FragO: Shift focus to fire for effect

If you follow military news much beyond the latest from Ukraine or Gaza these days, you’ve seen announcements about one commanding officer or another fired for “lack of confidence in his ability to lead.” The pronoun is varied to fit as quite a few senior females in command of one thing or another get the axe which makes it tough to blame organizational sexism or misogyny in this rash of high level terminations.

That said, the axe seems to be falling throughout the ranks with disturbing regularity and hits folks of all colors and ethnicities. Seems like almost daily we read about the CO of some surface warship or submarine fired “for cause.” It’s hardly a US Navy problem. Our Army and Air Force has been publicly embarrassed by relief of some seniors and even some courts-martial for general officers in high-command positions. There’s usually some tawdry unspecified reason behind these things. It’s generally one of the zero-tolerance military’s mortal sins such as a DUI bust, perceived sexual misconduct, or command style that just doesn’t gel with the Pentagon’s approved mode of operation.

In some cases—maybe even most—this is healthy internal medicine for our military. As citizens who pay for and rely on our military for solid defense of national interests, we have every right to expect integrity plus solid, selfless leadership from the people who command our sons and daughters in an inherently dangerous occupation. Few of us would complain about a truly bad apple being tossed on the trash heap, although it’s hard for many of us to understand how such bad apples were allowed to ripen and wind up as senior commanders in the first place.

The easy solution is to blame it all on a zero-defect modality in our modern military structure. There’s certainly plenty of that, and it costs us some good leaders who are caught in a minefield where one misstep means career death. A more serious concern is a system of advancement that encourages compliance and discourages independent thought and action. That kind of thing is nefarious and potentially deadly in a military such as ours now facing potential combat employment at hot spots around the globe.

Those of us who have served in uniform are all familiar with the go-along to get-along demand and living in fear of pissing off the boss, but there’s a deeper concern here, and we all ought to be complaining about it. Under DEI mandates imposed on our American uniform services, we’ve lost focus on the one true mission of our military which is—should you need reminding—to fight and win wars or conflicts as ordered by our national command authority. Regardless of social pressures, everything else in our military must be secondary or no concern at all. Our American military is not a laboratory made available every time some political crusader wants to experiment with social-science theories.

That doesn’t mean we must tolerate bad behavior or unbecoming conduct by the people who represent the nation in military uniform. It does mean we need to cease obsessing about individual miscreants and shift focus to combat or combat-support missions. It means we need to adjust our fire and our military priorities. Platitudes at press conferences about this ally and that ally and joint this and joint that won’t feed the ferocious bulldog in combat. Squeaky-clean leaders who have spent decades dodging assignments to avoid risk and damaging internal conflict will fail miserably when the defecation strikes the oscillation and real combat leadership is required up and down the ranks.

We are risking organizational rot in our military ranks the likes of which has not been seen since the pre-Pearl Harbor days when armchair generals and deskbound admirals were so focused on form that they ignored the military substance needed to fight World War II. Those who claim that service in our recent Middle East conflicts has imparted sufficient experience to fight and win a near-peer military conflict are fooling themselves. A peer-level clash with China or equivalent military power would be a whole new ballgame, and we need to start training for it at pro levels. It’s past time for our military to stop searching for fly poop in the organizational pepper pile. We need to shake out of the peacetime doldrums. We need to cease our obsessions with claims of war-winning gadgetry and focus on the eternal blood-and-guts nature of mortal combat. If we have to tolerate some knuckle-draggers and nosepickers along the way, so be it. We can be politically correct, or we can be combat effective—but rarely both.

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