Small Wars Journal

Fixing America's Military and U.S. Diplomacy

Mon, 03/31/2008 - 5:52pm
How to Fix the U.S. Military - Phillip Carter, Slate

Overhaul the budget. If you'd awakened from a 20-year-long slumber and glanced at the current defense budget, you'd think the Cold War were still raging...

Rejigger the military services. One obstacle to rational military planning is that, for the past 40 years, by unspoken agreement, the defense budget has been evenly split among the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force....

Fix the Army. The Army is (barely) meeting its recruitment goals by lowering standards and dishing out large bonuses...

Invest in people. When the draft ended in 1973, the Army chiefs shifted incentives from veterans' benefits (such as the GI Bill) to enlistment bonuses...

Promote the right leaders. Owing to a shortage of officers, almost anyone can get promoted to lieutenant colonel...

Create incentives for a real nation-building or counterinsurgency capability. ... more troops are trained in such operations and more officers with expertise in that area are promoted to general...

Spread the responsibilities around. Civilian experts are probably better than sergeants at the kinds of stability operations described above....

Taxes. ... more citizens have to contribute something to national defense—if not their blood, then more of their treasure.

Fixing America's Military - James Joyner, Outside the Beltway

Phil Carter has teamed with Fred Kaplan to write the first in a ten-part series on fixing what ails America's military.

Many of the suggestions are familiar: drastically change budget priorities away from major procurement programs designed to fight an enemy that doesn't exist; do away with parity between the Service budgets, realigning spending to our real-world mission requirements; stabilize career patterns to make them less burdensome on wives and families; and promote the most innovate, visionary leaders rather than the best bureaucrats...

Fixing U.S. Diplomacy by Fred Kaplan, Slate

Travel to all the Middle East countries and leave behind a full-time envoy to the region...

Iraq: Use the troops as leverage. Most Democrats realize that total withdrawal in the next few years is impractical...

Prevent Iraq's internal violence from spreading into neighboring countries...

In certain neighboring countries... In 2006, Condoleezza Rice was asked why she wasn't talking with Syria...

Separately, open up talks with Iran with an eye toward negotiating a "grand bargain."...

Work toward new Pakistani alliances...

Pursue public diplomacy. What we do sends a more potent signal to the world than the cleverest PR campaign...