As a retired U.S. Army colonel, I am encouraged to see such thoughtful analyses and deeply hope a new Trump Administration takes heed of these many excellent recommendations. However, one area of concern for which I have seen little commentary is how to halt the deep institutional rot associated with what I call the "civilianization" of America's military. The military forces of the United States of America exist first and foremost to kill the nation's armed adversaries.

Historically, this understanding has underpinned the "Warrior Ethos" that has made our military so great, but somewhere along the way, we lost this ethos in favor of a politicized, more civilian approach to warfare. I believe this is due to certain dysfunctional and deeply ingrained institutional processes and structures that must be fully and radically reformed in order to restore our military to one that defends the nation effectively and does not merely defend its own budget.

There are four fundamental areas for institutional reform, and all involve the "de-civilianization" of warrior institutions:

The "interagency" process in the DoD. After 9/11, the DoD (and the federal government more broadly) placed a significant emphasis on better coordination between the DoD and other federal departments like the State Department and the CIA. The idea was simple and appealing enough: to produce better coordination across domains. Nowhere was this more important than in the intelligence community, where failure to crosstalk between agencies led to startling intelligence failures like 9/11. However, this "interagency" approach became unfocused across all of the DoD and all agencies and became a priority in and of itself, whether it related to, for example, supposed climate change, government acquisition, federal land and water management, or leader professional development. While the goal of burgeoning interagency processes was to improve efficiency, the actual and unfortunate effect it had on the senior officer warriors of the DoD was to civilianize their mindsets. Instead of the State Department becoming more like the DoD, the DoD started thinking like the State Department. Historically, there was a healthy tension between the State Department and the DoD. The new interagency emphasis made former warriors think the goal was to be like diplomats, and it turned too many of our senior officers into wannabe State Department grandees who get invited to the best Georgetown cocktail parties. That former healthy tension between State and Defense was destroyed, and the warrior ethos of so many officers with it. We see this today in the form of the many retired and political admirals and generals who view their devotion to the D.C. bureaucracy to be more important than their oath to the Constitution, and nowhere has this phenomenon been more apparent than the nefarious shenanigans of the infamous Lieutenant Colonel (Retired) Alexander Vindman, who deemed his allegiance to the interagency to be more important than the judgment of his Commander-in-Chief.