and watch as all other problems self-correct. The American military truly finds itself in a crisis of command.

Again, Joe Biden, Lloyd Austin, and Mark Milley were unavailable for comment.

Wouldn’t you be, if you were one of them?