When President Trump announced he was nominating Pete Hegseth for SECDEF, I initially shook my head in disbelief. Yes, he has combat experience and leadership experience at the tactical level of war; however, he has no command experience (to my knowledge), no experience with acquisition (a large part of the job), no experience managing a bureaucracy, and no experience developing or executing military strategies.
I started to wonder why in the world we wouldn’t put one of our most experienced defense experts in that position. I thought back on my personal experiences, and the action by the president-elect started to become clear in my mind. I will say in advance that some of my numbers may be off slightly. My memory and other sources don’t all agree (even official sources don’t agree); therefore, I will share what I consider the best data that follows.
Vietnam
I spent 30 years in the military (obviously from an Air Force pilot’s perspective) and had a period to explore the facts as I remembered them. I did not serve in Vietnam, but I certainly remember the pain and effects of that war on American culture. First, it was one of the most unpopular wars in this nation’s history.
Most of that unpopularity rose out of the fact that the strongest nation in the world could not defeat a Third World nation. We were not in the war to win. The war was micromanaged from the White House, with targets selected by the Pentagon and approved by LBJ. He once made a comment that, “Those Air Force boys can’t bomb an outhouse without my permission.” Targets were being passed to the Swiss embassy who passed them on to the North Vietnamese as Washington did not want innocent civilians to be killed. In the meantime, we were losing young American lives every day, we saw “body count” numbers that would indicate the enemy was losing 10 times the numbers of lives the United States was losing.
At the end of the day, we lost over 58,000 American lives; had soldiers and airmen spend years in POW camps being tortured; spent over $850 billion (in 2019 dollars) and 2.3% of our GDP in 1968. Our aircraft kill ratio was around 10-1 in both WW-II and Korea. In Vietnam, in was slightly better than 1 to 1. US military losses were over 10,000 aircraft and helicopters! Two years after we left, Vietnam fell to the communist North Vietnamese.
The question must be asked – what did we gain that we spent all the resources and human lives on? I could identify nothing. The reality is North Vietnam won the war and captured South Vietnam in the end.
Post-Vietnam Disarray & The Fix
In the years following Vietnam, our military was in total disarray. We had military members abusing drugs, no discipline, and operational readiness at an all-time low. At one point in time, we did not have enough missiles to put a full load on all our fighters. Our personnel were poorly trained, and our fighter pilots were lucky to get 6 sorties/month. Our training obviously stunk. Our aircraft readiness reflected all of this, and we were lucky to have 40% of our fighters ready for war on any given day. We were blessed in the USAF by having General Officers who learned their lessons well in Vietnam. Bob Dixon and Bill Creech were two of many who recognized the issues and set out to solve the problems.
The first thing General Dixon did was begin Red Flag, a composite force training exercise that every fighter pilot participated in at least once a year. Red Flag was the closest thing to combat you could do without being in combat. For the first year, we lost a minimum of one aircraft and crew with every exercise. The pressure was high to stop the training, as too many aircraft and pilots were being killed and it was criticized for being “too dangerous” (as if war isn’t). These leaders refused to fold. Within two years, accidents and deaths decreased significantly and we found our crews to be better trained and ready to go to war.
General Creech recognized organizational issues and got rid of the old Strategic Air Command system of maintenance in the fighter forces. He reorganized and put the people where the action was – on the flightline instead of some back shop waiting to be dispatched. He moved spare parts to the flight line itself instead of some warehouse half a mile away. He started raising the standards of readiness as time progressed. He knew if he raised them immediately to where they should be the people would be discouraged believing it was impossible. Therefore, he raised the standard to 55%, then 65%, and then 80%. People and leaders responded and by 1984 or so, 80% of our fleet was ready to go to war on a moment’s notice, pilots flew more, and readiness spiked (both equipment and personnel).
The Reagan Years & Beyond
President Reagan came into office and placed the money in our defense budgets to buy and repair the aircraft parts we needed as well as build a reserve for wartime use. He actually broke the Soviet Union when they tried to keep up. The Cold War was won without firing a shot! My last year as a squadron commander was 1989 and – as the commander – I was flying 14 sorties every month and my squadron pilots were all getting 16-18 sorties/month. The USAF was the best trained and well equipped of our history!
In 1991, the First Gulf War was fought. The entire world witnessed the capabilities of our military. The promise of airpower became reality with the advent of precision weapons and low-observable technology. The US suffered 147 total combat casualties against the 5th largest military in the world at the time. Iraqi military deaths are estimated between 8,000 to 50,000. A total of 28 US aircraft were lost in combat (includes USAF, Navy, Marine, and Army aircraft) while establishing air supremacy. The ground war lasted 5 days as I recall, and Iraq surrendered.
The entire world (to include our adversaries) witnessed what we did. Some former Soviet generals stated publicly they were glad they never got into a war with the US as they would have been soundly defeated. And then the US began the 30-year destruction of the world’s greatest military.
The Last Thirty
President Bush declared the need for a “Peace Dividend” (after all, he stated when the Berlin Wall came down that there was now a “new world order” (even though he never defined what it was, as I recall). Defense budgets and weapons systems were cut. Facilities were closed and training assets deemed no longer necessary. Infrastructure such as logistics depots were closed. Organizations were “re-organized” for efficiencies (which proved to not be realized). Personnel were cut (particularly uniformed personnel – civilian personnel were spared many of the cuts as no politician could stand up to his constituents and say he cut jobs in his district).
We began promoting military officers who would stand up for the misguided politicians and justify these cuts while telling the American people were still the strongest military in the world. Our civilian military leaders were supposedly the best qualified and had the most experience of any civilian military leaders in our history. They had rotated out of the defense industry and military bureaucracy their entire careers. They were “Experts,” unlike Pete Hegseth.
The Present Day
So where are we after the last 30 years? I would suggest we are in almost as bad shape as were following the Vietnam War. These same “experts” keep telling us we are still the strongest military in the world even though we have half the number of people in our military; we have equipment readiness that reflects the same; our people are not as well trained and we no longer have the infrastructure to train them or the training assets we once had; and we spend as much time trying to push DEI (a divisive concept) even as we do away with combat training. We no longer have the standards we once had, and our “super intelligent” defense leaders lie to the American people. These are the same “experts” who got us into this position.
And now Trump appoints Pete Hegseth, and these experts are telling us he doesn’t have the experience needed. Let me tell you that if anyone believes these critics have done anything good, feel free to identify it to me. Austin? Chaney? Aspin? Just look back over the last 30 years and tell me something any of them did to improve our military.
Perhaps it is, in fact, time for change. I’m certainly willing to let Hegseth have a shot at it. He can’t be any worse.
Col. Roy E. Parker is a USAF Fighter Pilot.
