Military transformation boasts several fathers, including Andy Marshall (Yoda) of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, Andy Krepinevich of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (a Marshall acolyte) and the late Vice Adm. Art Cebrowski of the Office of Force Transformation (OFT), but relatively few children. The OFT built the M80 Stiletto (pictured above) and some in the Pentagon believe the combination of UAVs, satellite targeting and data fusion cobbled together over the last decade comprise an accidental transformational capability.
Rob Holzer, a former colleague of mine who went on to work for the one Pentagon office charged with pushing transformation forward in the face of a very unfriendly (or to be kind, cautious) military, argues it’s time for the US defense enterprise to finally and truly embrace transformation.
Read more
Transformation is a way of thinking, but we view it as new hardware to use. The reality right now is that we transform as needed for the moment, but go back to what we were doing before because it's familiar to us. Already the Army is talking about the "return to garrison," almost happy to shed itself of the lessons it learned in Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite the fact that we've been fighting low-intensity conflicts for a long time, we have been pushing bigger and bigger ships (LCS is NOT small) and have almost no capacity to fight low-intensity conflict for cheap (tell me how it's worthwhile to have a multi-million dollar DDG chase a 500 dollar pirate craft). We can't even route paperwork electronically, and it's 2013! Sadly, I don't see DoD or DoN embracing true transformation anytime soon.
ReplyDelete-NG36B
http://navygrade36bureaucrat.blogspot.com/