Let's Do It Right
Hackworth, David H.
fidence index against real retail sales growth during the six months that follow produces a scattershot pattern: consumer confidence predicts just three-tenths of a percent of the...
...Some specifics" 9 Combine the existing five service stafl~ into a single joint Pentagon staff, and get rid of the multi-layered bloat presently slowing down decision-making, stealing bodies from the fighting units and preventing America's fire brigade from getting to the blaze before the house burns down...
...9 Cut the over-manned officer corps-now close to 700, 000 active and reserve---by at least 50 percent...
...9 Kill the up-or-out personnel policy...
...9 Get rid of the current geographical commands and organize our fighting forces functionally...
...9 Get women off combat ships and out of ground combat units--for all the obvious reasons...
...We must also stop promoting people to their level of incompetence...
...Remember the U.S...
...Can i Col...
...Not every leader has the stuff to be the main man...
...But just as the Taliban's capo di tutti capi was about to receive his one-way ticket to Paradise courtesy of U.S...
...He fought in Korea and Vietnam, and is the author of the international bestsellers About Face, Hazardous Duty and other books...
...performance at Kasserine Pass in Africa in 1942 orVietnam in the 1960s and 70s...
...Talk about the twilight zone...
...Contrary to war-fighters of the past, they don't have the bold stuff to roll the dice and go for broke...
...9 Cut, merge and/or streamline the various fiefdoms such as the Defense Logistic Agency, Defense Investigative Service, Defense Commissary Agency and the Defense Audit Agency...
...desks than tanks and more staff weenies than we had in 1945, when our Armed Forces were four times as big...
...It's a perfect economic theory to support more government involvement in all aspects of the economy and greater redistribution of wealth...
...Civil War General Nathan Bedford Forrest had his priorities squared away when he said,"Get there first with the most men...
...And since the Cold War ended ten years ago, there's simply been no mission for our 100,000 Europe-based NATO troops, other than providing slots for the brass...
...They're watching the current conflict on TV while less than ten percent of our muscle-bound force is actually involved in hunting down and taking out the bad guys...
...Most of our conventional military fights are like a flabby fatso duking it out with a lighter, quicker opponent...
...9 Disband the last remaining Army parachute division and all major Marine amphibious units--they're all as obsolete as bows and arrows...
...The intel folks can provide the local knowledge...
...infantry maneuver battalions...
...These units would have max muscle and minimum flab, and be equipped with silver-bullet systems like the F-22 stealth fighter...
...Right after the 9/11 attack, our Germany-based two-division Armored Corps moved to Poland to practice "Hi-Diddle-Diddle-Right-UpThe-Middle"--a tank tactic of Patton's 57 years ago...
...Right now an arty guy, Franks, is running our Afghan ops and he hasn't a clue.This operation should be run by the Special Forces Command...
...And I say that as a very old airborne warrior--a parachute division uses too many assets, and once in an airhead can't defend itself...
...NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2OOi 9 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 23...
...what's harder to understand is why some in the Bush administration are now carrying the same torch...
...Central Command chief, chose to let this crazy call ride...
...The creation of wealth is not zero-sum...
...Keynes believed that the problems of the Great Depression revolved around the lack of demand...
...you imagine what George Patton would've done if his legal beagle had dared to suggest,"Don't squeeze the trigger, even though you've got Adolph Hitler's head sitting on a rifleman's front sights...
...And our air and naval forces have got to make the big leap from the 20 th to the 21 st century--unmanned aircraft, arsenal ships and smaller, faster fleets...
...David H. Ha&worth (ret) joined the US Army in 1945 as an under-age 15year-old...
...Knowing this, why do economists and our nation's leaders still talk about confidence as if it were the Holy Grail of economics...
...9 Combine the various Reserves and the National Guard...
...A truism of war is either change with the times or get whipped...
...And to do that, we need to change the mindset, cut the fat, the duplication and the redundancy, and return to a leaner meaner outfit geared to getting to the battlefield quick smart...
...fidence index against real retail sales growth during the six months that follow produces a scattershot pattern: consumer confidence predicts just three-tenths of a percent of the subsequent change in retail sales...
...Read his nationally syndicated column at ummzhackworth.com...
...9 Consolidate all the high-tech intelligence services and reactivate the human side---the spying that the Clintonistas thought so repulsive, and that Sun Tzu--the eternally sharp Chinese general/philosopher who fought more than 2,500 years ago--deemed so critical...
...It's easy to understand why liberals love this...
...9 Eliminate the multiple civilian Secretaries, whose main purpose seems to be sustaining large staffs dedicated to putting politics and porking over war-fighting.And cut the secretary of defense staff--two thousand clerks and jerks and political appointees--by eighty percent...
...While such spending would indeed create economic activity--as would scattering dollar bills--it could not have created new wealth...
...Bounce the Perfumed Princes who've made the military as inflexible and slow moving as the accounting profession...
...He went so far as to suggest that the government pay people to dig holes in the ground and then fill them back up...
...And then his boss, General Tommy Franks, U.S...
...As a bonus, this would return the warrior ethic, which has all but disappeared except for the fighter jocks and Special Ops grunts presently risking their lives in Afghanistan...
...Many good captains who have a hard time coming up with two plus two are brilliant troop leaders but make terrible majors...
...Like horse cavalry and the battleship, the huge tank fleets we saw in Desert Storm are already yesterday's tools of war.All our ground forces must be organized ASAP to fight like our Special Forces, SEALs and Rangers now operating in Afghanistan...
...Our defenders must change now, before we take even bigger lumps...
...The answer is simple...
...We need some of those grey heads...
...generals than there are U.S...
...Instead, they set up interminable risk-assessment safety nets-including rules of engagement tighter than a gunsmith's vice--to avoid taking any bullets to their careers...
...Meanwhile our warriors, our military assets and the citizens of this great land have never been so exposed...
...President Bush has been masterful when it comes to dealing with the military, but he has missed the opportunity presented by a war-time bully pulpit to promote good economics...
...But blinkered and bureaucratized military leaders who can't think out of the box must be making R.umsfeld lose it more and more frequently since he returned to the Pentagon for another tour, this time with the mission to boot that five-sided institution into the 21 st Century...
...No new supply would have ever occurred...
...Fresh thinking, creativity and ingenuity are needed even more than smart weapons...
...Insiders say that when Defense Secretary Donald R.umsfeld got the word, he almost pounded his desk into toothpicks...
...It's certainly hard to expect-or even detect~a great deal of supplyside stimulus from the tax bill that has been working its way through Congress this fall...
...He argued that if consumers were unwilling to spend, then government should do it for them...
...They'd train together and stay together, as tightly coordinated air-ground teams...
...technology, a military lawyer in Tampa, Florida shouted, "Cease fire...
...Looked at the other way, 99.7 percent of the growth in retail sales is determined by factors other than consumer confidence...
...The defunct economist, John Maynard Keynes, still has a strong grip on our nation's economic thinking...
...9 Merge the Army and the Marines into one flexible Ground Force, capable of sustaining fighting units with sufficient independent airlift to move anywhere in the world in 24 hours...
...As 9/11 proved, it's an increasingly dangerous world out there...
...Wars of the future will be fought by small, agile, fast-moving forces...
...Consumer confidence is a proxy for demand...
...It's critical that we start thinking and acting faster than our opponents--or the consequences will be unthinkable...
...Homages to ~II aside, the U.S.Armed Forcesmwith a total force, active and reserve, of about three million people---has more colonels than machine gunners, more 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 9 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2OO...
...At the same time, our forces are spread around the globe like Roman Legions, in unified commands such as General Frank's Florida-based CENTCOM...
...Most important is to put war-fighter leaders in the model of Patton, Halsey and Le May back in the saddle...
...Not all the dangers in the world are obvious...
...Unfortunately, today's politically correct senior uniformed leaders were selected for their Kinder-GentlerGlobal-Village bent.The result is that we're stuck with careerist, MBA types--I call them Perfumed Princesmwho act more like corporate CEOs than warrior-leaders...
...LET'S GET IT RIGHT BOOT THE PENTAGON'S PERFUMED PRINCES BY DAVID H. HACKWORTH O n D-Day during America's first strike in Afghanistan, the cross hairs of an unmanned Predator's air-to-ground missile were locked dead center on Mullah Omar's forehead...
...In NATO, there are actually four times more U.S...
...But governments tend to like this argument~it makes them the center of economic activity...
...Government redistribution is...
Vol. 34 • November 2001 • No. 8
