McMaster: Hey, the U.S. military has adapted and is now back in the game

By William Shields
Current operations branch, Best Defense office of H.R. McMaster affairs

“The military has adapted tremendously.” So began Brigadier General H.R. McMaster’s American Enterprise Institute talk the other day, begging the question: “Since when?” McMaster’s point is familiar to many Best Defenders but serves as an important reminder of how much the military has evolved in a short time. 

McMaster harkened back to the 1990s, when we “took a break from history.” The Gulf War encouraged a false sense of confidence among our armed forces, according to McMaster. We defeated an enemy that we didn’t acknowledge was both inept and unmotivated. That false confidence was coupled with the application of the same technology to land warfare that earned the U.S. maritime and aerospace dominance. Only unlike, in the sea or the air, land warfare takes place amongst people. While the Navy and Air Force contend with one target, practitioners of land warfare face thousands.

McMaster hammered away on this overreliance on technology, arguing that the replacement of a coherent strategic worldview with technology led to a military doctrine that operated in a vacuum apart from politics, the foundation of all wars. The emphasis on “full spectrum dominance” sought to overwhelm our competitors in spending and technology so that the few wars we did have to fight would be cheap and efficient. But it turned out that those were the wars we wished to fight rather than the wars we would fight. 

It was the era of “networks” and “seamlessness,” words that McMaster joked took on Orwellian overtones. He was referring to George Orwell’s seminal 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” in which Orwell reasons that that our language “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible.” 

The process did prove reversible. Two insurgencies reminded us that wars “will remain firmly in the realm of the uncertain.” Decentralization and initiative became paramount. We will always plan imperfectly for future environments; the key is to not be so far off the mark that you can’t adapt.

Given Tom’s skepticism of the service academies, readers of this blog may find interesting a question posed to McMaster, whose answer illustrated the overall transformation of the military. It came from a former Air Force Academy instructor, who wondered whether the service academies’ focus on engineering and technical training ill-prepared students for the cultural interactions central to our current conflicts. McMaster offered an unequivocal endorsement of the academies. He claimed that today they provide a “superb education” far removed from his time as a cadet, when engineering was “forced down his throat.” At least at West Point, students can now major in the humanities and have access to language training and overseas programs, both with the aim of acclimating students to the cross-cultural interaction required in population-centric military strategies. It is an education that prepares cadets for conflicts, and a world, distant from those taught to cadets twenty years ago.