by Robert M. Traxler
Retired LTC. Peter Brian Hegseth President Donald Trump’s administration’s pick for Secretary of Defense made the point at his Senate hearings that in World War II we won with six Four Star Generals. Today we have 43, in WWII we had 16 million Americans in uniform today we have 2.8 million.
I am not good at math — one reason I married a math teacher, but that is some 16% of the troops but a 600% increase in four-star generals. A four-star general has a personnel staff in the dozens with a general staff of hundreds to thousands. We referred to that as the tooth to tail ratio. Think of a dog, the teeth do the damage, but the rest is in support of the teeth.
We find ourselves top heavy with desk jockeys and our tooth to tail ratio once again way out of balance. We had this problem when Ronald Reagan became President, and he had the entire military do a study to reduce the number of staff personnel and increase the number of war fighters or trigger pullers.
A lean, mean fighting machine was the goal, as was more bang for the Department of Defense buck. Thousands of spit shined tailored staff/desk warriors were sent to combat units resulting in a much more effective military.
In WWII the Pentagon was not filled to capacity, today it is filled to capacity with more than a dozen separate office buildings in the Washington area, filled with bloated staffs of our top-heavy military.
Again 16 million vs 2.8 million troops and a disproportionate number on the cocktail and canopy social circuit. Every unit and installation have a DEI officer with a staff that does nothing to improve unit cohesion and combat effectiveness. Say what you may about Peter Hegseth, but he is on the right track when it comes to updating our military.
Our military will not give a damn what color, sex, religion, or nation of origin a warrior comes from, but can they fight, train and be loyal to the warrior ethos and most importantly our constitution? Let the rest of our government, academia and industry worry about pronouns. We need warriors, who will close with, kill, capture or destroy an enemy by means of close combat fire and maneuver and not cry if the enemy calls them by the wrong pronoun.
As the Marine icon General Louis Burwell (Chesty) Puller once said to a school board — you are producing milk drinking babies what I need is whiskey drinking Marines. We need a few more like General Puller.
The war between Israel and Hamas has taught once again that the soldier with mud on their boots wins wars. The lessons we need to learn from the Russian/Ukrainian war is the way we fight and the tools we fight with need to be re-evaluated. Armor heavy units are vulnerable to missiles and drones and the advances in indirect fire weapons. They must be studied and our tactics and equipment updated and improved.
In short, we need new younger blood leading our Department of Defense into a new era of warfare. We need someone like Peter Hegseth who can look at the DOD with an open mind and not fall victim to the “that’s the way we have always done it”
Shifting gears, who would ever have guessed the conservative party would be the party of Make America Healthy again? Robert Kennedy Jr. will be drilled by the Senate with the Progressives attacking his comments on reevaluating (or need I say reimagine) the use of vaccines and his personal life not his stand on destroying the incestuous relationship between the Department of Health and Human Services, Big Pharma and big food corporations producing massive amounts of highly processed foods.
We have seen the “Trump effect” as HHS has banned the use of a Red Die 3 in foods. They did it in order to say they did it before the new administration came into office. However, we know it is a reaction to President Trump’s victory. My opinion.
