CDR Salamander - Gen. Christopher Donahue, USA, Wants a Pony for Christmas

I first read Jen Judson’s article in Defense News back when it came out … and was simply in awe. I simply respect the audacity and enthusiasm by a man whose love of land-centric thinking is only matched by his demand that time and space bend to his will.

Please clap.

It is a well known cynical, and correct, angle that all the post-Goldwater-Nichols diktat was simply a way for the Army to exert an artificially large influence on the strategic direction of the otherwise natural maritime and aerospace power that is the United States. It didn’t so much lift Army up, but kept the Navy and USAF thinking suppressed through institutional barriers, bureaucratic obfuscation, and generally a blurring of differences and hiding options that weren’t “joint” enough for Army’s taste.

As the quarter century of imperial land policing actions in Central and Southwest Asia continues to fade from view, the events in Europe with the Russo-Ukrainian War of 2022 give land component advocates a reprieve from the coming rebalancing towards the maritime and aerospace forces that a great Pacific war would require.

As this day of budgetary reckoning gets harder to avoid, some of the most excitable Army leaders have become, well, shrill? Overwrought? Midnight televangelistic? Either they or their Zoomer speech writers just need to take a deep breath and step back from the energy drinks a bit.

When it comes to land component hyperbole and hype-men, the bubbas in green need not by dismayed with the retirement last year of General Charles A. Flynn, USA (Ret.). I mean, Flynn was an Army-centric parochialism force of nature. I didn’t think he’d be easy to replace, but I was mistaken.

Behold the commanding general of the United States Army Europe and Africa and commander of NATO’s Allied Land Command since December of last year, General Christopher Todd Donahue, USA.

I’m just going to string together quotes of his at the Association of the U.S. Army’s inaugural LandEuro conference in Wiesbaden, Germany his from Jen’s article, with a scattered comment or two.

Yes, yes, I know the venue…but that does not matter.

…the Army, along with NATO, is first focusing on the Baltic states “to try to get to how do you actually make it so that industry and the nations know exactly what the requirements are — ultimately that is now known as the Eastern Flank Deterrence Line…We know what we have to develop and the use case that we’re using is you have to [deter] from the ground…The land domain is not becoming less important, it’s becoming more important. You can now take down [anti-access, aerial-denial] A2AD bubbles from the ground. You can now take over sea from the ground. All of those things we are watching happen in Ukraine.

This next bit…where is the humility? Where is the understanding of our constant problem with overestimating what we can do and underestimating what our opponents can do?

…Donahue noted, Kaliningrad, Russia, is roughly 47 miles wide and surrounded by NATO on all sides and the Army and its allies now have the capability to “take that down from the ground in a timeframe that is unheard of and faster than we’ve ever been able to do…We’ve already planned that and we’ve already developed it.

This next bit has a lot of certainty that simply has no place on the European continent.

The mass and momentum problem that Russia poses to us … we’ve developed the capability to make sure that we can stop that mass and momentum problem…We already know exactly what we have to do with cloud and we know exactly the type of actual unmanned systems, brigades, everything else that we need for that.

Have we, really?

The next quote, and I understand the warning he is giving industry, but I’m sorry; we have got to stop demanding absolutes we cannot afford, and probably will not be able to deliver.

We want everything to be optionally manned, whether that is an air defense or a long-range fires system. We want it to be one system, optionally manned, where we’ll be able to take munitions from any country and shoot through them.

In the name of all that is holy, have we learned nothing from the last few decades about putting all our programmatic eggs in one basket.

“…one system..”

Yes, by all means, build one system for the enemy to hack. One system for the enemy to learn to counter. One system for industry to make that fails to thrive leaving us exposed, vulnerable, or after years and billions, with nothing.

Have we learned anything?

As a general rule, whatever you’re shooting at, whatever your weapon system or munition you shoot at, another adversary’s capability, it should be cheaper than what you’re shooting,…We have sent a clear demand signal to you of exactly what we need.

If you are shooting something at me that costs $500,000, but for me to successfully intercept it I need to spend $2 million, is that really that bad if it works reliably? If I spend $300,000 on a weapon to shoot it down, but it takes six of them to only have a 70% chance of protecting my $2 billion warship…is that really smart?

What if you do develop a $300,000 system to shoot down that $500,000 threat that is just as good as the $2 million system…but your $300,000 system displaces the other system, but cannot counter the enemy’s $4 million threat and as a result, lose your $2 billion warship…have you made the “efficient” decision?

…If you sell us something, it has to be interoperable. You have to share the [Application Programming Interface]. The cost has to go down.

Share with whom? Interoperable with what, whom, and why? What opportunity cost? How will overall cost go down? Via what expected mechanism? What capability are you willing to do without? How much security risk are you willing to accept?

Don’t get me wrong, I like Donahue’s enthusiasm and aggressive promotion of his service, but if these are the new rules, then giddy-up, let’s ride.

I am all about creative friction and the productivity of aggressive competition and argument. Let’s grab the nearest gut-hook and eviscerate the entire Joint concept that has served as an intellectual and institutional wet blanket over everyone since Reagan was President.

From make-work Joint billet box-checking, to the JPME Industrial Complex jobs program, to the ossifying gates, windows, and career milestones it places around everyone making innovation and truly diverse experiences career damaging and nothing but ducks picking ducks because of the artificial requirement of webbed feet.

We should play Donahue’s game. Where are our admirals making the same impassioned maritime-uber-alles argument?

Also, “Eastern Flank Deterrence Line”? Child, please.

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