The last week here at the School of Advanced Military Heresy was spent doing some futures work. Futures work normally involves development of concepts and identification of the requisite capbilities to achieve those concepts.
What made it that much more suspect was the involvement of contractors, in this case, contractors attempting to demonstrate proof of some principle.
I invariably feel leery of concepts work when they show up half-baked because the basis of those concepts will often steer billions of dollars of future procurements. When it's someone attempting to sell a particular piece of hardware and the recurrent ad pitch is that "we need warfighters to validate this!" Causation and intellectual rigor are necessary components of concepts development as a result. More prosaically, weak shit will cost more lives in the future as every validated concept for futures work shapes how we will expend our spirit, blood, and treasure in the pursuit of national objectives.
There were two things that drove me nuts.
1. The scenarios to describe the future environment were written like a can of spilled fuck. I'm not saying that we'll never fight against a near-peer competitor and fight the Clash of the Titans in (insert name of desert). But it's fucking unimaginative to think that we'll be fighting someone who looks like the goddamn Soviet Army with its bevy of indirect fire gun and rocket artillery.
As a framework, the National Defense Strategy outlines four types of threats (called challenges in this case): traditional, irregular, disruptive, and catastrophic. No less a document than the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review says the US military needs to get away from fighting traditional threats and concentrate on irregular, disruptive, and catastrophic.
So when guys raised on fighting the Soviets in the Cold War are pushing a certain genre of toys as a fundamental element of how we will conduct operations in the future, I get skittish when our enemy looks almost exactly like someone we vanquished through primarily nonkinetic means almost two decades ago. Too bad they are having a much harder problem with grasping that the basic nature of the threat is probably not going to be very traditional, and will require us to do the same kind of hard, but noncontiguous campaigning that has been a basic fact of life for us in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Philippines. It is what it is. It's not the goddamn Warsaw Pact.
2. The school I'm in is supposed to create officers capable of thinking at the high operational art. So, as I found myself doing staffwork to plan out an infantry battalion tactical attack, it's hard for me, as a strategist, to avoid the overpowering urge to say What A Fucking Waste Of Time (WAFWOT). If I was still interested in being tactical, I guess I would've stayed a shooter. I no longer have any aspirations or pretense to that level of war. If I have to drill someone with 5.56mm green tip at my workplace (and for a guy who hasn't had to fire a rifle for most of his career, I shot 37 out of 40 on advanced infantry optics at my last range) then I have seriously Boned The Pooch and I will presently have much bigger problems than strategy.
The long and skinny is that I don't think I could work for a contractor in good conscience after retirement. Maybe I won't think that way when I'm no longer on active duty, but the long and skinny is that every day I got done working with these contractors on their pet project, I felt like Lady Macbeth inasmuch as I felt the need to keep scrubbing because the blood just wouldn't come off my hands at the end of the day.
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