Compass Points - DOGE is Coming
Deliverance or Destruction?
Compass Points - DOGE is Coming
Deliverance or Destruction?
November 19, 2024
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The incoming administration is establishing a new office named DOGE - Department of Government Efficiency. The purpose of DOGE is to review, streamline, and prune federal government departments, offices, and agencies. DOGE will be led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Musk has been widely quoted saying the federal government budget could be significantly shrunk by at least $2 trillion. The outcome of a DOGE review will mean that some agencies will win increases to their budgets, some agencies will have their budgets cut, and some agencies will be eliminated altogether. If DOGE decides to inspect the Marine Corps, how will the Marine Corps be rated? Will the Marine Corps impress the DOGE inspectors and win a larger budget? Will the Marine Corps budget be cut? Or will the Marine Corps be eliminated all together?
Traditionally, the Marine Corps has always been the best value in US combat capabilities. One Forbes article “How The Marines Plan To Win Washington's Budget Wars” explains:
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Over the last few months, I've talked to several senior Marines, and the picture that emerges is of an organization that is downright eager to tell its story to policymakers . . .[Senior Marines] think the capabilities their service contributes to the joint warfighting portfolio are so useful and inexpensive that they are bound to win the battle for future funding.
The core of the Marine message comes down to what might be called the "Three R's" of military merit -- relevance, readiness, and realism. You can capture the flavor of their thinking by perusing a document titled "True North: Marines in Defense of the Nation" that appears on the homepage of the service's website. It's organized like the Bill of Rights, laying out ten concise reasons why the Marine Corps is versatile and cost-effective -- the "Swiss Army knife" of the joint force, as they like to put it.
. . . RELEVANCE. Marine leaders believe that their service’s core competencies are perfectly aligned with the nation's emerging military strategy, which entails increased emphasis on the Western Pacific, continued presence in the Middle East, and a modest footprint everywhere else. As a sea-based force, the Marines are able to remain forward deployed in any region around the world without needing access to bases ashore. That's a claim the Army can't make, and it matters a lot in a world where future threats are hard to predict.
The basic building block of the Corps' organization is the Marine Expeditionary Unit, a force of 2,200 warfighters carried on three-ship "amphibious ready groups" that possesses all the aircraft, ground equipment, logistics and command elements needed to respond quickly to crises. Most of the world's population lives near the sea, but with aircraft like the MV-22 Osprey rotorcraft, Marines can get far inland fast if necessary, and then land pretty much anywhere they want.
An expeditionary force can be scaled up or down easily depending on the mission, as can the degree of force it employs. As one briefing puts it, a Marine Expeditionary Unit can knock politely on a littoral nation's door when diplomacy is required, or it can pick the lock with special-operations skills, or it can simply kick the door in if quick access is needed. Other countries know this, making the forward presence of Marines a potent deterrent for aggressors and a source of comfort for friendly nations.
READINESS. Marines see themselves as the nation's first responders, the force that will be "most ready when the nation is least ready." Like the other services, they are straining to preserve force structure as overseas wars wind down, but they emphasize that whatever size the Marine Corps ends up being when the smoke clears, it will be in a uniformly high state of readiness. As one Marine general put it to me, "we will not sacrifice readiness for force structure." In other words, the Corps would rather be small and ready than big and unprepared for combat.
The importance of readiness is stressed by the institutional culture of the Corps, which requires that every Marine be a rifleman and every officer be capable of leading a platoon. Readiness is also built into the way that combat units are organized and distributed. Marine Expeditionary Units are continuously deployed along with pre-positioned combat equipment in Northeast Asia, Southwest Asia and the Mediterranean Sea, and are capable of quickly assembling or disassembling based on the challenges they face.
. . . REALISM. Marines are realists about human nature, whether that nature is manifested in the behavior of other countries or other military services. They aren't impressed with sweeping abstractions like "military transformation," and they understand the enemy gets a vote in any war plan. So their strategy for prevailing in Washington's budget wars begins with a hard-headed analysis of what the other players want, and how the Marine Corps should leverage the limited political capital at its disposal
-- Loren Thompson, Forbes, “How The Marines Plan To Win Washington's Budget Wars”
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Forbes contributor, Loren Thompson, provides a powerful summary of why the Marine Corps has nothing to worry about in budget wars. That is the good news. Or that was the good news. The Forbes article was published more than a decade ago in 2013. During the struggle over the military budget back in 2013, the Marine Corps was the most flexible, most useful, and most cost-effective source of US combat capabilities. It is military capabilities that must be the focus of a DOGE military review. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, for all their talents and accomplishments, have no military experience. When they turn their attention to the military, DOGE should focus on capabilities.
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Measuring the Unquantifiable
The challenge is that measuring military capability in any meaningful way is not entirely reducible to quantification and systems analysis. The working definition of military capability includes four variables: force structure, modernization, unit readiness, and sustainability. While some of these, such as the numbers of weapon systems and their performance, can readily be quantified, other variables such as unit readiness, which includes training proficiency and morale, are much more subjective.
Moreover, the adequacy of military capability is a function of its ability to coerce a potential enemy’s behavior. Thus, it should be assessed in the context of the enemy’s capabilities and interactions with the enemy’s strategies and capabilities. Ultimately, war is a contest of human wills conducted under the most frightening, uncertain, and trying conditions. As one noted American combat veteran once said, “it is like a fire in an orphanage on a frigid winter’s night.”[20] While quantitative analysis can inform an assessment of comparative warfighting capability, it cannot be reduced to an algorithm.
What is needed is the ability to apply professional judgment, supported by quantitative analysis, in an auditable, repeatable way to answer the basic question: Under a reasonable set of assumptions, does the U.S. military now have the capability “without national mobilization, to defeat two nation-state adversaries in geographically separate theaters nearly simultaneously,” and will current policies, defense programs, and trends in threat evolution allow it to retain that capability in the future? Development of the methodology and process to answer that question and a mechanism to include the answer in the national political and budgetary discourse should be a high national priority.
-- Richard Dunn - Senior Research Fellow
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A Compass Points reader, Douglas C Rapé, describes the recent loss of Marine capabilities and the situation the Marine Corps finds itself in today. He begins with a quotation from Winston Churchill.
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The [military] is not like a limited liability company to be reconstructed, remodeled, liquidated, and refloated week to week as the money market fluctuates. It is not an inanimate thing like a house to be pulled down, enlarged, or structurally altered at the caprice of the tenant or owner; it is a living thing. If it is bullied, it sulks; if it is unhappy, it pines; if it is harried, it becomes feverish; if it is sufficiently disturbed, it will dwindle, wither, and almost die; and when it comes to this last serious condition it is only revived by lots of time and lots of money.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
For almost six years the Corps has been pulled through the knot hole as it divested combat power and more importantly Marines. Rest assured the fever spread to the remaining Marines. The Corps was never been the sum of its weapons and equipment. It was always a sum greater than the parts based on Esprit de Corps, a phrase I have not heard in years, along with fighting spirit, loyalty, and selfless leadership. The Corps was tossed by ill-advised social change dictated from on high and doubled down on by feckless leaders, it was forced into gender politics devoid of all logic and DEI so perverse it was clearly unconstitutional yet forced on those who took a sacred oath to the Constitution and did not stand on principle. Added to this was the corrosive impact of a strategy of employment that was so outlandish that few with a modicum of experience could support it as it was further tarnished by the fact that the three other services could accomplish this self-assigned mission better. The last six years would have thoroughly broken any other organization or institution.
Today, as the Corps continues its forced march towards irrelevance and possibly extinction, the rank and file still adhere to the warrior intangibles. That will not last forever. It is being slowly bred out like wolves who will eventually become something other than alpha predators. If help is on the way, and I trust civilian studies and think tanks about as much as thin ice on a lake in the spring, it better come soon. The dark clouds of budgets in a new administration might blow in quicker and with a brutal finality. In the end Generals Berger and Smith may have bred the wolf pack halfway to lap dogs that have no place in the forest of world conflict. Time is running out and it is not on our side.
-- Douglas C Rapé
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The DOGE is coming. What will it mean for the Marine Corps, deliverance, or destruction? Traditionally, the Marine Corps has not only been most ready when the Nation is least ready, but has always been most capable. Is it still true? The clock is ticking. Global challenges and threats to the US will not wait for the Marine Corps to focus once again on global crisis response.
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Forbes - 06/11/2013
How The Marines Plan To Win Washington's Budget Wars
By Loren Thompson, Senior Contributor
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Heritage - 05/16/2014
Measuring Military Capabilities: An Essential Tool for Rebuilding American Military Strength
By Richard Dunn - Senior Research Fellow
Title X, USC guarantees a Marine Corps of 3 divisions, 3 wings, and supporting establishment. However, the anti-ship missile capabilities fathered by General Berger and nurtured by General Smith are fair game for the DOGE. The budgetary rub for organizing, training, and equipping a military service is balancing effectiveness and efficiency. An effective military service should take priority over a purely efficient service. Today’s Marine Corps finds itself neither effective nor efficient, leaving it exposed to DOGE.
SIFs armed with the Naval Strike Missile are ineffective. The missile is short range and subsonic. The SIF is not survivable - - it lacks the combat power to defend itself and cannot be reinforced or logistically supported. The ugly truth is that the Marines have essentially transformed to irrelevance.
SIFs armed with the Naval Strike Missile are inefficient. They are duplicative of Army, Air Force, and Navy capabilities. For example, just one of the Navy’s four SSGN submarines carries 154 Tomahawk missiles. The SIFs anti-ship missile capabilities are greatly inferior to Army, Air Force, and Navy capabilities. All of these services are investing is long-range, hypersonic missiles. The ugly truth here is that every dollar spent on the SIF is wasteful.
When a large corporation teeters on bankruptcy or is in one form of bankruptcy proceeding or the other, outside accounting or audit firms are usually called in to find the money, figure out if there is any way to salvage the entity or sell off the parts and get as much per part in dollar value to be distributed to the creditors. If the company is lucky, the outsiders say “replace management, get reorganized, get refinanced and run as hard as you can to regain shareholder trust.” If the company is unlucky, the cash and assets get distributed to the creditors. So which are we? A viable business but teetering on bankruptcy, or in chapter 7, case closed liquidation of assets, creditors paid pennies on the dollar? Since no one in foggy bottom can manage to audit themselves, the DOGE fad or gimmick or not seems a means to shake the system up and call for accountability. It could go badly, Musk and Ramaswamy may conclude that thanks to FD230, the easy route is fold the Corps up, who needs it. Talk about divest to invest, when amateurs like General Berger do it, it just causes financial troubles, when nasty money guys do it, it’s gone. They generally are not sentimental types. When queried as to how Twitter/X could fire 80% of the work force and continue to operate, Musk said “turns we didn’t need all those people after all.” Say Elon what about this small force that has no ships, no gear, can’t meet statutory obligations and is floundering around? “well looks like we don’t need that Corps after all…..”