“Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.” Most anyone who has served in combat arms as a tactical level leader in the Army is familiar with this expression. It is a pithy way of communicating that even in combat, rushing can lead to failure. Succumbing to the impulse to rush is a product of either insufficient training, indecisiveness, or some combination of the two. Seasoned NCOs and experienced officers use “slow is smooth and smooth is fast” to help train tactical patience, imprint the value of hard and repetitive training to build instinctive yet grounded tactical responsiveness, and to help soldiers avoid rushing to failure under the unique stress of combat. Slowing down just to take a breath and think for a second or two allows you to remember the basics, establish awareness of the situation along with your footing, and begin to steadily build positive momentum through smooth decision making and purposeful actions focused on the enemy or objective. This is what makes disciplined, professional soldiers and units different from amateurs.
The irony is that for some time, but particularly at present, senior leaders at the strategic and service levels have lost sight of this simple concept, and are hopelessly rushing—no, scrambling—to “transform in contact,” “modernize at the pace demanded by the modern battlefield,” and [insert meaningless buzzwords here] to keep pace with the “changing character of war.” Yet despite the buzzwords, the lofty sales pitches, and almost petulant insistence of progress (to a skeptical Congress), they are putting the entire enterprise at grave risk—just like an unprepared squad leader or lieutenant struggling and failing to regain the initiative while bullets are flying. The solution goes back to that simple catchphrase: “slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.” American military leaders—especially in the U.S. Army—must set aside partisan political white noise and their career-centered risk aversion, slow down, decide what the goal of modernization is well beyond the PPBE (military budget-speak: Planning, Programming, Budgeting, Execution) time horizon, and use their more than capable staffs to develop coherent strategies with implementation plans to yield meaningful and long-term change. As it stands, the Army is very far off track, reactive, rudderless, and unable to achieve real results over time.
This senior-level scrambling is plainly visible in the Army’s failure to produce a vision, strategy, or a warfighting concept since 2018—despite persistently messaging the urgent need for speed, modernization, and unity of effort. At all echelons of Army professional military education, but especially at Command and General Staff College and Army War College, students (rising field grade officers and rising colonels) learn that The Army Strategy is one of a small number of critical strategic documents produced by Army senior leaders. In concert with The Army Vision, Army Planning Guidance, and the Army Campaign Plan, these documents are supposed to represent the overarching guidance under which all downstream planning, prioritization, modernization, etc. are nested. Despite all that we’ve seen in Ukraine, the Indo-Pacific, and the Middle East since 2018, Army senior leaders—in a shared trend between the Biden and Trump administrations—state out loud that they do not want to “box themselves in” by adopting a strategy. Despite all the battlefield implications of the war in Ukraine and the alarming pace of China’s military modernization, Army senior leaders are more concerned with “preserving their decision space” than actually making meaningful decisions.
To return to our metaphor—at the strategic level, bullets are flying, the enemy is maneuvering, mortar impacts are inching closer, but the LT is too busy getting in his squad leaders’ way to direct any action to his platoon because, in the confusion, he’s lost sight of his role as the platoon leader. The LT, in the frantic rushed state he’s in, is reverting to focusing on more discreet tactical problems below his level instead of actually being the platoon leader—a situation that can be mortally dangerous for himself and his soldiers. The four-stars have forgotten that classic wisdom, ingrained in them as young officers, that even a bad plan executed with zeal is better than no plan at all. They are comfortable with no plan and with relying on siloed efforts across the force to improvise their way to success—to the great peril of those at the tactical edge of that force and to national security generally.
Some might be skeptical of the value of strategic documents and believe they are a waste of time. However, people who hold those opinions haven’t observed the view from inside the Pentagon. How many “functional strategies” are various entities across the Army producing in their efforts to build some sort of coherent path to modernization and effective change in the absence of clearly articulated ends? The answer is far too many. Unmanned aerial systems, unmanned ground systems, autonomous systems, air and missile defense, and organic industrial base (just to name a few) are all disaggregated efforts grasping at the Army’s latest flavor of…whatever senior leaders meant by “transformation in contact.” But these documents—despite the goodness of the people drafting them—accomplish nothing if they ever even get published to see the light of day. They don’t guide long-term action and decision making because they fail to articulate what the institution is supposed to be rowing towards. They are not the “North Star” that large enterprises, which are tethered to excruciatingly long and rigid budgetary decision-making processes, need to achieve meaningful progress in terms of reorganizing and re-equipping for the future fight. They lack coherence—because no senior leaders are willing to snap chalk lines with their names on them to tell the echelons below them what the goal is.
In fact, Army Senior Leaders cannot even decide what their modernization efforts are called. Is it Transformation in Contact (TiC)? Or the Army Transformation Initiative (ATI)? Or simply Continuous Transformation? What good are any of those titles other than useful tropes with which to convince Congressional panels that “we’re modernizing and need more money (despite our glaring inability to pass an audit…)?” Across the Army, all this amounts to is yet another flavor of one of the worst legacies of the GWOT era: chasing a chimera of readiness and modernization. Senior leaders have replaced their insatiable appetite for “readiness” with an even more insatiable drive for some vague notion of modernization that isn’t sufficiently described…. anywhere. Institutionally, we are enamored with future capabilities, and we express wild visions about how effective we will be if we successfully harness those capabilities. But we fail to coherently approach a description of how these capabilities will all fit together across doctrine, organizations, training, material, leadership and education, personnel, facilities, and policy…. those basic things we preach to rising majors.
This yawning gap in coherent guidance from senior leaders for the last decade may appear to those of us in the Pentagon as curious seams or strangely siloed efforts working hard yet never quite in the same direction. But at the tactical level, they inevitably translate into more dire problems. My peers across the Pentagon often express that we feel like we are shouting into a void, while my peers at the battalion and brigade level express immense frustration and exhaustion being on the user end of all this “transformation.” Look no further than the rumors trickling out of the last round of experimental training at the National Training Center, where those gaps and seams grew into gaping breakdowns, tactical stagnation, and confusion—a stark contrast from the glowing “top-level” talking points we hear the Army pushing across media platforms about “NGC2,” “PCC6,” and “Operation Jailbreak.” But the talking points and high-level meetings don’t do any good for the soldiers out on the line who may get sent into combat with radios that don’t function nearly as well as the Crystal City billboards suggest they do, data layers that no one can access, or with fires that are no more responsive or precise than they were a decade or two ago. The tactical level soldiers pay the price for senior leaders’ unwillingness to fulfill the mandates of their high rank and positions, even if they pay that price long after those senior folks have passed into comfortable retirement. A vision and a strategy count among the bare minimum expectations of Army four-stars, yet for more than eight years we’ve received only inexecutable and meaningless buzzword bingo [editor’s note: we can add the latest product, the Army Azimuth, to that list].
Obviously, developing coherent strategy is not simple, but as a very junior officer I remember learning not to make excuses. The fact is that four-star generals are failing their subordinates at echelon when they shy away from driving their staffs to document meaningful directional guidance in the form of strategies. Theoretically, four-star generals are chosen (and paid very well) because only they possess the knowledge and experience to drive strategic development. They are supposed to be true masters of the operational art. That is why they are entrusted with four stars—not so they can prove that they are the best former battalion/brigade commander in any given meeting or provide prioritization to which buzzwords their staffs will field.
“Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.”
“Even a bad plan executed with zeal is better than no plan at all.”
Army Senior Leaders: please leverage your authority to slow the train down, issue meaningful guidance in the form of a clear vision, and allow the enormous institution beneath you to begin rowing in one direction in a somewhat synchronized manor by giving them an overarching strategy. Do the basics of leadership and organizational change—and stop defaulting to getting in your subordinates’ way when you find that strategy is hard, complex, and does not contain instant victories. Failure to do this will only get more of what we now have: disaggregated efforts of tired subordinate echelons making their best guesses at what you want them to achieve with nothing to show for it but a growing boneyard of cancelled billion-dollar programs. Instead of hoping that bottom-up refinement will save us down the road as long as we flood the tactical level with capabilities, and instead of trying to do everything all at once yesterday, apply your knowledge and experience, pause, and tell us “What’s the plan, General?” Do this while we still have an opportunity to make a real difference ahead of the next fight. Your soldiers, now and long after you move on, are depending on it.
–Regulus
About the Author: Regulus is a career Army officer and West Point graduate. He has served one combat deployment in Kunar, Afghanistan, and led soldiers as a platoon leader and two-time troop commander in the 101st Airborne and 4th Infantry Divisions. He is also a historian and is currently earning his spurs as an angry staff officer.
The opinions expressed on this site are solely those of the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Army or Department of Defense.
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The Angry Staff Officer 