Let the paradigm shift continue! This week the Biden administration nominated General Eric Smith, the deputy U.S. Marine Corps commandant for combat development and integration, to ascend to the post of commandant, or top uniformed marine. This comes as glad tidings to those of us who favor “naval integration,” meaning the effort to alloy the American sea services—the Marine Corps, Navy, and Coast Guard—into a single keen-edged implement for denying, winning, and exploiting command of the sea in concert with our fellow armed services and allies.
Fighting jointly is how you prevail in an age when not just fleets of warships, and not just navies, but air forces, strategic rocket forces, and armies boast sensors and armaments able to mold events far out across the main.
If approved by the Senate, General Smith will replace retiring General David Berger, who made naval integration his signature initiative as commandant. General Berger released “planning guidance” to the service almost instantly after taking up his post in 2019. Marine Corps headquarters soon codified these initial rough rudder orders in a family of documents that go by such titles as “Force Design 2030” and “A Concept for Stand-In Forces.” In turn these directives built on associated concepts such as “Distributed Maritime Operations” and “Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations.”
Taken together these concepts put aggressors such as China on notice that the U.S. sea services refuse to be driven out of important combat theaters despite the proliferation of access-denial weaponry and sensors; that marines will fan out at sea and along strategically important archipelagoes, eluding assault while working with the fleet on such crucial functions as scouting and putting weapons on target; and thus that marines intend to help the fleet deny aggressors control of the sea, wrest away control for themselves, and make use of control once they rule the sea.
This is the classic pattern in naval warfare: deny, win, exploit.
If they demonstrate in peacetime that they can do all of that, the chances of their having to prove it in wartime diminish. Hostile leaders will desist from misadventures that look impossible—and deterrence will prevail. Meanwhile friendly leaders and peoples will take heart that America has their back. And deterrence and reassurance are what it’s all about in statecraft during tense eras such as this.
Smith represents continuity with Berger’s vision, and continuity is at a premium for the Marine Corps around now. I have never been a fan of stringent term limits for senior officers. It takes more than four years, the normal tenure for a military chief of staff, to change the course of a big institution that’s set in its ways. The Soviet Navy benefited immensely from the prolonged labors of Fleet Admiral Sergei Gorshkov, who oversaw the navy’s rise for almost three decades. The U.S. Navy submarine force profited from the exceptional case of Admiral Hyman Rickover, who served in uniform for 63 years and earned the title “father of the nuclear navy.” China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy has elevated its stature thanks in no small part to Admiral Liu Huaqing, who commanded the navy during the 1980s and rose to be China’s top-ranking military officer.
People are policy. But people need time to institute policy change. The more sweeping the change, the more forceful the leadership needs to be, and the longer change may take. And if necessary change is so convulsive as to amount to a “paradigm shift,” the demands on leadership are that much more intense.
The phrase paradigm shift goes back to MIT professor and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, who noticed during the 1960s that science advances through a messy, often vitriolic political process rather than through an orderly process of proposing, testing, falsifying, and amending hypotheses about natural phenomena. Professor Kuhn disputed the common notion that science is a dispassionate enterprise grounded purely in facts and logic.
In effect Kuhn defines a scientific paradigm as the best model going for explaining some facet of the world around us. For example, the geocentric paradigm satisfied humanity’s need to explain the workings of the cosmos for centuries until the Copernican revolution displaced it with the now-standard heliocentric paradigm. But as Kuhn observes, no scientific theory is ever proved beyond doubt. A theory can only be falsified, or disproved. It stands—provisionally—unless and until something better comes along. It’s doubtful anyone will ever improve on Copernicus’ model of the solar system considering all the direct observations made during the space age. What evidence could possibly falsify the claim that the planets in their courses revolve around the Sun?
But you never know.
So much for the theory of scientific progress. Here’s the rub: scientists are not Vulcans. They are human beings with human motives and frailties, and human beings do not accept something new just because it comports with fresh data and reasoning. Some defend the old with utmost vigor. That’s where politics comes in. People respond to incentives. Kuhn points out that upwardly mobile professionals tend to become invested in the reigning paradigm. Supporting and expanding on it helps them garner tenure, grant money, plaudits from peers, the sorts of career benefits all of us crave. Opposing the orthodoxy appears zany, and it certainly carries professional risk. That being the case, a paradigm’s adherents tend to become its gatekeepers, seeking to perpetuate their standing in the profession. If “anomalies” crop up between the model and observed reality, its defenders try to explain them away. Failing that, they adjust the model around the margins to accommodate anomalies.
Ultimately, however, the disparities between theory and reality may become so glaring that tinkering with the paradigm can no longer account for them. The paradigm collapses more or less at once. Gatecrashers who brought in the new paradigm become the new gatekeepers, and the cycle of progress through politics starts anew. No paradigm is exempt from challenge.
So it is with the natural sciences, so it is with maritime and military strategy (and, presumably, with other fields of human endeavor). Over the past year a clutch of retired marine generals and senior officials, joined most recently by the noted military strategist Newt Gingrich, have appointed themselves the defenders of the ancien paradigm of Marine Corps force design and strategy, a vision founded on hardware like tanks and tube artillery and on sloganeering about marines’ being the nation’s “9-1-1” force. They portray General Berger as a rogue commandant remaking the Marine Corps without congressional consent; they demand that Congress halt or slowroll the effort.
In Thomas Kuhn’s parlance, these gatekeepers refuse to accept that anomalies separate their boosterism from new martial realities, and to let go of their outworn paradigm. Retired marine colonel and deputy defense secretary Robert Work, who wrote in these pixels last year about the ruckus surrounding Force Design 2030, observed last month that the gatekeepers have lost in Congress and the administration. Smith’s nomination attests to it. But as Work notes, they refuse to move on.
One imagines Kuhn shaking his head in wonderment.
But why do they refuse to move on, and how do they get away with it? Part of it goes to the nature of warfare. Scientists have an advantage of serious moment over military practitioners. Namely, they can experiment more or less at will. They can adjust their theories, rejigger the parameters for laboratory or field trials, and on and on. They enjoy a considerable measure of control over the conditions under which an experiment unspools. By contrast there’s only one true field trial for strategy, operations, and doctrine, and that’s on the battlefield. Combat is the arbiter of what does and does not work in the military realm. But wars seldom come along, and no one in his senses would start one to test a theory of martial affairs (even though we do our best to learn from ongoing conflicts such as the Russia-Ukraine war). Still less can officialdom run controlled experiments.
So opportunities for “experimentation” under real-world conditions are rare and uncontrolled. This is not field research per se. Peacetime maneuvers and wargames are the best substitute for combat, but they’re at best a pale copy of the real thing.
Plus, warfare is intrinsically unpredictable. Nature operates by fixed, immutable laws grounded in mathematics that scientists set out to discover. Researchers can hold most conditions constant to reveal how a single phenomenon works. By contrast armed forces have to contend with living, breathing, often ornery foes intent on shaping tactical, operational, or strategic conditions in their favor. Antagonists abide by no fixed or predictable laws of martial strife. In fact, savvy combatants have every incentive to change battlefield conditions—to change the conditions of the military experiment. The greats, from the ancient Chinese general Sun Tzu to the U.S. Air Force colonel John Boyd, urge them to do just that. That being the case, military interactions display a protean, unpredictable quality not found in the natural sciences. They morph with time and technology, and as contenders fashion new ways to outdo one another for strategic and political gain.
Because of the nature of warfare, in other words, no one can say with scientific near-certainty that the foes of Force Design 2030 are wrong. Unlike adherents to a discredited scientific paradigm, marine retirees can cling stubbornly to an old military paradigm—and vehemently oppose a new one—without losing all credibility. They can argue from authority.
Sounds like politics, doesn’t it? While Thomas Kuhn posits that science achieves fitful progress through politics, military affairs is literally a subset of political life, with the same hurly-burly among strong opinions. But stasis is not an option amid drastic, constant change. Political leaders and their military advisers must make their best guess as to the character of the future strategic environment and appoint leaders who appear fittest for that environment. They have made their best guess. By all indications lawmakers, the Pentagon, and the administration concur with Berger’s appraisal of the situation. Short of persuading the powers-that-be to anoint a Gorshkov, Rickover, or Liu, elevating a likeminded successor as commandant is the best substitute. Eight years of top-level advocacy on behalf of reinventing the Marine Corps is better than Berger’s four.
General Smith is one of the chief architects and executors of Force Design 2030 and associated concepts. He formerly commanded the III Marine Expeditionary Force on Okinawa, which will act as the marines’ Pacific stand-in force in a scrap with China. And he seems fervently committed to seeing the force-redesign project through. Robert Work applauds the administration’s choice for commandant. So do I.
Approve Smith’s candidacy, senators. Out with the old paradigm of sea combat—and in with the new.
About the Author
Dr. James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and a Nonresident Fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation & Future Warfare, Marine Corps University. The views voiced here are his alone.
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