In Hegseth’s Pentagon, Top Leaders Battle Turmoil

The New York Times | Greg Jaffe

As many as 80 generals and admirals have had their promotions purged or prevented by Pete Hegseth, the United States Secretary of Defense, causing serious instability throughout the military hierarchy during the prolonged war with Iran. This massive overhaul of the personnel has led to a weakening of proven leadership and has put a stop to midcareer officers' education at top civilian universities.

Beneath the internal disturbances lies an effort by the administration to promote a traditional warrior mentality while at the same time using polygraphs to prevent internal leaks. At the same time, the long-term deployments in the Middle East have damaged naval morale and have revealed serious deficiencies in the number of missile interceptors, thereby endangering the overall readiness on a global scale. Important leadership posts are still unoccupied. As a result, General Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has limited his advisory functions so that they now cover only the risks involved in operational execution and not policy discussions. On the other hand, the imposition of restrictions on the research topics available to master's students and on the elite university programmes has had the effect of causing officers to engage in self-censorship during periods of high-tempo operations.

Comment

The reduction of the Joint Chiefs of Staff's advisory role under General Dan Caine greatly changes the kind of structural checks that were meant to result from the command system established after Goldwater-Nichols. Since it limits the main military advice to merely the mechanics of execution and not to debate on strategic policy, the Office of the Secretary of Defense gets rid of an important institutional check. This shrinking of the structure is similar to the operational hierarchy that existed during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, in which command authority under General H. Norman Schwarzkopf was based on close and centralised lines of operational direction.

The change in policy has a direct effect on the Joint Staff's ability to carry out frank risk assessments. If army colonels and flag officers are halted in their promotions because of their work on academic research, then the process of military decision-making suffers a serious lack of analytical strength. As a result, General Dan Caine may be required to put forward operational execution plans for contingencies in the Middle East which do not take into account the long-term depletion of stockpiles.

Strategic Question for Discussion

What kind of mechanism would then remain within the Pentagon if the Joint Chiefs of Staff under General Dan Caine were to limit their role to the execution of operations when it comes to challenging the high-level strategic assumptions involved in conflicts in more than one theatre?

The fact that Joint Staff advice is limited to execution mechanics means that the civilian political leadership have to carry out all the strategic risk assessments. If there are no formal procedures for raising dissent built into the advisory channels of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then operational planning will become detached from the long-term realities of the force's posture. I believe that this setup causes combatant commanders to have to take on the full strategic risks when responding to a crisis.

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