Thoughts on the importance of the NCOs in the U.S. military

Earlier this month, I psyched myself up to take my ASVAB and PFT - the two tests that I must pass (or, rather, ace) if I ever wish to become an officer in the U.S. Army Reserves. I wasn't too concerned about the ASVAB, but I was terrified of not being able to score a perfect 100 on all three events that constitute the PFT (for my age group, that means I have to run two miles in under 13 minutes, do 77 pushups, and 82 situps). But when I finally got to the Military Entrance Processing Station (MEPS) at Fort Lee for testing, I was turned away because it turns out that another MEPS in Baltimore has my information on-file and it needed to be transferred. So...it looks like joining the Army Reserves is going to have to wait (again). Oh, well.

In the meantime, I've been preoccupied with other matters. In order to get myself thinking about how I will want to carry myself around non-commissioned officers (NCOs) should I ever join the Army, I decided that I needed to remind myself of why they will deserve my respect as a lowly O-1. When I did my interview for my (eventually rejected) Air Force application last February, one of the major questions that came up was how I felt about NCOs.

I remember that I stumbled through an answer along the lines of, "Well, I realize that that as an O-1, I'm going to be entering the Air Force with nothing but my degrees and my theoretical knowledge learned in Officer Training School. Whereas a typical E-7 is going to have over a decade of operational experience, likely in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other deployments. We have to be able to complement each other."

But my interviewer, an Air Force Reserve O-4 who I had requested for the interview, told me, "You're missing the bigger picture here: The fact that the U.S. military has a professional class of career non-commissioned officers is one of the key differences between the U.S. military and almost every other military in the world."

Point taken: I didn't grasp why NCOs matter so much in the U.S. military. So I promised myself that I will have a better answer when I interview before the Army officer recruiting board. To that end, I have sought out reading material on the topic, and it just so happens that in December 2013, the National Defense University published a brand-new tribute to NCOs and their naval equivalents, Petty Officers (POs). It's called The Non-commissioned Officer and Petty Officer: Backbone of the Armed Forces, and it can be downloaded here. Aside from the foreward, written by J-7 Chief Martin Dempsey, the book's content is the product of a team of Sergeant Majors, Master Sergeants, and Chief Petty Officers serving at NCO/PO academies across the United States.The first chapter of the book is written in somewhat flowery language, but otherwise does a good job articulating what it is that makes NCOs/POs so important:

• "NCOs/POs are the specially trusted leaders who provide an indispensable and irreplaceable linkage between command guidance and mission execution."
• "NCOs/POs nurture individual and organizational well-being by genuinely caring for their subordinates and promoting morale and esprit de corps within their units."
• "By teaching, coaching, and mentoring the force, and by instilling a sense of unity, purpose, good order, and discipline—and demanding compliance with standards, tradition, culture, customs, and courtesies—they are looked upon as the organization’s pillars of strength and loyalty."
• "Because they are the leaders closest to the force, NCOs/POs have the greatest effect on accomplishing organizational goals and achieving mission success."
• "NCOs/POs are a commander’s treasure, a source of seasoned perspectives that transcends place in the organizational hierarchy, a place neatly balanced between mission and people. They provide the commander and officer corps with unique insights and actionable perspectives while also providing an enlisted voice in matters concerning operations, administration, readiness, and the well-being of the force."

For my purposes, Chapter 4 was of greatest interest, because this is where the book addresses the ways that NCOs/POs complement commissioned officers. They discuss the three Cs' of good NCOs - they must be "competent, credible, and capable", and describe the NCO's role to the CO as "[the] principal advisor, a source of competence and counsel, who enhances the officer’s ability to command effectively."

There's another reason to consider the importance of NCOs in the U.S. military: Many analysts who talk about other modernizing armed forces in comparison to ours tend to overlook the role NCOs play. Discussions of the Russian armed forces of Chinese People's Liberation Army tend to speak mostly to their attempts at acquiring new weapons and technology, or re-organizing their force structure for greater agility and faster deployment timetables. Often overlooked is the fact that the Russians hope that they can recruit 64,000 NCOs, and the PLA wants to attract 150,000 well-trained college graduates for enlistment, under the assumption that will be better-suited to operating the complex new weapons systems it wishes to purpose. Both countries seem to recognize that having an NCO corps is essential to transforming their formerly conscript-based mass mobilization armies into professional all-volunteer forces, and I think that's worth keeping in mind. Officers and junior enlisted men will always be easy to recruit for short-term service stints, but the NCOs will always be the most valuable commodity to the force.

My unpublished article on HTS

Last month, I wrote an article that was intended for a certain online publication (which shall remain nameless). It was turned down, sadly, so I've decided to post it here. It's not well-written, but doing the research allowed me to familiarize myself with the controversy surrounding the Human Terrain System (on a related note, check out this book review by an NDU colleague).

Here it is:

A Congressman Is Waging War Against the Army’s Human Terrain Teams

Since its launch in 2006, the U.S. Army's Human Terrain System (HTS) has been the subject of considerable online controversy.

The program was created to further the goals of the U.S. military’s then-new population-centric counterinsurgency campaign plan as outlined in FM3-24. HTS sought to embed military personnel and civilian social scientists within military units—usually at the Brigade level—in order to provide vital sociocultural understanding within the area of operations. Without adequate sociocultural understanding of Afghanistan and Iraq, unit commanders were less likely to wage an effective counterinsurgency campaign through the support of the local population. The teams of embedded advisors comprising the Human Terrain Teams (HTTs) would collect information on local cultures, tribal structures, and economics that could be used to brief Brigade commanders and their staffs, or uploaded into databases. (In Iraq, one HTT determined that restoring marshes in southern Iraq—previously decimated under Saddam Hussein’s regime—was vital to restoring the local economy and reducing arms smuggling to insurgents.)

But HTS has faced attacks from a variety of critics, some of whom have gone so far as to compare the program to the F-35 and label it one of the most “insanely wasteful projects the Pentagon is spending your money on.” The American Anthropological Association (AAA) has long opposed HTS on the grounds that it violates the AAA Code of Ethics because “information provided by HTS anthropologists could be used to make decisions about identifying and selecting specific populations as targets of U.S. military operations”; the AAA recently re-affirmed this stance. U.S. Army Colonel Gian Gentile, a prominent critic of the military’s embrace of population-centric counterinsurgency, has claimed that the effectiveness of the HTTs was “dubious at best” (though his claims have their own critics). Blogger John Stanton has written about HTS since 2007 and leveled numerous criticisms against the program; for instance, that “Hamas’ IT Tops Human Terrain System IT in Internet Capability, Savvy”.

In recent months, during Congressional debates over allocations for the 2014 National Defense Authorization Act, the program was again targeted by Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA), who called upon Congress to shut down the entire program in a December 2013 letter to the House Armed Services Committee. Pointing out that the Army already halved funding in 2013, Rep. Hunter argues that “the overall cost and failures of HTS indicate that the program be considered for termination.”

In his letter, Rep. Hunter cited a litany of allegations that led the Army to conduct its own investigation of HTS in 2010: Sub-standard work, inflated time sheets, incompetent supervisors, racism, sexism, and—guaranteed to resonate in the current political climate—the employment of CGI Federal (of Healthcare.gov infamy) as the main federal contractor behind the program. (Hunter neglects to mention that most of the aforementioned problems originated when BAE Systems held the program contract.) Even more recently, Rep. Hunter has complained that the total cost of the program, $726 million since 2007, remains unjustifiable in the current fiscal climate. He also has also expressed skepticism that the problems with HTS have been adequately addressed.

At the moment, the Army continues to defend the program. In a letter to Rep. Hunter in March 2013, Secretary of the Army John M. McHugh called the expertise provided by the HTTs “critical to military planning and operations.” McHugh has re-itereated this stance  again in recent months, claiming that 95 percent of commanders and staff members in Afghanistan “assessed HTS information as actionable and useful for decision-making.” However, it is not yet clear that the controversy over HTS will ever go away completely, given the negative media coverage and Rep. Hunter’s campaign against the program.

However, an alternative perspective of HTS has emerged in the past year. At the National Defense University in Washington, DC, a team of researchers led by Dr. Christopher J. Lamb has conducted the most in-depth assessment to date about HTS in Afghanistan. Their conclusions were published in a book, Human Terrain Teams: An Organizational Innovation for Sociocultural Knowledge in Irregular Warfare, and a July 2013 article for Joint Force Quarterly. Using data from over 100 interviews, the team’s findings and recommendations paint a more complete, though hardly uncritical, picture of what the HTS has accomplished and its future value to ground forces:

·         Human Terrain Teams had to overcome numerous organizational limitations to perform well, but were able to meet, and even exceed, the expectations of commanders who did not fully appreciate the optimal role the teams could play in an integrated counterinsurgency campaign.

·         In fact, the large majority of field commanders thought HTTs were effective. This finding also echoes previous studies by researchers at West Point, the Center for Naval Analyses, and the Institute for Defense Analyses.

·         Throughout its history, the U.S. military has regularly had to develop sociocultural expertise at great cost after the initiation of conflict, and often too late to ensure success.  Eliminating HTS now because it experienced growing pains would be repeating a mistake rather than learning from history.

·         The program will likely perform better under the management of the Army’s Special Operations Command rather than the Training and Doctrine Command, which is not properly suited to support HTS. Dr. Lamb also made this argument in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee in July 2012.

At a time when the Pentagon is facing enormous pressure to cut wasteful spending, it is understandable that the axe has swung in the direction of controversial programs that have come under public scrutiny. However, research suggests that Congress’ decision on the future of HTS must consider a more nuanced perspective than that currently represented in the public debate.

First blog post in 2014: Fighter costs

I'm still not blogging as much as I was when I started out - and it's partially due to a family emergency over the holidays. So, quick update: I just read a new article in The Diplomat that caught my eye: "Why Do Fighter Aircraft Cost So Much?" Highlights:

• "in many cases, governments only pretend to care about the expense of their fighters. Money spent on cost overruns for F-35s doesn’t just disappear; it makes defense contractors wealthy and generates jobs across the country. Representatives from districts that produce expensive fighters have literally no incentive to hold costs in line. The same goes for more authoritarian systems in which different power brokers use military spending to favor specific communities and interest groups."
• "An under-mentioned point in defense procurement debates is that the purchase of advanced fighter aircraft is often less about national defense than national identity. Both civilian and military leaders tend to resent the idea that neighbors and rivals will own and operate more capable, advanced, and expensive aircraft. Moreover, states don’t simply buy advanced fighters 'off the shelf,' as advanced aircraft have historically required long term deals for training, maintenance, and spare parts. Buying a fighter means buying a political relationship."
• "the advent of 3D printing may well mean that customers will have the opportunity to carry out much needed maintenance and repairs without relying on the sellers as much as they have in the past.  The days in which the Soviet Union could use MiG-23 airframes as a loss leader for jet engines, or in which the United States could use long-term maintenance agreements as a club to encourage additional purchases, are coming to an end."

Also, I've been paying way less attention to cyberwar and cybersecurity lately, but Peter Singer was recently quoted in a new Popular Mechanics article on the topic where (among other points) he draws attention to the continued business cultural ignorance of cyberspace at the higher levels - a problem I would argue the business community still shares with the military community:

• "As far as the actual surveillance activities that Snowden disclosed, I personally don't think that senior political leaders would have authorized many of them if they had understood the full ramifications. The discussion would have been fundamentally different if people had been able to connect the dots...Seventy percent of business executives, whether they're in car companies or defense companies, have already made a cybersecurity decision for their firm in some way, shape, or form, despite the fact that no major MBA [Master of Business Administration] program teaches this as a regular course of business management."