National Security is Hard

Hoping for Success from the Inexperienced is Not a Sound Strategy

The daydream goes something like this. It is early December, 2024, and I am sitting by the fire sipping coffee and reading a history of the hurricane that nearly destroyed Galveston, Texas. Just then, my phone starts a-buzzin’, and I see an unfamiliar DC area-coded number come up. I answer.

“Bryan, it’s Paul Ryan”.

“Good morning, Mr. Vice President Elect. This is a surprise.”

“Thank you for the support in our campaign and for your advice along the way. President-Elect Romney has asked me to call you and let you know that unless there is some kind of skeleton in your past, he is going to nominate you for Secretary of Defense.”

Silence.

This is where the daydream turns nightmare.

“Mr. Vice President Elect, that is quite an honor. But are you sure you have the right guy?”.

I have been in and around the national security machine of this country at various levels and positions since I took the oath of office as a Midshipman at UVA in August of 1983. I have 21 years of operational experience, and I have first-hand experience on the Navy Staff and on the Joint Staff, places where I interacted frequently with the Combatant Commander staffs and the staff of the Secretary of Defense. I have extensive experience interacting with the national security authorizing committees of the Congress, I understand the various processes that result in a defense budget, and I have a modest talent for getting the right people in the room with each other to arrive at reasonable decisions.

I have forgotten more about American Seapower than most people will ever know, and I have written and spoken widely advocating for American world leadership and a strong Navy.

In addition to all that resume stuff, I am not burdened by a lack of self-esteem.

But if that daydream call had ever come I would have had one and only one answer. I wouldn’t even run this one by Catherine. The answer would be no. And the answer would be no because I understand the requirements of the job, my own capabilities, and my personality. Simply put, I would be unqualified to be the Secretary of Defense based solely on my lack of experience in major portions of the job, to include 1) running a Leviathan of an organization, 2) international diplomacy, 3) and the appropriations process.

I get it. It is easy for someone who burned his ships on the beach in 2016 to daydream aloud about appointments that never would have or will happen. I also understand that there are a TON of places in the national security establishment that I believe my skill set would have been well-matched to. But that is for another lifetime.

What is this meander all about? It is about this piece I read this morning. “Time to Get Real”. In it, the author makes the case that there are several persons currently under consideration for national security posts in the next administration who should be considered superior choices when compared to the current occupants of the offices for which they are being considered. For this author (“Citizen Soldier”) service in the Army holds considerable importance in one’s fitness for high office, and this should not be ignored. Once learns a great deal about people by leading people, and I am certainly all for encouraging a greater emphasis on service in the Armed Forces as part of a well-qualified resume to lead in the Department of Defense. Citizen Solider contrasts this set of virtues to those of Biden Administration officials, whose qualifications are of lesser importance presumably.

This essay is of a kind that is quite popular in our populist moment, wherein we denigrate the pointy-heads in favor of “real” people, most of whom happen to share our own experiences. Expertise is not important, belief is. Demonstrated competence is not important, loyalty is. Thorough knowledge of how an organization works is not important, only a desire to change how it works is.

We see this at work in some of the nominees for national security positions, and Citizen Soldier calls them out. I will focus solely on the Secretary of Defense candidate, as it is the position with which I am most familiar.

Mr. Hegseth

Although there are a number of important questions of personal probity, questions that would once have disqualified someone from consideration, I will not deal with them here. I seek only to highlight what I consider to be crucial gaps in Mr. Hegseth’s professional fitness for the job.

I urge readers at some point to take a look at the Wikipedia entries for the two men that I thought were the best Secretaries of Defense in my lifetime, Donald Rumsfeld (the second time) and Robert Gates, both of whom I served under in uniform (this could be a source of bias). Look at the jobs they had before they became SecDef.

I consider them the best because of one and only one virtue that they had developed over years of diverse experiences. They were masters of the bureaucratic processes that underpinned their success. I once got into a snit with a colleague for referring to Gates in writing as a “Mandarin”, which he took to be an insult but which I offered as a compliment. By the time they arrived in the chair, they had deep knowledge and experience as to how their department got things done within the large and unwieldy system that is a fact of life in modern America.

I have seen men and women of character, heft, and experience ground down to a nub by the bureaucracy and the various processes that attend to national security decision making, and in a perfect world in which a Secretary could wave a magic wand and do away with such impediments, previous experience would be far less important. But we do not live in that world.

Mr. Hegseth has no experience in this world. None. Zero. Zilch. I honor his service in uniform, and I believe that it has enriched him in many ways. I honor his concern for Veterans issues, but as I have said and written for many years, Veterans issues and defense issues are NOT THE SAME THING, and in a very perverse way, the creation of a deepening veteran entitlement class has added to pressure on the actual defense budget, because so many legislators on Capitol Hill conflate veterans benefits with national security.

Make no mistake—I am not a fan of many of the people that served in the Biden national security apparatus. My sense is that there were far too many academics and loyal party apparatchiks, and far too few with real knowledge of AND APPRECIATION FOR the portfolios they represented.

Would Mr. Hegseth be a credible nominee for the Secretary of Veterans Affairs? Would he be a reasonable nominee for Under Secretary for Personnel and Readiness? I believe so, EVEN with the aforementioned process knowledge deficits.

What I cannot connect with on any level is just why Mr. Hegseth believes he is qualified to be the Secretary of Defense? Why in God’s name would he want a job for which he is so underqualified, a job that is one of the most important in the world? Is it because he doesn’t understand what he doesn’t know? Is it because he understands what he doesn’t know but considers it unimportant? Is it because he has such disdain for the process and organization of the Defense Department that he feels no real responsibility to understand it, as he sees his mission to “disrupt” it? Or—what I fear most—does Mr. Hegseth have such unassailable self-esteem that he simply thinks he’ll figure it all out on the job?

Again, in my tiny little arrogant brain, I consider myself at least as qualified to be Secretary of Defense as Mr. Hegseth. By which I mean that neither of us should ever be considered by the Senate for the position.

Finally, I anticipate what a large measure of pushback to my position will be—the “well he can’t be as bad as the well-qualified people who have screwed up in these jobs”, argument , which is a populist go-to if ever there were one. Well, I guess that is an argument. What it looks like to me is a great big gamble, at a time when I think we need strength, competence, and maturity.

I honestly hope I’m wrong.

One more thing for the right of center navalist crowd with which I am loosely associated. We’ve bitched for YEARS at the degree to which “the Army” cabal at OSD has argued a-strategically against greater resources for Seapower, yet because Mr. Hegseth plays for the team you like and says the things you like about social issues, his Army background disappears. You will remember it at some point.