General Mattis’s Challenge
“To change anything in the Navy is like punching a feather bed. You punch it with your right and you punch it with your left until you are finally exhausted, and then you find the damn bed just as it was before you started punching.” — Franklin Roosevelt, 1940 San Diego — What the former assistant secretary of the Navy said is descriptive of the entire military. Each service’s culture, and interservice rivalries, and bureaucratic viscosity are resistant to reform. Which is why the next secretary of defense, retired Marine Corps General James Mattis, has the most difficult management challenge in American government.
.. For about $500,000 in expenditures, the 9/11 attackers did over $2 trillion in damage to the United States and the world economy. The linked physical and cyber infrastructures of complex societies are vulnerable to such asymmetries.
.. The nation just experienced a raucous presidential campaign during which there was silence about the crisis of the entitlement state — an aging population’s pension and health-care entitlements swallowing government resources, with alarming national-security implications. But technology, pursued determinedly, has the potential to make peace through making deterrent strength less expensive.