U.S. MILITARY BROKEN, SAYS WHO?
Ben Andruss

With the U.S. military engaged in two countries, senior military officers have been forced to re-write the playbook by restructuring military units and deployments to maintain an appropriate force level. Military analysts, educated but un-experienced in waging war, claim the U.S. military is “broken” without ever defining the term. Various news outlets employ retired military officers to parry with analysts, while enlisted service members, who serve on the front lines, have their voices minimized in the debate.

Military analysts live in think tanks and policy advocacy centers. For example, the Center for American Progress employs 19 people as national security/military senior staff and fellows of which ZERO were enlisted and only THREE have military experience. Indeed, as Paul Rieckhoff, Executive Director and Founder of Iraq & Afghanistan Veterans of America has noted, “Participating in a heavily secured, carefully orchestrated sight-seeing visit to Iraq does not make you a military expert any more than a trip to Yankee stadium qualifies one to be a baseball broadcaster for ESPN.” With education the primary qualification for employment, highlighting the sources of information and confessing to reliance on second hand knowledge should be a requisite for the working papers produced by these centers. Moreover, while analysts are certainly qualified to speak on policy, assessment on the state of the U.S. military is not a policy issue. Gays in the military, education requirements for enlisted soldiers, and the raising of the maximum age for new recruits are policy issues, and even those require first-hand knowledge of military culture to fully comprehend.

Of the U.S. population only .5% serves in the military, of this 84% are enlisted soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines. Yet the media has relied on a disproportionate percentage of officers to tell the military story. Of the media sources in Iraq, officers are employed three times more frequently as enlisted personnel for news stories. Moreover, cable news networks interviewed enlisted service members three times as frequently as network news organizations. Indeed, cable news also generates almost twice the revenue of network news. Noted former Assistant Secretary of Defense and Harvard Professor, Joe Nye, has described media coverage as reacting to, “market forces” and “portray[ing] only the profitable.”

A recent poll on the current state of the military conducted by Foreign Policy magazine and the Center for a New American Security excluded enlisted personnel because they did not want to “take a pulse” of the military. Have you ever been to a doctor who didn’t take your pulse before diagnosing your condition? Moreover, only the ranks of Major or higher were included in the poll. Bear in mind an Army Major is responsible for between 300 to 1000 soldiers.

In the early 1990s an enlisted soldier created NCO Net, which provided an access point for enlisted soldiers to share knowledge and experiences that occurred during combat and in training missions. In Iraq, the U.S. military has employed the technological child of NCO Net, by employing internet chat technology to share tactically useful information quickly. For example, CAVNET, which is used by the 1st Calvary Division, has been crucial to the successful dismantling of grenade-traps hidden behind posters of Moqtada al-Sadr. Moreover, Predator drones utilize this same technology and, as seen in newspapers and on TV, the success is immeasurable. As Audie Murphy, an enlisted soldier who later became the most decorated combat soldier in U.S. military history once said, “Lead from the front.” Can there be a better advocate than the voice of experience?

Fortunately, the military has many tools to transform its currently anemic communication system. The most easily implemented and currently employed system, is the after action review. An After Action Review (AAR) is a post-mission assessment, where each mission member, regardless of rank, voices their opinion of the overall mission. Its current use and function is readily understood and appreciated in military culture, hence the review provides a gateway, to harness the collective voice of the U.S. enlisted service members.