Military leadership is more than knowledge and technique. It requires fundamental changes in personality, patterns of thought and perception, emotional control and interactions with others. That is as true for fighter pilots as battalion commanders. Inexperienced leaders panic when seasoned veterans would calmly carry on; unseasoned commanders leap to conclusions where salted warriors comprehend the entire situation.
Advanced technology generally exacerbates these problems by flooding hastily promoted officers and noncommissioned officers with information as they fight to retain or regain emotional balance and rational perception. And there can be no real preparation for the loss of soldiers under one’s authority except to live through that horrible experience. The U.S. military is overwhelmingly composed of officers and noncommissioned officers who have developed these human skills in ordered progression of promotions and schooling (which were wisely not seriously disrupted during the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq despite strains on the force) and in combat.
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Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on potential cuts to defense spending.
The president proposes to let some 92,000 of them go in favor of preserving investments in technology. Those military personnel are a repository of knowledge about how to conduct complex, lethal operations across a wide area in distributed formations. They are not merely the world’s leading experts on counterinsurgency but also the leading experts on exactly the kind of targeted operations Obama’s strategy envisions. There is no more precise weapons system than a highly trained soldier who can hit whatever he aims at but also knows when not to shoot. Over a decade of conflict, our troops have refined formations, doctrine, techniques and theory to the highest level ever. Rapidly reducing the force will flush away much of that expertise before it can be institutionalized.
Advocates of the president’s strategy say that we do not need that human capital or expertise in ground operations because we will never again fight wars that put large numbers of our soldiers at risk. Technology, they say, will make future wars precise, rapid and decisive. We have heard this argument many times since the Cold War ended, from George W. Bush as enthusiastically as Bill Clinton. Yet every U.S. president since Ronald Reagan has ordered tens of thousands of troops into ground combat. Obama himself sent 70,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops have been deployed abroad to wars or peacekeeping operations for 38 of the past 70 years — and nearly continuously since 1989. The argument that next time will be different is unpersuasive.
The question is not whether the United States will again send troops to fight in far-off lands. The question that should weigh most heavily on Congress as it considers the defense budget is what kind of leaders those troops will have and how well prepared they will be.
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