I want to have confidence in our senior military leaders. But they lost me in the months before our Afghanistan Skedaddle Debacle and years after. The needed Roman decimation may be beginning.
Be still my heart (tip to Instapundit):
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is considering firing a slate of military generals and flag officers as early as this week, according to two defense officials and three congressional officials.
Pentagon leadership has shared a list of generals and officers who could be fired with Republican members of the House and the Senate, the defense officials and congressional officials said. The officials said the timing for announcing the decisions could shift.
And here we go. Trump fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I didn't care what that general was thinking about George Floyd as he did in a video he posted. I wanted to know about his views on the protection for our aircraft he was responsible for in INDOPACOM. And I questioned his "recruiting" commercials that seemed like an advertisement to get his JCS job. He has surely done way more to protect this country than I did or will. But hold the top job? No.
But so far we're in rookie number territory for an old fashioned Roman Decimation, eh?
I want a purge. I lost confidence--justifiably, I believe--in our flag officers and general officers (FOGOs) over the Afghanistan defeat. Although my disappointment in our FOGOs regarding Afghanistan is not all-encompassing.
Our staffs are too bloated with officers, I believe. But I concede I'd rather have rigorous analysis of what expanded duties and coordination with other services require in the area of senior officers. Perhaps some of that staff is better suited to higher levels of command rather than overloading the combat commander in the field. Perhaps the black box of effects I want for troops should be duplicated at higher echelons to fulfill the expanded duties needed to wage a battle.
One means of keeping useful slots for not quite apex generals might be to increase our divisional headquarters by 50% by commanding just two brigades each. In 2000 I proposed this as part of a Military Review article (charts were stripped and some text garbled, which broke the flow, so I put the corrected text version here) on making divisions more deployable while being capable of absorbing another brigade for large-scale conventional operations.
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