Mark Milley’s bureaucratic proposals could lose us the next war

General Mark Milley, the 20th chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is about to retire after a four-year term and a 43-year career of military service. It is therefore telling that a man with such a long career would, to cement his legacy, recommend establishing a “Leader of a Joint Futures Organization” — that is, a sort of “future jointness czar.” 

Milley’s argument, in the just-published issue of Joint Force Quarterly, demonstrates the U.S. military’s direction — one that undermines the power of the services and centralizes strategic, operational and technological development within a pseudo general staff. This will create a military organization incapable of adapting to future conflict and reacting to unexpected technological change. 

Milley’s proposals, in short, will lose the U.S. its next war. 

Few positions in the American state have as much cultural power as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. That is to say, the position has immense influence on the thinking, structure, processes and direction of an immense organization — in this case, the U.S. security system — in shifting it toward a new objective. Milley’s views must therefore be read carefully. 

The U.S. security system is in need of a refresh. It faces two concurrent challenges: first, the intensification of Eurasian strategic competition, and second, a shift in the character of war. 

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has dragged strategic contestation into the open. No longer can the Western policy class claim that conflict is largely restrained to subversion, manipulation and so-called “salami-slicing” and hybrid warfare. Monarchies may largely be dead, but their final argument remains. The Eurasian revisionist powers — Russia, China and Iran — all seek to transform the Eurasian security system, eject the U.S. from the landmass and thereby impose their will on the world. This end involves war, or more likely, multiple wars. 

General Milley makes a similar observation, although without explicitly identifying the probability of conflict. Yet the general framing is similar enough to demonstrate strategic rationality, that is, a grasp of the obvious: Great power war is increasingly probable, and therefore must again dominate the strategic attention of American defense policy. 

Milley’s second point is that a shift in the character of war is underway, driven by a variety of technologies such as artificial intelligence, unmanned systems and precision fire. These necessitate a new intellectual approach to the conduct of war.  

He is correct in the main on this count. But his argument is curious: He identifies a mish-mash of technologies without making any effort to prioritize them, then immediately turns to harmonization between the services as his solution to the new combat environment.

Milley’s case for inter-service harmonization is, more specifically, a case for a wholly joint approach to doctrinal, technological and strategic development. It rests not upon new technology, but on technology that came into being during the Cold War. Milley’s point of departure is AirLand Battle, the doctrine that assisted the flowering of operational theory in U.S. military practice. Milley’s criticism of AirLand Battle is that it was insufficiently joint — it never included a naval role, nor did it delineate properly between aerial and ground responsibility for long-range fires. 

This criticism is telling in that Milley’s argument does not actually rest upon the new technologies he mentions. Rather, it rests on the assumption that the greatest change in modern warfare in the last century is the development of jointness itself, embodied in an empowered chairman and the centralization of force design and doctrinal development in the Joint Staff.  

Alongside the empowered chairman stands an empowered Office of the Secretary of Defense — one that seeks to deprive the services of the ability to guide their own force structures, and which tightly controls doctrinal developments alongside the Joint Staff. Recall how, in 2020, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper closed down the Navy’s effort to discuss the future role of aircraft carriers. 

In pursuit of centralizing force design and doctrine, Milley’s key proposal, and his parting advice for the Armed Forces, is to establish a lead for joint force transformation, a position that will lead the military’s technological transition and, implicitly, completely swallow joint warfighting development. 

Such an approach to military affairs rests on a premise for which General Milley provides neither evidence nor a persuasive argument. If an organization can accurately forecast the developments in military technology and invest with near-perfect anticipation, then one can control an enormous institution such as the U.S. military from the top down. Each service can be remade in the pursuit of a truly joint vision, with seamless integration between air, sea, land, space and cyber capabilities. In effect, this would create a Unified Armed Forces, with no need for organizational distinctions between the services. 

The danger is that military technology is not obvious enough to be predictable, and predictions are not accurate enough to justify a comprehensive, systematic force structure dedicated to a single threat.  

The U.S., after all, faces several threats. They are linked at the grand strategic level through the framing of the Eurasian landmass, but they are distinct in their different political and geographic contexts. This points to a need for different force structures. Unmanned systems and autonomy have unmistakable centrality to future combat, for example, but these two factors will change depending upon the enemy, and in turn upon different warfighting domains. 

Warfare is the most complex of human activities. The combination of violence and the passions that violence entails, the essential elements of chance stemming from friction, the fog of war, and other chaotic elements, and the overriding objectives of policy — always in fluid dialogue with the military balance — make warfare supremely difficult to understand. The lessons of the World Wars are still debated today, despite a wealth of data about 20th-century combat. With even less data today, accurate prediction becomes far more difficult. 

It is not only mistaken but also dangerous to assume that any centralized, specific analytical function within the U.S. military can predict the future of warfare accurately enough to transform the joint force. 

There are several debates to which the Ukraine War has contributed but which nevertheless remain unsettled: the role of mass on the modern battlefield, the relative power of the offense and defense in an age of persistent reconnaissance, the way electromagnetic effects must be sequenced and related to ground operations, just to name a few. The conclusions one might draw in these debates, moreover, have unclear relevance to maritime operations. Humility is in order, not centralization. 

The more prudent choice would be to empower the services, and the service departments, to think creatively within the domains they understand best. Every field grade and flag officer serves in a variety of joint capacities. But their career paths naturally make them specialists. Combat is complicated, and it is crucial to ensure that each officer knows well the demands of his share of the task. 

Of course, there must also be an overall force design in mind, developed from and articulated by the chairman, the joint staff, and the secretary of Defense. But this design must incorporate insights from the services in their own analytical assessments. The services must be free to experiment independently in a manner essentially impossible since the late 1980s. 

More minds investigating smaller slices of an extraordinarily complex problem will have a far better shot at finding useful insight than a much smaller set of investigators whose dedication to “harmonization” exceeds an experienced knowledge of their service’s abilities. The joint staff and Secretary of Defense should sift the insights of the Services, not control the Services and impose rigid structures upon them, 

The rigid, centralized model has been tried before — France implemented it throughout the interwar period. The French general staff dominated all doctrinal and force structure development, applying the seemingly sacrosanct insight of the First World War that massed firepower was insurmountable.  

The French approach was less wrong than incomplete. Germany understood that maneuver was possible if forces were decentralized and air, armor, and artillery combined. The result was the Fall of France. 

Equally, Germany’s approach was ultimately incomplete. The Soviets realized that maneuver alone was insufficient, absent a systematic operational design behind it with properly organized echelons. Soviet victory, of course, came at the price of nearly 9 million military (and more than twice as many civilian) deaths. Even with the proper intellectual insight, adaptation took time. 

Centralizing force design through a “future jointness czar” is not strategic wisdom — it is hubristic, bureaucratic policymaking. The danger is that the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the next Secretary of Defense, are too blinded by their conviction in the arc of technological change that they commit the U.S. military to the wrong transformational program. 

Jointness is useful in creating a military force whose cooperation in training multiplies effectiveness in combat. But as the author of force design and doctrine for all the military services, it would be a disaster to trade experience for “harmonization.” 

Seth Cropsey is founder and president of Yorktown Institute. He served as a naval officer and as deputy Undersecretary of the Navy and is the author of Mayday: The Decline of American Naval Supremacy and Seablindness: How Political Neglect is Choking American Seapower and What to Do about it.