The Armed Forces Need to be Put Back in the Hands of Soldiers—Pete Hegseth is the Person to Do It
Part One: A Major Crash Reveals Dysfunction on a Base—and Decline in the Armed Forces
This report originally appeared in Restoration of America News and is reprinted here with permission.
The real scandal looming over the upcoming Senate confirmations hearings for Defense Secretary designate Pete Hegseth has nothing to do with Hegseth’s supposedly controversial past. The real scandal, the one affecting Americans and our security, starts with an actually verifiable controversy that occurred less than a year ago: on January 4, 2024, 10 miles Northeast of Rapid City South Dakota, at Ellsworth Air Force Base, home to the 28th Bomb Wing of the Global Strike Command’s Eighth Air Force.
A B-1 bomber crash that occurred at Ellsworth that day, and a subsequent damning report on its causes, open a window onto a bigger crisis in the Armed Forces. This crisis is a decade-and-a-half decline in morale and skill, as able soldiers are pushed out and those who remain are demoralized by a “revolt of the elite”—politicians, administrators, contractors, and top brass in the Pentagon. Examining the circumstances of the crash and tracing them to its causes shows how this crisis has developed, and suggests how to fix it.
A Startling Crash—and a Damning Report
At 5:47 pm on January 4, 2024, at Ellsworth Air Force Base, a B-1 bomber navigating fog missed a runway landing by 100 feet. Its tail hit the ground and its wheels hit the runway’s landing lights before it skidded for nearly a mile into the grass between runways and caught fire: a loss of $456,248,485 counting base repairs, as well as several injuries among a four-person crew who safely ejected. The report on the crash released six months later by a board chaired by Col. Erick D. Lord uses technical language to describe the crash’s causes, but even within these constraints its diagnosis is blazingly direct: Avoidable and compounding human error caused by every base agency failing in some way.
But Col. Lord went even further, writing in his report of “an unhealthy organizational culture that permitted degradation of airmanship skills, inadequate focus on governing directives, lack of discipline, and poor communication regarding airfield conditions and hazards.”
In the U.S. Armed Forces, where loyalty and discretion are core values, launching a 49-page public broadside against the culture of an entire base is the equivalent of throwing a carefully constructed hand grenade into a windowless mansion. Why would a respected senior air force officer do it? This is not a question that anyone has raised, until now. Outside of the AP and Washington Times no mainstream publication has mentioned Lord’s report, and no military publication has connected the report’s conclusions to broader, deeper patterns in the Armed Forces. But those connections need to be made, because, judging by Lord’s report, the January 4 B-1 bomber crash was an accident waiting to happen: so many things were so wrong already on the base that a single event could tip the scale.
What Really Happened on January 4, 2024…
That single event was weather: unexpectedly heavy fog and sharp winds as the B-1 bomber began its descent on January 4 after a flight exercise. Heading into Ellsworth, the Instructor Pilot, the senior officer on the flight overseeing the pilot and two other crew members, chose to land on Runway 13, the runway the B-1 bomber ended up missing. He was unaware that part of Runway 13’s weather visibility sensor had stopped functioning six weeks before, because, according to the report, the “Weather Flight [crew] did not provide formal notice of this outage to other entities . . . .” This meant that the B-1 crew “could not verify the requisite criteria” for commencing an approach to the runway because it lacked full information about conditions on the ground.
The crew of another B-1 bomber that landed on Runway 13 soon before the bomber which crashed “described the [landing] conditions as the ‘minnest of mins,’ but did not communicate these difficult conditions.” Weather personnel on the ground also saw the bad conditions but failed to follow up. They “noted the [control] tower was completely in the fog, unable to see [Runway 13] 5/8 mile away” but never communicated this to the B-1 crew. Nor did they communicate this to the bomb squadron commander in charge on the ground, who might not have listened anyway The commander testified that, “at the time of the mishap…he was focused primarily on administrative office work despite the deteriorating weather conditions.”
In a situation like this—landing blind—rigorous training becomes pilots’ safety net. Most of all this means executing the crosscheck: in Lord’s words, “incorporat[ing] various instruments . . . to estimate the overall perceived performance of the aircraft . . . and . . . determine what needs to happen with the throttles and control stick.” On January 4, an “effective composite crosscheck” by the pilot, supervised by the Instructor Pilot, would have shown that the plane’s airspeed and its glideslope, two crucial indicators of whether the plane had adjusted to touchdown in the correct landing zone of the runway, fell outside of safe measurements.
But the flight crew did not perform the crosscheck in such a way that the necessary information came through. The report indicated, based on its analysis of an audio recording of the flight, that some standard instructions weren’t given, and the crew’s Defensive Systems operator “freely admitted” that “he was referencing his After Landing Checklist instead of . . . fulfilling his landing crosscheck duties.” As a result, not only did personnel on the ground set the B-1 crew up to land blind, but the B-1 crew’s actions made that potential a reality.
…And Why?
This all suggests a culture more associated with an H.R. department than a combat unit: of box checking and cubicle mindsets that encourage miscommunications, missed cues, and worse. Subsidiary facts from Lord’s investigation reinforce this picture, for example that the Instructor Pilot “appears to have exceeded the maximum weight for the B-1B,” which may have led to his unusually bad injuries after ejection. In Lord’s view, this “further highlights the unit’s degradation of culture and discipline.”
Lord also reported that eight service people “testified of a known culture…where crewmembers…willfully disregard…requirements by not wearing gloves and helmets when flight conditions require.” What’s more, Lord found that one personnel member had a specific temporary medical limitation for executing her role but that she “was allowed to continue duties per their squadron leadership” without addressing her problem.
A deeper reason for these failures may be literal lack of squadron leadership: Lord noted in his report that the rotation of higher-ranking servicepeople to other units had left Ellsworth with a shallow bench where inexperienced officers were taking command positions and experienced commanders were spread too thin. Even the criticism of Lord’s report supports its contention that problems at Ellsworth ran deep. One former Ellsworth servicemember who spoke to Military.com called the report unfair, saying, “We don't have enough manning anymore in order for the squadrons to be manned at whatever the full rate is now."
The underlying cause of these problems, a further investigation suggests, runs much deeper than Ellsworth.
The Spreadsheeting of the Armed Forces
A source who served in the Armed Forces in an upper-level position confirmed to Restoration News that the report sums up a widespread belief among many soldiers and veterans—what the source calls ‘spreadsheeting’ and its outgrowths, most recently DEI, have weakened the military. This culture helped lead to not just the January 4 crash but to other disasters besides. By “spreadsheeting” the source means bureaucrats using metrics and regulations to tame an organization of high-skilled adventurers disciplined by training to be a lethal force. A focus on DEI is the obvious manifestation of this taming but DEI developed as the final turn of the screw in a broader bureaucratic takeover.
The numbers tell the story. Since 1998, according to one independent estimate, the Armed Forces’ manpower has shrunk while the number of administrators has continued to grow. According to this estimate, the growth has occurred in areas including Program Management; Procurement, Research and Development Spending; and Finance, Legal, and Contracting. Protected by federal unions, operators in these fields bring a different approach to the business of fighting: minimize exposure, promote deniability. According to another estimate from the CATO institute from 2015, which was before budget cuts put an even more serious dent in uniformed personnel, “civilian DoD employment has grown 105,000 since 2001, while uniformed employment has grown just 22,000” and “the ratio of bureaucrats-to-soldiers has increased from 47 percent in 2001 to 54 percent in 2014.”
Unsurprisingly, according to several critiques of these trends in the Armed Forces, correlating to this growth in bureaucrats and loss of soldiers has come a new command emphasis on working “to reduce risk” along with efforts to “institutionalize consistency and redundancy.” This means that multiple positions have been created to perform tasks already de facto incorporated into the positions of existing officers—and these new positions provide liability coverage if something goes wrong. There is also an emphasis on management and “blurring or even eliminating distinctions between decision-making and planning.” This means that the metric for missions increasingly becomes not their actual success but the degree to which they satisfy pre-planned bureaucratic categories. It’s this mentality that Colonel Lord’s report revealed at Ellsworth: focus on filling out “administrative office work” or the “After-Landing Checklist,” not on actually landing the plane.
A deeper dive into this spreadsheeting shows that its effects extend throughout the Armed Forces—to training, equipment, personnel, morale, and recruiting. These effects appear to have played into the problems Colonel Lord identified at Ellsworth in 2024—and into much more besides.