Ivan Eland
Since February, U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., has blocked all senior military promotions requiring Senate confirmation. He is doing so to protest the Pentagon’s policy of allowing military personnel to travel to get abortions if the state they live in does not allow them. The U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in the Dobbs case last year overturned Roe v. Wade's guarantee of nationwide abortions, creating a patchwork of state laws.
Tuberville is enjoying his celebrity status as a “never back down” type of guy a little too much. And Tuberville is taking his superficial Republican anti-wokeism too far by inserting it into military affairs.
Yet the predictions of catastrophic consequences for U.S. national security from Tuberville’s symbolic protest are wildly overblown by some members of both parties.
U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., vaguely railed that Tuberville is “prepared to burn the military down” with his hold on senior military promotions. Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, a hawkish Republican candidate for president, complained to Hugh Hewitt, a conservative radio host, “We do not have a chief of staff of the army for a first time in 200 years. More than 300 vacancies. It’s a mess.” Haley said Hewitt should contact Tuberville “and ask him to stop screwing up the military because we’re on the brink of a conflict with China and we cannot have this.”
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The desired public implication Tuberville’s critics want to leave is that the giant bureaucracies of the American military have ground to a halt because some senior leadership positions are temporarily unfilled. The suggest is that this impedes the readiness of our military to deal with any immediate armed contingencies that arise.
Yet based on my long experience working with the Department of Defense, I know its services adapt to run on autopilot quite successfully with acting senior officials. In fact, they regularly do so when Senate confirmations are slow, such as when a new president's administration is in transition. Granted, new policy initiatives may be delayed without senior leadership positions filled in some services, but a catastrophic loss of military readiness will unlikely occur.
Despite the public grousing about Tuberville, his grandstanding will have minor real-world effects. Tuberville's protest also could force Congress to consider pruning the bloated numbers of senior officer positions.
Since World War II, the ratio of flag officers — generals and admirals — to the enlisted ranks has ballooned to nearly the highest in modern military history. Republican congressional leaders are already on the right track in considering slimming down the number of flag officers in the services — currently more than 900.
In 1965, the year of the escalation of the Vietnam War, such generals and admirals were only 0.05% of the total force. In 2018, it had climbed to 0.07% of the force. During World War II, there was one general or admiral for every 6,000 troops. Now, it is one flag officer for 1,400 troops.
More generally, the officer bloat goes below the flag officer level, with a ratio of one officer to 10 enlisted men during World War II soaring to one officer for every four enlisted men in 2022. Col. Gregory McCarthy of the Marine Corps called this phenomenon “rank creep.”
Though the budget savings of eliminating the salaries of retiring flag officers would be modest, these legislative leaders realize something that the critics of doing so don’t — inefficiencies of bloated top-heavy service bureaucracies regularly undermine military readiness and waste too much of the almost $850 billion annual military budget far more than some temporarily unfilled senior positions.
What is required is a considered and systematic examination of whether many of these senior positions are still needed. Whittling down the excessive layers of flag officers to more historical levels will speed decision-making through the ranks in any emergency.
Eland is a senior fellow with the Independent Institute and author of “War and the Rogue Presidency.” He wrote this for InsideSources.com.
