Some proposals have been put forward to achieve—and afford—a military transformation by drastically cutting our force structure, removing forward-based and -deployed forces from overseas, and stopping modernization. Advocates of such a “strategic pause” think we can withdraw from the world and opt out of interventions that threaten our interests. They are wrong. They are blind to the world as it is. We cannot gamble on a self-ordering world. The risk to us could be great—even fatal—if we are not capable of dealing with an unforeseen threat that emerges from this disordered global environment.

The need right now is critical to transform our military in a deliberate and thoughtful, yet significant, way. Americans must acknowledge this need and support investment in this transformation for it to succeed. This will require a stronger and closer relationship between Americans and their military. This relationship has drifted apart, and has even been strained at times, since the end of the Vietnam War and the institution of the all-volunteer force.

What should be the shape of that transformation?

The military traditionally goes out there and kills people and breaks things. From that, we determine how we are going to straighten out the mess or resolve the conflict. Once upon a time, we looked at the other elements of national power—political, economic, information, whatever—to figure out how we could bring them to bear. That’s what George Marshall did at the end of World War Two. It has not happened in recent times.

The military does a damned good job of killing people and breaking things. We can design a better rifle squad than anybody in the world. We can build a better fighter, a better ship, a better tank, a smarter bomb. We are so far ahead of any potential enemy right now in those kinds of technological areas, in the areas of expertise, of quality of leadership, and of all the other elements that make military units great on the battlefield, that you wonder why we keep busting brain cells working to make it better, or to transform it into something else.

Transformation has to include finding better and more remarkable ways to tap into technology, our own brainpower, our training and education, and creative ways of redesigning our organization to make our military even more efficient and more powerful on the battlefield.

But transformation has to go beyond that.

What is the role of the military beyond killing people and breaking things?