Americas Defense Meltdown - IT Acquisition Advisory Council

William S. Lind • 119and Kaga, Soryu and Hiryu – rise from their watery graves, the U.S. Navy will be readyand waiting. While military reformers may appreciate historical tableaux vivant asentertainment, we usually do not consider them the main function of the fleet. Somemodest reforms would seem to be in order. To see what those reforms might be, wewill consider the U.S. Navy’s personnel, guiding concepts, and materiel, which is tosay ships and aircraft. This reflects reformers’ belief, often reiterated by Col. John Boyd,that for winning wars people are most important, ideas come second and hardwareis only third.PeopleThe principal personnel problem of the U.S. Navy is that its officer corps is dominatedby technicians. This is in large part the legacy of Admiral Rickover, who ensured thatthe nuclear power community was made up entirely of engineers and that engineeringwas the main focus of the Navy’s officer education, especially at the Naval Academy.All skippers of U.S. Navy submarines, our capital ships, must be nuclear engineers.This is in strong contrast to Britain’s Royal Navy, whose submarine commanders havenuclear engineers working for them where they belong, in the engine room. The otherinfluential community in the U.S. Navy’s officer corps, the aviators, are also primarilytechnicians, people whose main skill is flying high-performance aircraft.The reason this is problematical is that the technical-engineering way of thinkingand the military-tactical-strategic way of thinking are opposites. War is not anengineering problem. The opponent is men, not machines, and as Colonel Boyd said,they use their minds. If they are clever, their minds lead them away from a direct trialof strength, which may be roughly calculable, to asymmetric strategies and tactics,which put a premium on indirectness, imagination, creativity and surprise. Mostengineers, which is to say most U.S. Navy officers, cannot deal well with challengesof a type they do not expect and that do not lend themselves to quantitative calculation.While those officers usually do a superb job of navigating and operating theirships under peacetime conditions, fighting them effectively may require qualities fewengineers possess.The domination of the U.S. Navy by engineers reinforces the service’s Second (orperhaps First) Generation War institutional culture. Like the other U.S. armed forces,the Navy’s culture is inward-focused, risk-averse and centralized, preferring obedienceto initiative and relying on top-down control rather than self-discipline. Ironically,the opposite of this culture, the outward-focused, decentralized, initiative-orientedculture of the Third Generation, began at sea in the Royal Navy of the second half ofthe 18th century, long before the German army developed it for land warfare. ThirdGeneration institutional culture is every bit as beneficial to navies as to armies, asthe Royal Navy’s record in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars demonstrated.And it is instructive that during the 19th Century, a centralizing technology