Gates to Army: make security force assistance work
Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s speech last Friday to West Point’s Corps of Cadets was a warning to the Army to prepare for wrenching change. It was also a plea for the Army to not squander the wisdom and experience now residing in its junior and field grade officers and in its NCOs. Gates’s speech made clear that he is concerned that in spite of the experiences of the past decade, the Army has not completed a cultural transition from the Cold War–era Army to an Army optimized for an era of persistent irregular conflict. For Gates, realigning the Army’s institutional culture for this era is more than updating its training and acquisition programs. The task won’t be complete until the Army’s personnel and promotion system is also dramatically changed.
Gates also made clear that he won’t be around to drag the Army in the direction he described. That will be up to his successor and the next generation of Army leaders. If Gates’s message wasn’t ominous enough, these leaders face an even bigger challenge left unsaid by Gates but perhaps implied, namely how will Big Army – its general purpose forces – remain relevant in the period ahead. With threats rapidly compounding in the air, naval, space, and cyber dimensions, and defense spending heading in the other direction, the Army’s general purpose forces would appear to be the easiest target to get the books balanced.
Gates asserted that, “any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined.'” Gates is presumably exempting the current defense secretary from such a cranial critique. It was Gates himself who implemented the surge strategy in Iraq and (according to Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars) was the most determined advocate for the “big American land army” in Afghanistan. During his time as defense secretary, the U.S. headcount in Afghanistan grew from under 24,000 to nearly 100,000.
When Gates councils against another large, open-ended campaign by general purpose forces, he seems to be assuming that the U.S. government will find some effective tactic, technique or procedure other than a large stabilization campaign to deal with Eurasian security problems that are certain to arise. The second half of Gates’s speech implied as much. He sees a new generation of young Army leaders who now have extensive on-the-job training and experience in security force assistance and building partnership capacity. He wants to retain that generation so that they can use these skills to both prevent future security problems that would otherwise require a large messy intervention, or to prepare indigenous or proxy forces to fight these conflicts so U.S. general purpose forces won’t have to. It is an unproven model. But for Gates, it is politically imperative that the Army provide such an option to future policymakers.
In order for that happen, the Army needs a personnel system more optimized for breeding T.E. Lawrence and Russell Volckmann rather than Omar Bradley or Bedell Smith. The Army’s officer promotion system has been designed to train and select officers who are the best at leading larger and larger general purpose units. Any time in one’s career spent away from command, staff, and school billets not in support of that track is a grave career risk. Gates explicitly called for Army officers to get off that track in ways that would improve their skills at security force assistance with foreign military partners. And he called on the Army’s personnel system to support this new primary track.
With Gates sharply downgrading the probability of either Big Army COIN stabilization campaigns or “another head-on clash of large mechanized land armies,” the primary tasks of Gates’s future army would seem to be security force assistance, strategic raiding, counter-terror direct action, brigade-level rapid reaction, and disaster response. With Cold War-era general purpose missions downgraded, much of the Army’s mechanized forces could be headed to the reserve component, which would revert to a strategic reserve.
Gates’s speech was a warning that the Army is about to get smaller, more intellectually challenging, and with promotions harder to come by. The result, Gates hopes, will be an Army that can make security force assistance into a highly effective and widely used tool. It is an unproven theory. But it’s a plan that has to work — because Gates’s successors will certainly strive to take his advice about those big land wars in Asia.
