John Schmitt starts his article: “The defining feature of the development US military policy is the tension that exists between the lessons of history and the promises of technology. A contest between those who see the past as prologue and those who see it as irrelevant.” He’s exactly right — airpower vs. attrition vs. maneuver. The last thing that he says, Chinese anti-access area-denial is formidable, without a doubt, but to assume it cannot be overcome is defeatist. So boom. We talked about careerism and careerists, we talked about attritionists, and now we have a new word in the lexicon and that’s defeatist.
That was from a very interesting episode of the All Marine Radio podcast: The Mensas discuss 6 articles that criticize Force Design 2030. John Schmitt, of course, mostly wrote the Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1: Warfighting under the leadership of General Alan Gray in 1989 — which really is a must read.
The Marine Corps new Force Design 2030 led by Commandant Berger has created an impassioned debate, one that probably should have been had a long time ago. If you missed the May 16, 2022 CSIS panel, be sure to give it a listen. CDR Salamander also has a good post on the subject where he takes a middle of the road approach.
One of the points critics make is that General Berger essentially asked mid-level officers to help formulate the plan without significant input from the combatant commanders or the retired generals. The short version of the result is less reliance on armor, artillery, and even a reduction of aircraft by more than 200 in favor of longer-range fires (e.g., Naval Strike Missile, MRLS), unmanned systems, and decentralized networked forces. General Berger wants to achieve Force Design 2030 without more money, which has meant $18 billion in program tradeoffs.
Certainly all levels of defense and congressional leadership has been aware of this. I was surprised by the supportive statements at the HASC hearing on the Marine Corps’ FY23 budget. But the critics feel that there are many hard questions which have not been addressed. One is the idea of expeditionary advanced basing — if you’re going to do that then you better work on your network of international partners who will host these Marines and probably ask for some offsets and assurances.
Anyway, I have a love-hate relationship with this next argument:
Schmitt is obviously making a point of overarching technology which is utopian. I’ve talked about a book before called Finding the Target, which is a criticism of the whole transformation debate that was occurring before 9/11. If you remember, Rumsfeld was in trouble because they couldn’t get transformation done. The author of the book basically says we’re looking for this transparency on the battlefield to be handed to us by technology and then warfare comes down to ‘can we find the target?’ Fundamentally, Marine Corps doctrine and all of us in our heart of hearts know, warfare has not a lot to do with finding the target, it’s two men in a fight. One will win and one will lose. Which man are you? … Reliance on technology goes away from 2,500 years of written history on warfare.
Funny enough, what General Berger is doing with the Marines is precisely what Christian Brose recommends in his book The Kill Chain. Essentially, Brose says the United States will lose a war if it doesn’t adapt asymmetric technologies to counter China’s quantitative advantage. It’s all about closing the kill chain quickly, which starts with finding the target. Moreover, Brose argues that top DoD leadership has all the tools they need to make such a transformation, but it just requires someone to do it.
Well… Force Design 2030 is a good test of that theory, and it seems a bit exclusionary. The problem is that no senior leader or group of staff officers can make these detailed plans rationally, even if they start with the right assumptions. Rapid prototyping, experimentation, and feedback will probably expose many of the issues these “old-school” Marines are already talking about. These can only be addressed by providing higher level mission intent, but delegating program choice to the people who actually have to make it work.
The other side of the coin is that counter-UAS, long-range fires, electronic warfare, and other capabilities of Force Design 2030 also have utility. Room for these systems can only come from tradeoffs in legacy force structure, because tanks and artillery are not getting any cheaper. To say no change will result from technology is the real defeatism. To say not one of three Marine Expeditionary Forces can be used for experimentation is hard to swallow.
In my mind, the burden of proof is on the critics. What is the percent likelihood that the United States will suffer a resounding strategic defeat if it doesn’t have one Marine Expeditionary Force? Is that an acceptable risk relative to the new options provided by Force Design 2030 should the tech-utopian contingency materialize?
If the whole thing were framed incrementally, constructive criticism were invited, and scaling up were based on empirical evidence, then maybe the transition would be smoothed over. Unfortunately, budgetary choices on weapon systems are supposed to be based on a well-defined plan stretching decades — set prior to empirical evidence. Create a strategy, document programs to meet that strategy on paper, and then you can get money a couple years later for items delivered a few years after that.
The Soviet-era PPBE budget process creates this lock-in effect that builds up until its untenable, but also stifles the empirical evidence with which to move towards new paradigms. There should not be generational crises in force structure — change should be continuous. PPBE was explicitly designed to replace incremental choices with static, multi-decade programs.
To close out, I thought this discussion on JIEDDO was interesting:
My other point [of contention] is technology is the answer. JIEDDO, Joint IED Defeat Organization. That thing’s budget was billions. And all that stuff was TS Top. They would have a program that would come in and all the service vice chiefs had to sign off on it, which was a pain in the ass document.
… I got a letter that I could sign certain things for the general — the iron pen — if something costs less than $10 million for JIEDDO, I would just get it signed. Those were maybe 10 percent of programs that came in, usually they were in the tens of million or hundreds of millions of dollars. These were not MRAPs. These were ‘find the target.’ And it never worked. That’s the whole point. We have a 20 year history that only ended two years ago to convince us that our ability to have overarching intelligence to narrow down target sets to defeat the enemy doesn’t work.
We spent billions of dollars recently to defeat the crudest of enemy weapon systems. And we think we’ll be somehow better at more technical weapons? It’s ridiculous. We’ve proved it to ourselves…. What’s even worse is I spent several years driving around Afghanistan impervious to these IEDs because I drove in a local car, and nobody could tell who I was.
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