Reminder: Tomorrow Jasmine and I will be bringing you an attempt at a video mailbag in the place of a normal Friday Triad.
1. Stop Loss
Yesterday Secretary of the Navy John Phelan was fired.
Twenty-one days ago, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George was fired.
Fifty-four days ago, the American military launched its largest war in a generation.
These datapoints are linked. They are an admission by the president that America is losing the war.
Because the simple fact of the matter is: You do not make high-level personnel changes in the middle of a war if you are winning.
Phelan and George occupied different roles in the Pentagon. Neither was in charge of day-to-day management of the war—their jobs were focused on things like recruitment, retention, and training, of personnel and acquisition of technology and supplies. We can leave aside questions about their competence. Maybe they were excellent at their jobs; maybe they were not. Maybe they were pushed out for purely political or personality-related reasons that had nothing to do with performance.
But this war is a gigantic, sprawling exercise. It involves two dozen warships and roughly 50,000 troops. We are spending somewhere between $1 billion and $2 billion per day and expending munitions at a fantastic rate.
When an organization enters a period of high-tempo operations like this, it places strain on the entire system. There are warfighters on the front line. Behind them are people in charge of logistics for the tip of the spear. Behind them is a universe of people who then have to compensate force dispositions across the rest of the world to rebalance America’s military presence. And behind them are the organizations Phelan and George led: people who suddenly have to start the process of rebuilding stockpiles and working double-time on procurement; who have to deal with what the war will mean for force retention and human resources.
There is no corner of the Pentagon that doesn’t get touched when America gets into a real war, as we are in Iran.
And when organizational structures are strained, the thing they need most is