Op-Eds

For America’s Military, Personnel Is Victory

By Rep. Pat Fallon

February 4, 2025

National Review

Motivated and experienced personnel will be our asymmetric advantage in a potential future conflict with a near-peer adversary.

French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte defeated multiple European coalitions despite his opponents’ numerical and resource superiority. Napoleon’s “corps system” (corps d’armée), which emphasized flexibility in maneuver and local force superiority, was so revolutionary that it formed the basis for modern command and control systems. But casualties and disruptions to the French army’s leadership after Napoleon’s initial exile to Elba took a toll on his ability to achieve victory in the Hundred Days campaign. Chief among other factors, Napoleon’s ultimate defeat at Waterloo in 1815 can be chalked up to this dearth of capable personnel. Without officers and soldiers he could trust to implement the corps system in the field effectively, the so-called Master of Europe lost a crucial advantage.

Without the right personnel, whatever technological, strategic, or logistical advantages a military may possess on paper become irrelevant. Personnel is everything; without capable personnel, weapon systems go unmanned, and supply systems become bogged down. It’s well known that the U.S. military is in the midst of a recruiting crisis, but it’s our retention crisis that proves equally as dire.

A key strength of the U.S. military for more than a century has been the superior quality of its personnel, both in training and experience. One of the best examples of this is our premier non-commissioned officer (NCO) corps, the seasoned and capable servicemembers who form a critical bridge between the junior enlisted and the officer class. Not only does this improve how units operate, but senior NCOs provide valuable advice and support for newly minted junior officers. The NCO corps is a force multiplier because we have reliable senior enlisted servicemembers, and officers know they can trust their subordinates to carry out orders by acting on their own disciplined initiative. This flexibility from an organizational and leadership perspective means that the U.S. military can adapt and overcome the evolving challenges posed on the battlefield. The U.S. is unique in this respect, as more authoritarian nations either do not have such capable NCOs or lack an NCO corps entirely.

China is facing a unique crisis in that it has been unable to recruit and retain capable talent within its military despite its size. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has continued efforts to incentivize Chinese citizens to enlist but has had difficulty recruiting and retaining talent within the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The CCP has been targeting high school students with better success in recent years, recruiting over 17,000 high school students in 2023, an increase of 2,000 students from the year prior. The CCP has also progressed in recruiting more candidates with higher education in the past three years. Despite this progress, the PLA’s force-size numbers are strained, and retention is still an issue due to inadequate benefits compared to private industry and familial obligations. This has led the CCP to change its law on conscription and mandatory retention, but party officials are still concerned that this approach doesn’t improve motivation or ingenuity in the ranks. Organizational integrity, professionalism across all ranks, and the ability to act independently on the tactical level — something the U.S. military’s NCO corps excels at — remain a challenge for the CCP.

The U.S. needs to take note of the Chinese military’s problems and embrace the fact that personnel will be the decisive factor in any possible conflict in the near future. Unlike the PLA, the U.S. military is an all-volunteer force, motivated and united by a common purpose and rich in experience and history. Innovation and measured risk-taking are in our DNA, enabling greater adaptability across the organization. But for the past two decades, the Department of Defense (DOD) has been anemic in promoting this culture and tapping into this vast potential — something that the second Trump administration must address.

The DOD and Congress must empower our military’s personnel by reaffirming its culture of self-confidence, removing unnecessary barriers at all levels, and sustaining trust and collaboration across the armed forces. This starts with reevaluating our organizational structures concerning our strategic intent, prioritizing key qualities for promoting leaders, and ensuring consistent and good-faith communication between the administration and Congress. In order to improve both recruitment and retention levels, we need to focus on our personnel and ensure our servicemembers and support teams are adequately compensated and taken care of.

Well-motivated and experienced personnel, like Napoleon’s forces, will be the U.S. military’s asymmetric advantage in a potential future conflict with a near-peer adversary such as the CCP. To maintain this advantage, we must reestablish our commitment to properly investing in our servicemembers and sustaining our military’s war-winning culture of excellence.

Pat Fallon represents Texas’s fourth congressional district. He is a United States Air Force veteran and a member of the House Armed Services Committee, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.