by Chas Henry
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are transforming America’s Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps – in ways the services themselves may not immediately realize. Wartime necessity has blurred traditional roles and missions, minimized differences in individual service culture, and wrought change being permanently printed into the military’s organizational DNA.
The resulting philosophical and organizational metamorphosis will be at least as significant as that which occurred in the wake of U. S. military action in Vietnam. One intriguing question: will it yield a military more jointly intertwined, less defined by branch? Are the military services in the midst of an unplanned but inevitable merger?
The most widely recognized change brought about by force stress has been the services’ unexpected reliance on reserve and National Guard forces to carry out primary missions. More than 590,000 have been activated since September 11, 2001 and in early August the number remaining on active duty exceeded 96,000. A good deal has been written, as well, about the degree to which many support and security functions have become the province of commercial military firms.
But consider these additional, less remarked upon indicators.
Ten thousand sailors and naval officers are presently assigned ad hoc to billets traditionally filled by members of other services – a number that does not include medical staff and chaplains the Navy traditionally provides the Marine Corps. Filling posts in many cases left empty by an over-extended Army, these “individual augmentees” were at first deployed with little training in even defensive ground combat. Now most complete an Army-run orientation before assignment to Iraq or Afghanistan, a formal architecture ensures their administrative needs are looked after and the service is offering financial incentives enticing more volunteers to don camouflage and step ashore.
The Navy is not alone in contributing forces in this manner. More than 20,000 Air Force men and women have similarly rounded out other-service units since 2003. These “ILOs” take on missions “in lieu of” roles traditionally assigned to airmen – and are similarly provided Army-led field training before deploying overseas. Additionally, in acknowledgment of battlefields without traditional front lines, the Air Force last year began to train its recruits to fire rifles and conduct security operations in field environments.
Pressures to augment an over-stretched Army have forced the Marine Corps away from its traditional role as a light, fast strike force. In the past, defense dogma called for Marines to violently open paths into enemy strongholds, often from the sea. Army forces – with heavier weapons and longer supply trains – would prosecute protracted, large-scale fights. The Marine Corps commandant has expressed concern that Marines may lose their expeditionary edge after extended service in Iraq and Afghanistan as the nation’s “other Army.” An additional, odd result: the Navy’s quiet creation of another Marine Corps, of sorts. Understanding that missions in Iraq and Afghanistan will severely limit Marine Corps availability for sea-launched infantry operations, the Navy recently stood up a nearly 40,000-strong expeditionary combat command whose members can undertake ground actions the Navy feels necessary to accomplishing its mission.
More nuanced indications of the trend are the services’ adoption of uniforms increasingly common in appearance. In a tradition-rich military culture, this is no small thing. Witness the commonality of camouflaged uniforms resulting as services combine to fight as “unified commands” (e.g., the U. S. Central Command). Take a look at the degree to which soon-to-be-issued Navy uniforms are similar to those worn by Marines.
Also indicative of the degree to which forces are working across service lines: the Navy’s recent clarification that anti-fraternization rules prohibit certain social relationships between junior and senior service members – even when individuals’ paychecks note membership in a different service branch.
Certain of the changes are reactions to manpower and fiscal stresses imposed by fighting on multiple fronts with a small, professional force; others are adaptations to tactical realities of a global war on terrorism. Some may be reversible. But a sufficient number are codified to an extent that it is reasonable to ask: will these incremental changes lead to greater melding of the nation’s defense forces?
Incremental movement in such a direction was facilitated by efficiency-seeking legislation two decades ago. The Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986 responded to growing evidence that the Nation’s military services were not able to efficiently work together in achieving complex combat aims. Specifically embarrassing: the botched April, 1980 effort to rescue Americans held hostage in Iran, and problems of inter-service coordination during a 1983 attack on the small Caribbean island of Grenada.
The act removed direct operational authority – that is, strategic wartime decision making – from the chiefs of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps. Newly empowered was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who was designated principal military advisor to the president, National Security Council and secretary of defense. Decision making at the operational level – previously wielded by service chiefs and corps commanders – was imbued in a handful of “combatant commanders,” each assigned control of operations in certain regions and reporting to the president via the secretary of defense.
The best known of these in recent years have been the four-star officers overseeing Middle East operations while heading U. S. Central Command. Generals and admirals leading the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps were left with the role of recruiting, training and equipping forces – then turning them over to combatant commanders who would lead them in the fight. The Goldwater-Nichols legislation also encouraged inter-service cross-pollination by restricting promotion of officers who had not completed assignments requiring daily contact with counterparts from service branches other than their own.
Though at the time many in uniform chafed at the legislation’s implementation, its intent seems prescient in light of joint military operations undertaken in years following – and some portion of credit for successes achieved during the 1991 liberation of Kuwait – and, indeed, the initial 2003 push into Iraq – must be credited to reduced parochialism.
Such operationally motivated alterations have combined with cost-saving measures – some imposed, others a result of military innovation – designed to reduce redundancy. Examples of the latter range from moves to combine training of the services’ initial-stage flight training to a merging of various service-unique schools. It was difficult to explain as necessary, for instance, multiple institutions for the orientation of military chaplains.
Service members deployed in recent years to Afghanistan and Iraq are members of a force, when contrasted with its predecessors, comparatively small and more professional. They are increasingly comfortable wearing common uniforms and more likely now than in the past to have served and trained with individuals from other branches. They are not as likely as their predecessors to do a double take if they see an Army helicopter lifting off the deck of a Navy ship.
Will these trends, some of them unintended consequences of war fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, cause further melding of the military branches? To many veterans – proud of traditional roles and missions that forged their service’s identity – the suggestion is blasphemy. Military service leaders, when given time to pause from immediate war fighting concerns, will resist change they view as diminishing individual service authority and resources. Evidence they will do so: inter-service maneuvering in the face of mandates to merge certain bases, with one military service managing the facilities of others at the post. Similar scrapping resulted after the Air Force suggested it should control all unmanned aerial craft.
While future defense forces will still require teams deeply versed in such highly specialized activities as navigating massive vessels across the world’s oceans and operating spacecraft, it will almost certainly continue to find efficiencies in the combination of common support and operational functions – performed by members of any branch, or perhaps by contractors.
The most difficult challenge faced by any notional future merger would be dealing with an intangible: warrior spirit. It’s frequently been said of Marine Corps boot camp that – marksmanship notwithstanding – teaching skill sets is less important that imbuing attitudes. It’s not clear that the ethos and élan exhibited by Marines and Special Forces units can be – or need be – achieved across a larger defense organization. A major challenge as defense planners imagine a future, potentially more melded, force will be determining to what extent such “degrees of differentness” will be necessary or acceptable.
The U. S. military is an institution known for its ability to gather, seriously consider and learn from its experiences. Resulting alterations may be short of wholesale merger. But they will almost certainly become more permanent than imagined by those who may have created them as stopgaps. The Iraq and Afghanistan experience will combine with pressure to make the most of every defense dollar – and with 20 years of Congressionally mandated “jointness” – to create the nation’s most operationally integrated, least service-focused defense force ever.
Washington, D. C.-based journalist Chas Henry reports on defense, intelligence and homeland security. A retired U. S. Marine Corps officer, his reporting and analysis has been featured on television stations, radio outlets and websites across the United States, Canada, Britain, the Middle East and Australia.