Righting The Ship Before It Is Too Late – The Urgent Need To Regain Our Edge In National Security

Donald Trump has once again been elected President. He will not take office, however, until January 2025. Our nation is already under assault by multiple enemies abroad, and those adversaries may well take advantage of the next two and half months to exploit the windows of opportunity Joe and Kamala have afforded them. 

In short, Trump will sit down in the Oval Office as the President of a nation already experiencing multiple national security crises and with little or no time to settle in before he has to act to defend our interests worldwide. It will be critical that in responding to these crises he gain control over our national security apparatus and act quickly to reform it and sharpen its edge.

We hear a great deal about what DEI and political correctness have done to degrade our capacity to safeguard our national interests. We should. It is imperative that the President act immediately to purge DEI from our government and ensure the only thing that matters in law enforcement, intelligence, and the military is competence. We must have meritocracies, not political indoctrination camps.

We must also recognize, however, that there is a great deal of additional work to be done. We don’t just need to purge the DEI commissars from our ranks. We need to bring back competency and ensure that every national security agency we have is laser-focused on mission accomplishment again.

We say we have the best military in the world. I am not sure that is true. Do we have the best people? Yes. Do we have the best gear? Without question. Are our military services really the best in the world? That would require leadership, audacity, and creativity. All too often those qualities are nowhere to be seen.

Our initial operations in Afghanistan after 9/11 were wildly successful. We crushed the Taliban and never had more than 420 men on the ground in country for the first five months. CIA officers, Green Berets, the U.S. Air Force, and tribal allies executed what was probably the most brilliant military campaign since World War II.

Then the bureaucracy woke up. Big DOD rolled in. We spent twenty years building an Afghan military on our model. That horrifically expensive machine fell apart virtually overnight when asked to do its job. How many of the generals and admirals who presided over that debacle were held accountable?

Not a single one.

Has anyone stopped to consider that the problem may have been our strategy or lack thereof?

If so, there is no evidence of it.

Recently swarms of drones flew over some of our most sensitive military installations in Virginia for a period of two and one half weeks. They appeared and disappeared at will. We did nothing. We still have no idea where they came from or why they were there. We don’t know if they were gathering intelligence or rehearsing for an attack.

When asked about this catastrophic failure the Commander of NORAD General Gregory M. Guillot, the guy charged with protecting American airspace from intrusion, had this to say.

“The only thing I can tell you about the Langley drones is roughly the number and roughly the altitude.”

In answer to why he hadn’t personally done anything about the intrusions, Guillot said, “I saw that NORAD’s responsibility for countering UAS (drones) was very limited to something that would be an attack of national consequence.” For those unfamiliar with how bureaucrats speak this translates roughly to “It’s not my job.”

Guillot then offered these soothing word-salad comments about what his job does entail.

“I want to make sure that we have a solid foundation for the DOD and the interagency, and I also want to put an umbrella over the top where someone’s looking out to share best practices and ensure machine-to-machine linkage, so we can share that type of information.”

“For years, we’ve had clutter reduction capabilities, moving target indicators that can find something moving in clutter that’s very important to us. And I think, as we saw with the balloon, what the clutter gate is, you know, so you could reduce anything below a certain speed, where we have that set, and then, the elevation, how high we look, is certainly something that I think we’ve learned over the last several years.”

Replying to a reporter’s direct question, Guillot said he did not know if the drones were tracked back to their recovery point or whether they could have been launched by a vessel off the coast. There was no indication he intended to find out.

Frederick the Great, one of history’s most famous generals, lived by this saying. ''L'audace, L'audace! Toujours L'audace!'' (Audacity, audacity, always audacity.)

The modern equivalent for our generals might be “Jargon, jargon, always more jargon.” And, “more PowerPoint” of course.

Our military services are not the only national security agencies that have lost their edge. Earlier this year we saw an emotionally disturbed young man who did, from the standpoint of an assassin, everything wrong come within a hair’s breadth of killing our next President. In the aftermath, we listened to one Secret Service “leader” after another ramble on about the challenges of walking on “sloped roofs” and how everything they had done in Butler was in accordance with their doctrine. Apparently, that doctrine no longer includes keeping the protectee alive.

The FBI routinely busts some 17-year-old kid who has been talking smack about jihad online, but somehow they can’t manage to find and arrest the multiple assassination teams targeting Donald Trump that the Iranians are reported to have on our soil.

Our borders are wide open. We know for a fact that human smuggling networks connected to the Islamic State have moved hundreds of people onto our shores. There is no indication that the Bureau has any idea where they are or intends to waste time trying to find them.

CIA is virtually blind when it comes to the top-tier hard targets on which we desperately need intelligence. The Iranians may be days away from having nuclear weapons. They may already have them.

The reality is we have no idea and we no longer have the operational capability to find out. The hard-nosed operators who had spent thirty years in the field who used to run ops for the Agency have long since been replaced by individuals more familiar with Northern Virginia than Lahore.

We have lost our edge. We spend a lot of money. We generate a lot of process. We no longer do what is required to keep the American people safe. Once the only thing that mattered was mission accomplishment. Now, it is hard to know if the people in charge even understand what that means.

Trump is going to sit down in the Oval Office surrounded on all sides by enemies and threats. He is going to have to move very quickly to put in place the action-oriented team he will need to return us to fighting trim. That team will be charged with righting the ship before it is too late. We better hope they are the right people and that they are up to the job.