In military doctrine, there’s many actions and maneuvers you can take to defeat an enemy; to breach their defenses, break their forces, seize ground, and reshape the political landscape. No matter the action, the effect is what matters most: is your opponent’s army unable to mass themselves and their effects, are they unable to coordinate their actions, are their soldiers unwilling to fight to the last for the cause of the day? If you can answer yes to these questions, then you’ve achieved what is necessary for victory.
So uh, congrats to the PLA.
We’re doing it to ourselves.
A not insignificant amount of time, energy, and resources has went into preparing for war in the Pacific and hopefully deterring or at least buying us some time until we’re ready. We’ve been short on munitions and munitions production capacity for years if not decades. We’ve struggled with basing and access, found ourselves repeatedly short on spare parts with maintenance backlogs, and slow to develop relevant training for the next fight. We let some critical skills decay and others we have yet to learn in the first place.
But in the last few years, there was a real effort to change things.
New technologies, CONOPs, and diplomatic campaigns mixed with the munitions and friends of old. We weren’t where we needed to be, but maybe we were buying time and getting a bit better. The stockpiles weren’t full, but they weren’t bare bones anymore. The production lines were growing. The assets were finally being relieved of their perpetual CENTCOM duties and getting realigned to PACOM. These sorts of things take years. The Pentagon is a big ship and she does not turn on a dime.
And then, we set ourselves on fire. And like with any fire, you can reasonably recover from first degree burns. But the longer you burn, and the higher the heat, the less recovery is likely and death ever more so. We set out to break an army, and boy did we. Just not the one we thought we would. As I travel the country and talk to new folks and old friends, I am getting this deeply unsettling feeling that we have broken the force in a way not seen since the post-Vietnam era. It’s been five years since the fall of Kabul, and instead of a joint force realigned to the real, century defining fight….we are pinned down in a war of our own making against a second tier opponent making Lego memes about us, running out of ammo, our forces spread thin and overworked, our leadership in disarray, and discipline and morale fading.
The Thinning Red Line
The Navy is bearing the brunt of the pain today. Like the Army during the Iraq Surge and the entire force during the BCA era, we have placed a massive burden on a force we cannot effectively man, equip, supply, and retain. In this case, it’s the US Navy floating in and around the Indian Ocean for far longer than they ever should without port calls and dockside maintenace. It’s PACOM assets once again being dragged out of their foxholes in the 1st and 2nd Island Chain to clean up CENTCOM’s mess. It’s the non-stop sorties and protection missions, the isolation, the deteriorating living conditions. You’ve all seen this in the news over and over again. The Fleet out there is taking the worst of it, but as we saw during the BCA era, those strains reverberate for years on people and machines. You don’t fix this just by turning the war off tomorrow. The damage is done, it’s just a matter of how many pints of proverbial blood you’re willing to lose.
Then you’ve got the US Army, which continues to rotate all three components both overseas and domestically, for extended deployments, as if GWOT was still raging, all around the globe. At least PCS units forward if you’re gonna do that, but still. People are tired, and as we’ll see in the morale section, increasingly unmotivated. The force can only survive so long living the duality of wartime tempo with peacetime means.
Out of Ammo (Redux)
As I wrote in “What Did We Learn, CENTCOM?” and other pieces, we’re out of ammo. We keep running our magazines near empty and industry seems to be hitting cap on what can be sustained for production. Combatant Commanders are begging OSD to stop the deployments and munitions burn, that it is unsustainable, and yet we persist. We’re like an alcoholic trying to find happiness at the bottom of the bottle. Production is not magic and JASSMs and exquisite interceptors do not grow on trees. Yes, we did not have enough ammo before this conflict…and we have a helluva lot less now and destroyed any progress we made in building our stocks up over the last few years. It will take even longer to get back to where we were, much less where we need to be. We have burned this much exquisite ammo, again, on a second tier threat. Whatever our estimates were for a China conflict, we should assume we have to burn even more now. Quite frankly, this is catastrophic. I don’t know how to calculate the damage done to our magazines. The comparison that most often springs to mind is the gross incompetence of the Imperial Russian military leading up to World War I. It isn’t like we aren’t aware of the modern, capable military across the ocean that is very much bent on putting us at the bottom of the Pacific. We’re very aware. We’ve just decided yeeting things at Iran is more important.
Leadership in Disarray
Where to begin here…from bizarro strategies written on paper that are ignored at the drop of a new tweet to misadventures around the world to apparent purges and blocking of senior leaders for the mere perception that the color of their skin or gender gave them some advantage never documented. How about the infighting between the remaining senior leaders that has resulted in the very public spats between OSD and SECARMY’s office? How about the departure of well-respected senior leaders young and old while others scheme to take their place at any cost to the force? Is it a good look when the SECARMY resigns the same day he’s in the Oval Office pleading the Army’s case about its future, as Politico reports.
Look some spats and debate are healthy…this is not. It’s clear personality and politics has taken full priority over sound policy and strategy, to say the least. And as we all know, problems at the top filter down and make things worse for everyone. Confidence, clarity, and trust in leadership matters. And it’s just not present today.
Killing Morale
Morale and discipline go hand in hand, every soldier knows this although some mistake pointless discipline for morale. Discipline, when tied to purpose, ethics, and morals, is important for a force even when not actively in combat. It means soldiers share a common narrative, culture, and system which respects them and provides them justice. When bad soldiers are prosecuted, deterred from doing harm, and good soldiers are protected, morale is up. When crime goes up among service members, particularly between service members, that is a massive red flag for the force. Crime during and post-Vietnam, from assaults to drug dealing to murder, skyrocketed among low morale and lack of discipline, which then created a negative feedback loop and only made it worse. We are now seeing a significant uptick in service member on service member violence, particularly assault, among deployed service members. Downstream, you can see that in the day to day lack of discipline which is much harder to quantify but that few green suiters who are honest with themselves could dispute these days. The enthusiasm, discipline, the morale, quite simply isn’t there. And that’s before you get into the toxic information environment found on TikTok and elsewhere that either promotes toxic VetBro culture, antisemitism, anti-science, anti-Americanism, or whatever brand of hate may rule the algorithm today. We live in a slurry of disinformation that our junior soldiers are most vulnerable to and which we do a poor job of protecting them from.
A Long Time Coming
In simplest terms, it is the job of the US military to deter and if necessary, close with and destroy the enemy to achieve the political objectives of the united States. It cannot do that if we have no ammo, no motivation, and no clear strategy.
It would be easy for me to say that all of this has come about in one administration but that’s simply not the case. We are asking more while providing less for so long and this is our reckoning. The Iran War and its uh, mishandling, is simply the straw to break the $1 trillion camel’s back. We are 5 years post Kabul, but never stopped acting like we were deploying for war and never stopped and seriously realigned forces, resources, and support, for the fight we should be training for. The US military for too long has said it can do everything when asked (even if by its own analysis it says otherwise) and political leadeship has cared little for answers other than “yes sir” no matter how ridiculous the ask. Now the Joint Force finds itself suffering under a hurricane of stressors from declining morale to ammo shortages, all tied to an incredibly unpopular war with no end in sight. Just as the real bad guys grow in strength across the Pacific.
We’ve seen this before: this is how you break an army.