National security writer Thomas Ricks thinks the United States will lose its next war.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author was the featured speaker at the 10th annual Paul J. Schatt Memorial Lecture on Monday at the Walter Cronkite School. He told an audience of about 130 people that the U.S. military’s lack of adaptability and innovation in a world of global surveillance and big data will hinder the country during the next catastrophe.
He said the military should “stop buying things and start thinking things.”
“The U.S. Army today is like a Ferrari without a steering wheel” — really good and really fast, but lacks direction
–@tomricks1 #CronkMSM— Sarah Jarvis (@jarahsarvis) February 9, 2016
“The defense industry has no incentive to innovate,” he said. “Because the defense industry has jobs and spending, it has the ear of Congress, and because we have a thoroughly broken campaign finance system in this country, we have a defense industry that can undermine America’s security with the help of Congress.”
Ricks compared our army to the British Army in 1939, expanding on a lack of adaptability in both forces.
He also specified that the U.S. armed forces doesn’t demand the intellectual rigor it did in the days when West Point focused more on engineering.
Ricks focused on the differences between training and education, specifying that “you train a person to operate a machine gun; you educate them to think about operating it in an environment like Iraq.”
He said the U.S. recently spent $15 billion on a new military aircraft carrier, a piece of equipment he said is “useful today for intimidating a third-world country perhaps, but not for fighting a real war.”
He said companies like Google and Amazon are the defense contractors of the future.
“How much do we need guys emulating George Patton, and how much do we need generals emulating Steve Jobs?” he said.
Ricks said the military’s structure is also a point of weakness. The system incentivizes military leaders to keep their heads down and not make a lot of trouble.
He described one of the scariest things he heard about the military from a discussion he had with a platoon commander. The commander told him that he and the other leaders simply “try to keep a lid on” things without thinking about the future, since they know their terms as commanders are limited. The commander told Ricks they would act differently if they were to hold their positions indefinitely.
Ricks said military leaders also often blame external factors for their failures.
“We need generals who speak truth to power instead of protecting the institution,” he said.
Ricks doesn’t think the solutions to the problems he identified will come anytime soon.
“We will need a wake-up call that is big enough to wake us up but not big enough to shake us apart, and I worry that that might not happen,” he said.
Addressing the journalism students in the audience specifically, Ricks said it’s important to study the history behind the subjects they write about.
Ray Bernreuter, an Arizona State University donor from Ontario, Canada, said he thinks it’s important for today’s students to hear Ricks’ point of view.
“It’s the same point of view as Eisenhower and the military industrial complex,” he said. “It’s a continuous story that nobody listens to.”
Contact the reporter at sajarvis@asu.edu.
