What President Trump can do for the U.S. military

Donald Trump correctly realized that this election was about domestic ‘kitchen table” issues and not foreign policy or military readiness. He alluded to the fact that there was much wrong with the Pentagon and vowed to fix it. The voters were interested in other issues, and he did not have to go into details. Now that he is President-elect, he has an opportunity to fix what is wrong with the Pentagon while fulfilling his promise to reduce the size of government. Here are some ideas of how he can do it.

First, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has grown from a cottage industry in the Pentagon to a mega-juggernaut that produces nothing but resentment and a devastating impact on recruiting, particularly children of veterans. It will likely be high on the list of cuts on Elon Musk’s efficiency task force agenda. The whole concept should be scrapped, and revert back to a merit-based promotion system for both service personnel and civilian employees.

The Biden administration, like many before it, attempted to turn the military into a social experimentation laboratory. Most of the red-blooded American men which the military needs do not want to participate in group self-deprecating seminars. They want to join an organization dedicated, if necessary, to locate, close with and destroy the enemy by fire and maneuver, or repel the enemy assault by fire and close combat when the nation needs it. The Biden administration ignored this, and that is largely why we have a military recruiting problem.

A second and no less critical area to fix within the five walls of the Pentagon is to fix the Goldwater-Nichols Act (GNA) military reform legislation.  GNA was created for decades ago to improve the performance of joint staffs in the wake of the failed Iranian hostage rescue mission and the muddled command relationships that characterized our incursion into Grenada in the early 1980s. While well intentioned, GNA had unintended consequences that plague us today.

One such unintended consequence was the requirement for Flag or General Officers (FOGO) to serve three-year tours on a joint staff, leading to bloated staff that cannot get out of their own way, much less win wars. This also contributes to FOGO bloat. For example, Rommel’s Panzer Army, the equivalent of U.S. AFRICOM today, overran most of North Africa with a staff the size of a U.S. Army brigade staff in 2024.

In contrast, most modern American theater commands are the size of two infantry battalions with staff sections run by FOGOs, Rommel’s staff sections were run by colonels and below. The mighty fleets run by Bull Halsey and Raymond Spruance that beat Japan had staffs that could fit in the wardroom of an aircraft carrier, and that was before the advent of modern computers that are supposed to reduce the need for personnel.

It is instructive that the last war that we won decisively, Desert Storm, was run by officers educated before the reforms of G-N and the related Skelton military education mandates were fully in place. The current crop of FOGOs spent twenty years in Afghanistan without realizing that they were trying to build an Afghan army in our own image that would not be able to sustain itself after we left. The “Forever War” should have been handed over to an Afghan army built along Taliban lines in 2006 to fend for itself.

Cost effectiveness, the third fix for the Pentagon would be the making the Marine Corps great again. During the Biden administration, two misguided commandants reimagined the Marine Corps from a global force in readiness to a China-oriented defensive force at the expense of the combat power that made the Marine Corps capable of winning amphibious campaigns such as Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, and Inchon.

The Marine Corps can no longer contribute to large-scale combat operations such as Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom without the tanks, heavy assault engineers, and adequate tubed artillery that the Marines divested to buy anti-ship missiles for the counter-China mission. Unfortunately, as noted in a recent study, the military cannot build a strategy or a force on a single adversary or conflict.

The good news is that, through incompetent leadership, the anti-ship missiles have yet to be acquired and are wastefully redundant. These capabilities are already in the Army, Navy, and Air Force’s inventory, but were never considered.

To remedy the Marine Corps’ unforced errors, the senior leadership of the Marine Corps should be replaced with officers who understand the true nature of what the Corps has traditionally added to national defense. It will take at least a decade to get the Marine Corps back to where it was when Mr. Trump left office, and that Vice President elect Vance remembers as a Marine even if they start on day one.

Albeit these recommendations are just a few in the effort to reform for the incoming Trump administration, but nonetheless vital to gain ground in preparation to deter any future conflict, large or small. I hope that we never have to fight a major war, but if we do, we should win it.

Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps Colonel who served as a Special Advisor to The Deputy Secretary of Defense and as a civilian advisor In Iraq and Afghanistan.

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