Dod Personnel

The men and women of America’s armed forces are the most critical component of our national defense strategy, but in recent years, they have been overextended, undervalued, and insufficiently resourced. Their families help them to carry the burden of service, but the assistance they receive is disproportionately less than the sacrifices they make. Young civilians who would thrive in a military environ- ment are disenfranchised when educators and influencers discourage them from learning about military service and preparing for the honor of wearing America’s uniform.

The United States military is an extraordinary institution, staffed by exceptional people who have defended our nation and changed the course of history, but the Biden Administration, through word and deed, has treated the armed forces as just another place to work. We must restore our military to a place of honor and respect and recruit and retain the individuals who will meet the rigorous standards of excellence that are required for membership in the world’s greatest fighting force.

Needed Reforms

Rescue recruiting and retention. Recruiting was the worst in 2022 that it has been in two generations and is expected to be even worse in 2023. Some of the problems are self-inflicted and ongoing. The recruiting problem is not service-specific: It affects the entire Joint Force.

1. Appoint a Special Assistant to the President who will maintain liaison with Congress, DOD, and all other interested parties on the issue of recruiting and retention.

2. Improve recruiting by suspending the use of the recently introduced MHS Genesis system that uses private medical records of potential recruits at Military Entrance Processing Stations (MEPS), creating unnecessary delays and unwarranted rejections.11

3. Improve military recruiters’ access to secondary schools and require completion of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB)—the military entrance examination—by all students in schools that receive federal funding.12

4. Encourage Members of Congress to provide time to military recruiters during each townhall session in their congressional districts.

5. Increase the number of Junior ROTC programs in secondary schools.

Restore standards of lethality and excellence. Entrance criteria for military service and specific occupational career fields should be based on the needs of those positions. Exceptions for individuals who are already predisposed to require medical treatment (for example, HIV positive or suffering from gender dysphoria) should be removed, and those with gender dysphoria should be expelled from military service. Physical fitness requirements should be based on the occupational field without consideration of gender, race, ethnicity, or orientation.

1. Strengthen protections for chaplains to carry out their ministry according to the tenets of their faith.

2. Codify language to instruct senior military officers (three and four stars) to make certain that they understand their primary duty to be ensuring the readiness of the armed forces, not pursuing a social engineering agenda. This direction should be reinforced during the Senate confirmation process. Orders and direction motivated by purely partisan motives should be identified as threats to readiness.

3. Reinstate servicemembers to active duty who were discharged for not receiving the COVID vaccine, restore their appropriate rank, and provide back pay.

4. Eliminate Marxist indoctrination and divisive critical race theory programs and abolish newly established diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and staff.

Eliminate politicization, reestablish trust and accountability, and restore faith to the force. In 2021, the Reagan National Defense Survey found that only 45 percent of Americans have “a great deal of trust and confidence in the military”—down from 70 percent in 2018.13

5. Restrict the use of social media solely for purposes of recruitment and discipline any armed services personnel who use an official command channel to engage with civilian critics on social media.

6. Audit the course offerings at military academies to remove Marxist indoctrination, eliminate tenure for academic professionals, and apply the same rules to instructors that are applied to other DOD contracting personnel.

7. Reverse policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military. Gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service, and the use of public monies for transgender surgeries or to facilitate abortion for servicemembers should be ended.

Value the military family. Military service requires extreme sacrifices by families.

Support legislation to increase wages and family allowances for active- duty enlisted personnel. No uniformed personnel should ever have to rely on social benefits like as food stamps or public housing assistance.

2. Improve base housing and consider the military family holistically when considering change-of-station moves.
3. Improve spouse employment opportunities and protections, including licensing reform,14 and expand childcare.
4. Audit all curricula and health policies in DOD schools for military families, remove all inappropriate materials, and reverse inappropriate policies.
5. Support legislation giving education savings account options to military families.15

Reduce the number of generals. Rank creep is pervasive. The number of 0-6 to 0-9 officers is at an all-time high across the armed services (above World War II levels), and the actual battlefield experience of this officer corps is at an all-time low. The next President should limit the continued advancement of many of the existing cadre, many of whom have been advanced by prior Administrations for reasons other than their warfighting prowess.

DOD INTELLIGENCE

Our national defense establishment must evolve to meet the rapid, pro- found, and dynamic change in the global landscape, but absent significant effort to evaluate and retool in critical areas—including our intelligence and security portfolios—America’s competitive advantage against rivals and adversaries is at serious risk. However, for any structural changes to succeed, the crisis in our Intel- ligence Community (IC)/Defense Intelligence Enterprise (DIE) leadership must be addressed.16

The DIE accounts for the bulk of the Intelligence Community’s personnel and a significant portion of its budget. Of the IC’s 17 elements, eight are within DOD,17 two are independent,18 and seven belong to various other departments and agencies.19 Overall, “[t]he DoD provides 86 percent of the personnel who conduct intelligence activities, both military and civilian.”20

The Defense Intelligence Enterprise must deliver accurate, unbiased, and timely insights consistently and with clarity, objectivity, and independence. If they continue on their current path, however, both the DIE and the Intelligence Com- munity writ large will continue to provide inaccurate and politicized intelligence assessments that mislead policymakers.

Needed Reforms

Improve the intelligence process. Defense intelligence assets have been committed to the prosecution of operational campaigns since September 11, 2001, at the expense of our strategic objectives, and this has led to increased risk.21 Further, the DIE has evolved into a “customer-based” model with the DIE/IC trying to be supportive of policy direction at the expense of analytical integrity. The result has been a significant politicization of intelligence.

1. Establish unbiased intelligence reporting from DIE/IC senior leaders.

As the leader of the DIE, the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security should provide a top-line, dissenting, or clarifying view of DIE and IC assessments as needed.

2. Align collection and analysis with vital national interests (countering China and Russia).

3. Establish an effective global federated intelligence framework with allies and partners and our Combatant Commands. Avoid the temptation to neglect areas that appear less pertinent but that support a convergence of threats and the critical requirements to sustain those threats.

4. Establish and sustain feedback loops to provide insight and direction for continuous improvement and accountability.22 We must revisit our assessments and understand where we got it right and where we got it wrong.

5. Better exploit publicly available information (PAI) data and foster innovation to improve collection and analysis. We must end the practice of multiple DIE organizations paying to acquire the same PAI data and invest more in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to exploit open-source and classified intelligence data.

6. Remove policy obstacles that impede available technical solutions and tailored approaches in order to preclude corruption at the point of collection.

7. Develop statistical discrimination techniques based on relative value to deal with the volume and velocity of available data and information, which are rapidly exceeding our ability to exploit and analyze available data and information efficiently.

Expand the integration of intelligence activities. The prevalence of asymmetric warfare requires Defense Intelligence to leverage the unique authorities and capabilities of U.S. departments and agencies, as well as our partners and allies, to competitive advantage.

1. Create an improved cyber defense and capability. We must reevaluate the dual-hat structure between the National Security Agency (NSA) and U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM).

2. Resurrect economic analysis capability to improve our ability to counter Chinese whole-of-government strategies that combine security with predatory economic objectives.

3. Resurrect critical thinking to provide true strategic intelligence that will enable the U.S. to counter global adversaries and emerging technologies (such as adversary advances in hypersonics, Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), cyber domain, advanced fighter aircraft, and advanced undersea capabilities) more effectively.

4. Rebuild human intelligence (HUMINT) and counterintelligence (CI) and improve their integration with defensive and offensive cyber operations.

5. Establish true alignment between DOD and DHS both to improve the defense of critical U.S. infrastructure and national border integrity and to develop vital information that enables defense against foreign targeted disruptions.23

Restore accountability and public trust. In recent years, public trust in Defense Intelligence has been eroded by, for example, flawed assumptions leading up to our Afghanistan withdrawal, flawed Russia–Ukraine assessments, divergences in relations with key Gulf allies, and voids being filled by Russia and China around the world. For trust to be restored and sustained, officials must be held accountable.

2. Elevate the DIE’s voice in national policy discussions, commensurate with the DIE’s 75 percent share of the IC budget. Present defense intelligence to senior policymakers, either independently to avoid all-source bias or in consensus products like the National Intelligence Estimates.

Eliminate peripheral intelligence obligations that do not advance military readiness. In 2019, following the catastrophic 2015 data breach at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA) accepted transfer of the responsibility to conduct security clearance and suitability investigations for 95 percent of the U.S. government’s civilian workforce. This decision, which grew out of an intention to deconstruct OPM, was wrongheaded on many levels and made the federal bureaucracy dependent on a new overlay of DOD bureaucracy, in a sense instilling DOD control of civilian managers. This function should be returned to OPM except for military security clearance investigations.

Restore DIE critical thinking. Establish mechanisms to restore analytic integrity and return to true intelligence-driven operations. The next Administration should eliminate the conflict of interest in the current customer-based model (in which the customer is always right) by enforcing time-tested procedures that guarantee independent analysis, even if it means challenging policymakers’ assumptions. The Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security’s leadership role should be expanded to include providing analytic top-line views and improve DIE transparency by highlighting diverging views.