By Marina Malenic
The Defense Department is likely to see further shrinkage of its weapons procurement accounts as the need to allocate more resources to educating and training military personnel grows in the coming years, a top general said yesterday.
“I think you’re going to see a significant shift,” said Marine Gen. James Mattis. “Instead of just things we buy–radios, trucks, ships, airplanes–we are going to see a shift in resourcing and priorities to how can we better train people?”
Mattis, the chief of U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM), was speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
As the Pentagon organization responsible for transforming the military in response to ever-changing threats, USJFCOM is in the process of formulating one of the most significant revamps of U.S. military capability to date, according to Mattis. Namely, the military services are being asked to embrace the kinds of protracted ground wars and international assistance campaigns that once fell under the disparaging term “nation building” and were widely shunned by military and civilian leaders alike.
Mattis said the greatest challenge for the United States will be maintaining its nuclear and conventional military superiority while simultaneously training its force to respond to irregular threats. The Pentagon has begun referring to this simultaneous mix of challenges as “hybrid” warfare.
To that end, he said, USJFCOM is preparing for a war game this week to test its new Capstone Concept for Joint Operations–the model for how the military would respond to various threats. The three scenarios in the exercise will be an attack or threat from: a “near-peer” state competitor; a fragile or failing state; and a globally networked terrorist organization. The exercise is expected to reveal details of U.S. strengths and weaknesses as it potentially confronts each type of threat.
The general also said U.S. military leaders see a “new triad” of ground forces emerging in the reshuffle–the Army, Marine Corps and Special Operations troops. Those forces will have to be highly mobile, he said, but also equipped with armored vehicles that are survivable in an environment where roadside ambushes with high explosives are likely to remain a favorite enemy tactic.
“The enemy has decided that that’s where we are not dominant, so that’s where they’ve gravitated,” Mattis said. “We have to create a triad out of those land forces, supported by our aviation and our naval forces.”
He said the Navy of the future, meanwhile, will be asked to conduct sea-basing over a sustained period of time for a significant expeditionary force. The ability to operate against the littorals will also be critical.
“We can’t have a Navy out there that can only fight a blue water fight and then wonder why, again, it keeps getting cut down in size,” he said. “Our naval forces have a lot to bring to the fight if we would simply think differently.”
Further, Mattis warned that the U.S. military “is the most vulnerable military in the world if it relies on highly centralized” command and control.
“We must decentralize to the point of discomfort,” he said.
And that decentralization, he added, will require a dramatic change in military education. In the future, soldiers at lower echelons will be required to operate on their superiors’ intent, rather than on their orders. In other words, they will be asked to make decisions on the ground quickly with little or no supervision.
Molding soldiers capable of such sophisticated decision-making will require hefty investments in personnel rather than in equipment, according to Mattis.
“It’s mostly going to take training and education to produce soldiers capable of carrying out their commander’s intent,” he said.
Asked whether the Army and Marine Corps need to increase their end strength, Mattis said their numbers ought to remain steady for the time being. He said “quality is more important than mass,” and the focus should, at least for now, be on training existing personnel to a hybrid warfare model.