Yes, American generals should be fired

In October 1939, just a month after taking office as Army chief of staff, General George C. Marshall winnowed the ranks of senior officers into hiding to prepare for war. Most of them have their minds fixed on outdated patterns, Marshall told his leadership team, and cannot change to meet the new conditions they might face if we engage in the war that has begun in Europe.

Since the defeat of Athens, each democracy has pruned its senior leaders who proved inadequate to the demands of their respective times, often more painful than simple public shame. Ours is perhaps the only era in which an entire class of generals and admiralties, more than 80% of whom obtain employment in the defense sector after retirement, are systematically rewarded with lucre and prestige for their loss.

With two failed wars and numerous weapons acquisition fiascos now consigned to the dustbin of history, many may fear that virtue itself has been swept from the ground. The general public's deference to self-serving illusions has fostered an unearned and atrophied trust in a system of selecting top executives made hollow by assumptions of the past.

Therefore, Defense Secretary-designate Pete Hegseth's impassioned call to focus on the people who serve and his condemnation of a self-perpetuating, class-creating system of leadership could, if we can look past the vitriol of our time, announcing our own Marshall. moment to deter war rather than wage one.

First, most Americans do not realize that the competitive promotion commission system for our military, as defined by law, ends after two-star selection. All three and four star officers are therefore politically appointed in every sense of the word. No selection committee meets to nominate them for secretary, president, or Congress. So who removes the anointed from the flock? It is the responsibility of each uniformed service chief to manage an increasingly small and hermetically sealed talent pool, presenting a Goldilocks-like offering of options to the Civilian Secretary who will then forward recommendations to the Secretary of State. Defense. Products from these selections, once confirmed by the Senate, will often outlast their civilian masters in terms of service life. The long-term national security stakes could not be higher.

The Senate rarely thoroughly reviews the lists of future three-star officers submitted to it for confirmation. A clear sign of systemic dysfunction was the outcry from top military officials and the mainstream media over the control exercised by Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama. Even after a long history of failure among senior officers, what was ultimately most valued was the reproduction and respect of an established hierarchy, and certainly not the effectiveness of the hierarchical selection system itself.

Hegseth is also not wrong when he accuses a senior officer class of self-serving political machinations that often ignore the realities of war. Yes, the past and present senior rank structure is required for the legal execution of the necessary war captaincy. But this is the very nature of political competition for promotion to the highest levels where leaders often stray from their virtuous origins. The philosophical descent from the battlefield to the polis can be morally treacherous for all who walk it, and especially for the battlefield gods who soon prove all too human.

The officers protected from prosecution even when convicted of embezzlement are often the very ones most willing to end much younger careers, rather than stand up and support them.

The press and leaders who believe that an effective uniformed meritocracy still exists reinforce this debilitating dynamic. Often the first time much of today's elite civilian socioeconomic class mixes with the military occurs at the highest levels. And the latter believe that if they had left the service earlier or benefited earlier from the privileges of their counterparts, they too would have naturally risen to the rank of leaders in the corporate world. Continuing positions in the same industries that have sustained them in uniform is simply seen as their just due.

This mutual reinforcement reaches its peak when our highest military leaders believe that they are speaking publicly for the good of the nation, in concert with their new class. They may even attempt to lead the electorate by using their institutionally supported platform to promote policies that resonate with their own experiences while satisfying the desires of their political masters, thereby ensuring their rise and prominence.

A picture book about firsts thus replaces battlefield victories in the minds of decision-makers who measure such selections, however fairly won, as an increase in even greater power.

However, new volunteers from civil society are often lost in this vicious circle, because they have little ability to predict the political game to come.

Indeed, it is our most vulnerable leaders in the junior ranks who suffer the greatest damage from such replication of hierarchy and class creation. Herein lies Major Hegseth's greatest potential and longest contribution. For as he well knows, most of our best young people are simply not willing to go through the insane career paths, obsequious mental torture and downright family damage required to participate in such replications of the hierarchy, while that the less talented do it much more willingly.

Yes, the talent market works, but with active flows that definitely leave an open tap of promise at each career decision stage. Current leaders are rarely held accountable for recruitment and retention issues, or indeed anything else.

Some people say it's too complicated to solve, but there are ready-made solutions. Because the Secretary of Defense must approve each permanent retirement at the three- or four-star rank, he or she has the ability to use that approval as a lever for national success, not just an automatic approval for a Guard without incident. Like the reserves, we need to increase the permeability of experts and cadres coming in and out of uniform at the highest levels, and make the reservist-civilian model a feature of the selection system, not a bug.

Additionally, we should mandate and extend cooling-off periods without which senior officers are incentivized to benefit from the same military requirements they wrote while on active duty. Bring back former three- and four-star officers to testify when the weapons requirements they championed go awry so we can learn as an institution. Audit the selection process, focus on developing leaders, and implement a modern talent management system that can earn trust from all ranks.

And since these are actually political appointments, create a repeatable mechanism to ensure that potential three- and four-star officers are held accountable to a clearly expressed strategic intent, rather than wandering aimlessly and often selfishly between the Constitution and the President.

Because history is also ruthless in its pursuit of truth, it teaches how the choice of military leaders often determines the progress or failure of democracy itself.

Around the same time that General Marshall was preparing America for war by choosing more agile leadership, a historian and French army officer named Captain Marc Bloch was castigating the lack of virtue and ability of his superiors in his remarkable book Strange Defeat, written just a few months before his election. his own cold-blooded execution by the Gestapo.

Summarizing the facts he witnessed without access to battlefield archives, Bloch highlighted the serial errors that led to the fall of France which, a glaring feature, were nevertheless common to all. Our leaders, or those who acted for them, were incapable of thinking in terms of a new war. In other words, the German triumph was essentially a triumph of the intellect and that is what makes it so particularly serious.

As General Marshall well knew, America is no more immune from a triumph of the intellect than the French or any other nation when it comes to self-defense. Senior management selection systems also require both the freedom of introspection for which many have died and the trust of all who will serve in the future. There is nothing more strategic or existential than that.

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