Leading The Human Dimension Out of a Legacy of Failure

Leading The Human Dimension Out of a Legacy of Failure¹

CHAPTER 3 on AMERICA’S DEFENSE MELTDOWN

Col. G.I. Wilson (U.S. Marine Corps, ret.) and Maj. Donald Vandergriff (U.S. Army, ret.)

“Take away my people, but leave my factories, and soon grass will grow on the factory floors. Take away my factories, but leave my people, and soon we will have a new and better factory.” – Andrew Carnegie²

Summary: A Legacy of Failure

The end of the Cold War brought changes to our national defense strategy and force structure. Yet, we remain hobbled by an archaic and dysfunctional personnel system that fails to recognize the new realities of leading our human resources. The most serious of these realities is that the demands on our active duty, reserves and retired recall personnel differ greatly from those of the past. Institutional failures are abundant in the management of military human resources.

Eliot A. Cohen and John Gooch’s book, “Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War,” describes three kinds of institutional failures: failure to learn, failure to adapt and failure to anticipate. This chapter contends that the military legacy of human resource failure encompasses all three types by incorporating flawed mental constructs – including lack of imagination, faulty assumptions and analysis paralysis – compounded by lack of risk awareness, preference for the status quo and organizational factors such as institutional-think, “turf” battles and bureaucratic arrogance.

All large organizations have similar needs for managing their human resources. Therefore, DOD’s legacy of human resource failures can legitimately be evaluated from a business perspective. For example, a recent economics conference conducted by The Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., to ascertain whether American industry could raise productivity by changing the way it pays its employees reached the conclusion that productivity may be boosted more by changing the way workers are treated than by changing the way they are paid.³ In line with that finding, the late Peter F. Drucker, perhaps still the most respected writer on leadership and management in the United States, concluded “most of our assumptions about business, technology and organizations are at least 50 years old.⁴ They have outlived their time.” Drucker went on to identify a number of personnel management assumptions that are no longer valid:

• There is only one right way to manage people.
• People who work for an organization are subordinates expected to do what they are assigned to do and not much else.
• People who work for an organization are dependent on the organization for their livelihood.

Drucker also made a number of suggestions about the management of people that seem to be relevant for any service human dimension as well:

• Employees must be managed as if they were volunteers.
• Many employees are knowledge workers who must be managed as if they are associates, not subordinates.
• Employees need a challenge. They must know and believe in the mission.
• Employees have to be managed as partners whose goals are aligned with the goals of the organization.
• Maximize the performance of people by capitalizing on their strengths and their knowledge rather than by trying to force them into molds.

As technology spreads around the world, the only competitive advantage the United States can hope to have is the productivity of its knowledge workers.

It is evident after studying Drucker and other scholars of business leadership that today’s military personnel management (vice human resources leadership) is based on invalid assumptions, including requirements for mass mobilization, equity, a surplus of pseudo-command qualified officers that drive centralized management, individual evaluation systems, and the “up-or-out” personnel promotion system. These will each be described in detail below. If these assumptions are no longer valid, then the direction for a solution is clear: Develop a human resources leadership model that is adaptable and focused on developing leaders earlier and that places people where they best serve the military and the nation, while providing units to accomplish full spectrum missions.

Foundation: Leading Human Resources and the Future Force

We predominately use Army case studies; nevertheless, all the services and the Department of Defense will find that much of what we present can be extrapolated and applied with great fidelity. To date, the Army’s efforts to uncover the human resource requirements of the future force have generated projects like the “Pentathlete,” conducted by the U.S. Army War College task force in 2005, as well as studies conducted by the Army Officer Personnel Management System (OPMS) 2005-2006. The Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) has recently released a detailed and far-reaching study called the “Human Dimension in the Future 2015-2024” that also calls for reforms to the current personnel system and how the Army develops and trains its soldiers. Concerns drawn from these works include:

• The Army must promote adaptability in the Army and encourage innovation.
• The Army must recognize the fragile nature of the all-volunteer force and never take it for granted. The Army, too, must maintain constant vigilance for signs of personnel “hollowness,” understand the balance between enlistments and the civilian labor market, and keep watch over significant indicators. In 2015, for example, the Army will have a smaller pool of potential recruits than it does today.
• The Army must continue to focus on quality and seek to determine how much it will pay for this attribute in light of how much it can afford.
• The Army must focus on human resource to sustain a quality force. If that means placing more recruiters in the marketplace in order to obtain quality soldiers who are willing to go the distance in the Army, so be it.

Additional insights about the military’s environment from these various studies include domestic business trends as well as the Joint Operating Environment (all the services working together as a unified force):

• The domestic U.S. environment will continue its shift from industrial age to information age. In a parallel manner, adaptability and innovation – and their inherent human characteristics – will continue to play a larger role in the Army’s success.
• Intuition is becoming recognized as a powerful leadership and management tool.
• Adaptability is only a buzzword in the U.S. military, but it is resident in business and government organizations. In regards to the latter, proposals have been made to collect and categorize the traits and attributes of each individual to best use that person to meet the needs of the military while balancing with the needs of the person.
• Multiple environments will also present challenges to the Future Force Human Dimension (human resource) strategy.⁵

It is fair to conclude that among all the services, the Army recognizes the need to change with the times and has an idea outlined in its own “Human Dimension in the Future 2015-2024.” While many of the ideas in this study remain to be implemented into the personnel management system, the Army is taking on new approaches to education and training.

A Centralized Beer Can Personnel System

As John Tillson states in the paper “Reducing the Impact of Tempo,” “A conflict exists in the Army.”⁶ The same holds true for the Marine Corps as well. The services, particularly the Army and Marine Corps, must manage individuals and they must manage units. We see what we call “beer can personnel management”: The operant idea is to reach into the stack (i.e. human resources) of cold beer sitting in the refrigerator, grab one, slam it down, crumple up the beer can (i.e. the individual), toss it out, and reach for another. The cycle is repeated over and over taking an irreparable toll on individuals, the personnel systems and operations.

To be sure, the Army and Marine Corps do a good job of developing the individual skills and building the motivation of their members. Marines and soldiers in the future will be imbued with a warrior ethos and discipline and be physically and mentally hardened for combat. They will possess perseverance, competence and, most importantly, the will and means to win. Additionally, they will be sophisticated in the use of emerging technologies and trained for a full range of operations. Furthermore, they will have the “moral determination to kill our enemies as readily as alleviate the suffering of innocents.”⁷

To manage individuals, the Army moves them from place to place in accordance with both its defined need for trained individuals and its concept of the jobs a successful career should encompass, but with little or no concern for the impact of these moves on the readiness of the units to which these individuals are assigned. To ensure the readiness and capability of units, however, the Army must constantly train and retrain units primarily to make up for the constant exchange of untrained individuals for trained individuals caused by the personnel system.⁸

Army and Marine Corps leaders recognize that they hurt unit readiness and capability when they move individuals from unit to unit and from job to job. For that reason, the Army moved to a unit stabilization program, where it rotates divisions to and from Iraq, beginning with an Army Chief of Staff policy letter signed November 2003 (part of this is the aligning of battalion and higher command tours with the rotation). Army and Marine Corps leaders, however, still believe that the movement of individuals under the Individual Replacement System (IRS) is necessary to fulfill their need to manage individuals. The Army is unable to resolve this core conflict because there are a number of questionable assumptions that drive Army personnel policies, practices and measures.⁹

Here are two examples.

The first assumption is that individuals must be managed by a centralized personnel system. This assumption was built into the Army personnel management system in the early l900s when the War Department modeled its personnel management system on that of the Pennsylvania Railroad. It was strengthened during World War I and World War II when the size of the military increased dramatically and centralized control seemed essential for success. It was further reinforced in the l950s when American corporations espoused the virtues of centralized control. Centralization continued into the l970s and 1980s with the centralization of promotions of most officers and noncommissioned officers (NCOs), as well as the centralization of command selection.¹⁰

The second assumption is that the personnel system must provide a surplus of qualified Army officers in the middle grades in order to support a future total mobilization similar to the mobilization experienced in World War II. At the end of World War II, the Army, having participated in the total mobilization for World War I and World War II, concluded that it was necessary to maintain a surplus of qualified officers to support a total mobilization that would create entirely new units to meet the needs of a future, multiyear war with the Soviet Union. Accordingly, the Army designed a personnel management system that would provide a surplus of qualified middle-level officers. Key to maintaining this surplus was an up-or-out requirement and a 20-year retirement that would create a large number of middle-level officers but would get them out of the Army before they became too old.¹¹

These assumptions have been “hard wired” into the system over many years and most officers, even most personnel experts, seem to be unaware of their existence.¹²

Over the years the Army has found ways to mitigate some of the effects of these assumptions. For example, the new Army personnel policy calling for some officers to become specialists – in contrast to its longstanding emphasis on producing “generalists” – can be seen as a way of finding equitable solutions for excess officers. This policy has the added benefit of reducing the number of more senior officers, all generalists, who must become “command qualified.” These changes can be seen as an implicit effort to mitigate the impact of the mobilization assumption.¹³

The generalist assumption has been a part of American military culture since the late 19th century and early 20th century, when the United States rejected Emory Upton’s efforts to create a professional Army and general staff whose officers were rigidly selected and trained in technical areas. This generalist concept was enhanced at the end of World War II with the reforms of the Officer Personnel Act of l947 (OPA 47). The Officer Personnel Act of l947 enshrines this thinking and was institutionalized by the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act of 1980 (DOPMA). Continual adaptation by the personnel system has retained its core legacies.¹⁴

In the early days of the Cold War, the Army continued to evolve a personnel system to meet the needs of a future war. This system, which was promulgated in OPA 47, was strongly influenced by the determination that, in a future total mobilization, the services must not have the problems they experienced at the start of World War II.

The Army, in particular, had had two major problems in expanding from fewer than 200,000 regulars in 1936, to 1.6 million in December l941, to 8.3 million in May l945. First, the Army did not have enough trained officers at the middle and upper levels to take on the responsibilities of a much larger force. Second, it had too many older senior officers. During the war the Army responded to these problems, first by centralizing authority to compensate for the lack of experienced officers and, second, by forcing many older officers to retire. The post-war solution to the first problem was to create a bulge of middle-grade officers who were “qualified” to take on the additional duties associated with a largescale expansion of the force. This policy was built into OPA 47, under which it became the responsibility of the centralized personnel system to ensure that officers were qualified to meet mobilization demands. Given the uncertainties associated with mobilization, this translated into a demand for “generalists.”¹⁵

Individual Evaluation Systems

The Army has embraced some form of written evaluation since the early 1800s, and in subsequent years this report has proved to be the only tool used to evaluate the performance and potential of officers. There have been attempts to broaden the basis of promotion, however. In 1881, upon the founding of the School of Infantry and Cavalry, the future Command and General Staff College, at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., reformists, known as “Uptonians” after Gen. Emory Upton, surfaced who attempted to implement the use of formal and objective examinations using the Prussian military as a model.

This move to establish professional standards was severely resisted by most of the officer corps. The hue and cry was the practice was “undemocratic” and unfair. In reality, it was because the majority of officers, except for graduates of West Point, were largely uneducated, especially in the art of war. Examinations would expose the weakness of the officer corps and the Army in the knowledge of their profession to Congress as well as the public.¹⁶

This cemented the tradition of resisting professionalism and intellectual achievement. It remained dominant until after World War II, and resistance is still seen today, where the only personnel tool-of-comfort for evaluations is subjective and easily controlled, manipulated and massaged by centralized promotion boards. Those serving on that board ultimately fall prey to picking those who most resemble the board members.

As one Army colonel put it, Army selection and promotion boards are “selecting those who they feel most comfortable with; those who are like you.” Remember those on the board got promoted by the very same system, so if it was good enough for them why change it? This does not just happen in the Army either.¹⁷

The pernicious and persuasive impact of subjective selection undermines the Army’s (and the other services’) ability to become adaptive and to participate in constructive change. Personnel managers, unlike human resource leaders, only know how to react to change. Human resource leaders, by contrast, leverage change, adjusting the first decision with their second decision and so on.

As the 21st century opens, change remains the bane of personnel managers while human resource leaders view change as opportunity. Roger Martin writes in the Harvard Business Review about leaders and what it takes to stay a leader: “Part of the challenge is changing with the times and looking inward as well as outward.” Human resource leadership is about change and grasping what Marshall Goldsmith considers an essential principle of “What got you here, won’t get you there.”¹⁸

Personnel-Comfort Tool: Officer Evaluation Report (OER)

The Officer Efficiency Report (OER) Series 67 was standardized in July 1947, in line with the reforms being pushed by Gen. George C. Marshall that would culminate in OPA of 1947. The Army has gone through 10 versions of the OER from 1947 to present. Because of its purpose of supporting an up-or-out promotion system, the OER has always been prone to inflation by officers wanting to project their subordinates as the best, or because the raters or senior raters did not have the moral courage to face their officers with average or below average OERs that would destroy the careers. The OER fits perfectly into a culture of management science that stresses equity, where generalist officers are measured by how well they pleased the boss because it is their superior or raters who make or break their careers.

The OER was and is now used as the main tool on promotion and selection boards. As the OER continued to gain strength, it came to be used in one of two ways. In a negative sense, it could be used to damage an officer’s career or even end it. An officer with strong character who posed a threat to a commanding officer could be sabotaged.

The other way was to advance a favorite of the “brass” rapidly up the ranks or into the right job. In both cases writing an OER became an art to the career-minded officer who learned how to employ the right words in the right places to make a point.¹⁹ Today, every assignment has to receive a perfect OER in order to get an officer selected for battalion, higher command and for special assignments such as graduate intern programs. The result of the OER façade as a tool of careerism, which does not create professionalism, has become apparent to the members of the officer corps. “There is now a total disbelief in the system and a concomitant question regarding the integrity of all of us who continue its use.”²⁰ The use of the OER reflects poorly on the ethical strength of the officer corps because officers cannot fairly assess performance and potential.

Every officer is caught up in the scandal. With a large officer corps operating under an inflated evaluation system, anyone who tries to use the system to fairly assess his officers would destroy his officers. Up-or-Out Promotion System OPA 47’s provisions were also based on the belief that the best way to prepare for war was to make every officer a generalist. Gen. George Marshall and succeeding chiefs of staff of the Army directed personnel managers to formulate Army policies that moved officers around frequently so they would become experienced in numerous positions, always emphasizing the need to prepare for more responsibility at the highest levels of command. They also sent instructions to promotion and selection boards to look for a wealth of experience in numerous positions and duties. Their purpose was to ensure that officers would be prepared to lead the new units that would be created when war came with the Soviet Union, and the services once again expanded as part of a total mobilization. This generalist theory was also popular in corporate management at the time. It should be noted that recent Army changes in the personnel system could be seen as an implicit effort to mitigate the effect of this assumption.

The generalist assumption is also tied to the assumption that the Army must provide equity. Following World War II, a number of officers were sent to the best business schools in the country where theories of “career equity” were taught. This concept rested on two suppositions: 1) the creation of a corporate generalist, who developed via a series of short assignments to a large number of different positions, and 2) the idea of treating all corporate members equally or fairly. This was not “equal opportunity,” but “equity” in which everyone was treated the same by the centralized personnel management authority.²¹

The officers brought these business concepts back to the Army, where the concept of passing large numbers of people through critical jobs fit well with the OPA 47 concepts calling for a large number of trained middle-grade officers all managed by a centralized personnel bureaucracy. This concept also fit well with the centralized “one size fits all” policies that the 1999 8th Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation (QRMC) identified as a problem for the Army today.²²

Another key assumption is that Army members must be interchangeable – “beer can” personnel management. This assumption is a product of the reforms introduced in the early 1900s by Secretary of War Elihu Root. One of his “modern management concepts,” drawn from the Industrial Revolution, viewed individuals as identical component parts that could be created on an assembly line. This concept led the Army to change from a unit-based system for replacing casualties to the individual casualty replacement system it used in World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam. Under this system, soldiers resemble replacement parts and have a set of identical skills that can be defined by a Military Occupational Specialty (MOS). The Army’s “one size fits all” personnel policies may also derive in part from this assumption.²³

The up-or-out system underwrites the “Peter Principle,” in which individuals are promoted to their level of incompetence. Officers then get mired in jobs because there is no way to advance, and, because the holders are not competent, the assignments are not performed well. Sadly, the Army does not generally take steps to move personnel back to a level where they can function effectively. Where the Army runs into problems is when it uses promotion to reward short-term performance. These two concepts – performance-competence and leadership potential – need to be separated in the promotion system.

Personnel: Changing the Wrapping, Not the Substance

The OPMS (formally OPMS 3) task force attempted in 2005-2006 to once again fix the deficiencies of the culture, which was caused by the Officer Personnel Act of 1947, the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act of 1980 and the Army’s own rigid management policies, by continuing to try to fix something with small adjustments that requires a complete overhaul. OPMS continues its process of specialization of the officer corps for the future, yet within existing cultural boundaries set by centralized management and the up-or-out promotion system.

The benefits of OPMS are yet to be seen, but the potential exists to put the officer corps back on the right track. The OPMS emphasis on specialization within the bounds set by OPA 47 and DOPMA ensures that fewer officers will get “an opportunity to command.” This will be a small price to pay for the benefits of specialization, and arguments that more former commanders are needed for mobilization ignore the ability of staff officers and junior commanders to learn from good examples. The larger benefit of the OPMS proposals is the continual strengthening of critical staff and “soft skills” specialties throughout the Army, such as the foreign area officer (FAO).

Excellent officers not selected for command can pursue successful careers through repeated assignments in one of the above fields. The long-term goal of OPMS is to have well-qualified specialists selected as general officers, destroying the myth that command experience is essential to high-level advancement. More importantly, the Army would run well without the influence of entrenched civilian bureaucrats, of obvious benefit to the functioning of units in combat. OPMS changes are a step in the right direction, yet more remains to be done outside its boundaries, such as addressing the problems caused by the up-or-out promotion system, a bloated officer corps, the all-or-nothing retirement system, and a lack of a unit personnel system.²⁴

OPMS has, in reality, only guaranteed that the competition will be “fair.” By moving many out of the old command track, which is now the operational field, into the three other fields, as well as promising that everyone can attend ILE (Intermediate Leader Education), formally known as Command and General Staff College (C&GSC), it can once again promise all starters who reach the grade of major an equal chance to win. In this way the Army can continue to feed the up-or-out promotion system and fill the numerous jobs mandated by law. It can also assure that few competitors will become prematurely discouraged in the race for status. As mentioned, under OPMS, the symbol of status will swing somewhat away from the need to command and the generalist career pattern. It continues the trend of providing “many roads to the top” by increasing chances for promotion and promising all majors attendance to ILE, which was a career discriminator if an officer was not selected to attend. OPMS continues to streamline fairness by remodeling the façade of the personnel system’s customary mechanism for maintaining the tractability of the officer corps.

All is not positive with OPMS, however. It continues to manifest the competitive ethic caused by the up-or-out promotion system and a bloated officer corps. OPMS allows the organization to extract deference through competition. As did the earlier three OPMS systems (1971, 1984 and 1997), the new system uses competition more than ever as a lever to control the career soldier. Under the culture of management science, from the very day officers receive their commissions the Army impresses upon them the importance of remaining competitive. Thus, the Army encourages officers to compete against each other to survive in the up-or-out system. It uses the “competitive ethic” in an explicitly coercive manner. To become noncompetitive is to risk exclusion from the Army officer profession altogether. Officers have and continue to feel compelled to give careful attention to the institution’s performance cues, despite the demands of the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Army’s officer system under OPMS will continue to use competition, theorizing the “best” will rise to the top, when in fact it corrupts and creates an unhealthy strain that no officer can elude. The preference inherent in most offices to adhere to the profession’s ethical code eventually yields to the grinding realization that the officer must also satisfy the institutional demand to remain competitive, if only out of self-preservation.

On balance, looking at both positive and negative aspects, one could argue that given the strict boundaries imposed by the laws that govern our officer system and the culture, the reforms under OPMS are perhaps the best that could be given to the officer corps. The problem remains, though, with broader issues, including the fear of mass mobilization and an undying belief in management science. Before any changes can really be termed reforms, issues that generate careerism and undermine readiness must be openly discussed. Unfortunately, OPMS’s downfall, as it was with the previous three OPMS “reforms,” is that it leaves careerism unaffected due to the emphasis it places on the competitive ethic, which despite specialization, will remain.²⁵

On the whole, however, our prognosis is positive. Perhaps by recognizing the limitations of personnel management science, as well as the compulsion to maintain policies around a personnel system developed for mass mobilization, OPMS can become more than a short-term fix that will soon become another of the series of evolutionary fixes. Instead, OPMS might best be viewed as a bridge to more and better reforms in the near future. The Army will eventually create its own military version of a new, flatter organization with the inherent officer personnel policies revolving around the unit policies that must accompany it. As a result, the Army will reintroduce professionalism to its officer corps.

Professionalism: Thriving on Change

The current war is forcing the Army and the other services to examine a new doctrine that emphasizes increased responsibility for lower ranks. At the same time, the Army must struggle with embracing and integrating new technology through the Future Combat Systems (FCS). The Army, therefore, has no choice but to be bold and create a new institutional culture. This new culture will create, nurture and promote human resource leaders who thrive on change in general and, in particular, on the increased demands that doctrine writers are advocating and, most importantly, the future challenges our foes create.

This is a different culture from the one we have now. We cannot continue to write glowing documents advocating adaptability, yet subtly support peacetime politically correct practices that shore up bureaucratic qualities rather than combat leadership qualities.

Unfortunately, when leaders come up for promotion and selection, the out-of-date system too often selects out the most creative and dynamic of leaders and subordinates.

To prepare leaders for the Army in the 21st century, we must:

• Continue to replace the individual personnel system with a unit personnel system. Revolve all personnel policies around a modular, unit-based system and move to an Army force structure that can be supported by a unit replacement system.
• Eliminate the up-or-out promotion system and replace it with an up-or-stay promotion system using tougher accessions.
• Replace the specific branches such as Armor, Field Artillery, Infantry, Aviation, Quartermaster, Transportation, etc., and place officers on a track or category system at the captain (O-3) or major (O-4) level. Retain NCOs in their branches until they reach master sergeant or first sergeant (E-8). Make personnel management more flexible by setting up a database system that lists a person’s attributes and traits in order to put that person in the place where they best can serve the Army and nation.
• Revise the officer evaluation system to involve a narrative Evaluation Report (ER) on character with a periodic examination to enter the officer corps, as well as attendance at the Command and General Staff College. Add the 360-degree evaluation system with the ER as one part of that system.
• Revise the education system, using the Adaptive Leader Methodology (ALM) (the new leader development model using experiential learning) as the core to the leader development for officers, NCOs and civilians at all levels (the Army is moving to ALM).²⁶

The purpose of these reforms is to change the incentive system. It is time to usher in human-resource leadership. Human-resource leaders must seek to reward strength of character, especially as manifested in a willingness to set priorities (i.e. in the order of people, etc.), make decisions, take action and penalize those who simply go along to get along, get by while doing nothing and passionately embrace risk avoidance.

It does no good to call for promoting the risk-takers when the incentives all work the other way. Once strength of character is rewarded, then loyalty to the nation, the Army and unit can be established over loyalty to self, which is the centerpiece of today’s personnel management science. It is the reasoning behind the personnel system’s advocacy of the individualist focus “be all you can be,” and it underlies the belief that people must be constantly moved and promoted, as well as make-work opportunities hyped, to give the appearance of it-happened-on-my-watch promotion points.

The “OODA Loop”: Change as a Component of Strategy

The important 20th century strategist, the late U.S. Air Force Col. John Boyd, contended that there is a direct relationship between strategy and change. The purpose of strategy is to improve our ability to shape and adapt to circumstances, so that we, as individuals, groups, cultures or nation-states, can survive on our own terms. In business and national security it is vital to stay ahead of adversaries. Those who ignore change often find themselves unequal to its challenges.²⁷

The pace and challenge of change since the end of World War II have surpassed anything our military faced in the preceding 170 years, where with the exception of skirmishes with Native Americans in the late 1800s, the presumed foe was always a military establishment similar to our own. During the last 60 years, however, we have found ourselves fighting an assortment of Third World militaries, insurgencies and, most recently, terrorist networks. To deal with such periods of rapid change and unpredictable opponents, Boyd developed the concept of “operating inside an opponent’s Observe Orient Decide and Act (OODA loops).”²⁸ It is a formula for, in the words of business consultant Tom Peters, “thriving on chaos.” As an associate of Boyd’s, retired U.S. Air Force Col. Chet Richards, describes it in his book, “Certain to Win”:

You are simultaneously observing any mismatches between your conception of the world and the way the world really is, trying to reorient to a confusing and threatening situation, and attempting to come up with ideas to deal with it. It is the “quickness” of the entire OODA Loop cycle and the time it takes to transition from one orientation state to another, which keeps you up with the pace of changing events.²⁹

It would not be overstating the matter to conclude that real human resource leaders use “OODA loop thinking” to anticipate and rely on change, unlike the personnel tool-of comfort approach.

Nonetheless, despite the recognition by human resources leadership professionals of “What got you here, won’t get you there now,” personnel comfort tools still hold a death grip on our personnel system, robbing it of agility and quickness to meet the changing needs of the Army. Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, implored his people to face reality and change each morning, for each morning is different from the last. Welch continually insisted to GE management that what was important yesterday might no longer be important today. Welch was not afraid of going back on something and giving new direction. He exhibited a willingness to change and saw it is leadership strength.31 So, we will strive to this end and begin with a brief case study to explore the dominant personnel comfort tool, the written personnel evaluation known officially as the Officer Evaluation Report (OER).

DOPMA: How Many Officers?

The first ingredient in the reforms to prepare the leaders and the Army for combat in the 21st century is to unload a force structure that must be manned by a top- and middle-heavy officer corps. Surprisingly, the Army still employs a similar table of organization and equipment (TO & E) to the one derived in World War II (in historical doctrinal terms, we are still operating similar to Napoleon’s corps-de-armee concept).

The Army’s primitive structure, despite this era of e-mail, faxes, telecommunications and faster intelligence gathering and assessment systems, still consists of industrial age hierarchies, which means many layers of supervisors, or colonels and generals, all practicing perfection in a bureaucracy brought on board by Elihu Root in 1903. What makes it worse, despite our modern age of automation, is the percentage of the officer corps, which comprises 14.3 percent of the entire force. This is as bad as it was at its height during the Vietnam War.

The Army has the worst officer-to-enlisted ratio ever, 1 to 6. At the same time, the number of senior officers – especially at the middle and general officer level – has become bloated, with one field grade officer for every junior officer and one general for every 1,006 soldiers. This is not simply a matter of inefficiency or the Army’s preoccupation with mobilization. When there is a surplus of officers, officers must frequently be assigned to “make-work” jobs that are not relevant to warfighting and in which military skills atrophy. Personnel turnover and competition increases as officers fight for moves from “make-work” to critical “branch qualifying” jobs, such as company command for captains, battalion operations and executive officer jobs for majors, and battalion command for lieutenant colonels. In addition, an officer surplus leads to centralization, as officers at more senior levels create work for themselves by pulling decisions up to their level and creating work for their staffs producing an incredible number of PowerPoint briefing slides.³²

While the theory behind maintaining a large officer corps was readiness for mobilization, what in fact occurs is the opposite. As we have noted, the current up-or-out promotion system and the idea of a large officer corps evolved from Marshall’s experience with the problem of maintaining a force ready in peacetime to respond to the unique demands of war. This system rests on two principles. First, if the system works properly, there will always be more officers qualified for promotion than there are vacancies available. This permits selectivity, the selection of the “best qualified.”

It was also theorized that exposure to numerous jobs could apply in a meaningful way to senior leadership positions. As a result, officers are forced through the ranks very quickly, often with too little time to learn the ropes, not being able to gain the confidence and respect of the troops: “Future Force (Future Army) would work fine if officers were given the time in one position to learn the how the technology, techniques, tactics and procedures involved in the new doctrine work.”³³

The unneeded inflation of officers at the middle grades of major, lieutenant colonel and colonel, and at the senior levels of general officers, contributes to the “swollen middles of American command bureaucracies – which themselves sometimes exist only to give a two- or three-star general a place to hang his hat.”³⁴ There are, for example, commands consisting entirely of Military Intelligence battalions and brigades – commands that exist for command reasons alone and do not have a battlefield function. There are the redundant commands of Recruiting and Cadet.

Then there are the numerous acquisition and testing commands and area commands such as U.S. Army Japan. Most of these commands themselves have under them numerous positions filled by senior officers and their staffs. Thus, we have positions in unnecessary commands that must be filled by personnel managers. These numerous commands with bloated staffs, with each officer occupying a position behind a computer generating more work under the demands of a “perform-now” evaluation system consists of “too much overhead, too hierarchical, too much middle management, and too slow.”³⁵

The experience an officer gains in the current environment – be it in the halls and the cubicles of the Pentagon, or in one of the many large headquarters – is contradictory to the demands of the global battlefield, which calls for decisive action when dealing with the “friction of war,” unless we have really led ourselves to belief that technology will eliminate the fog and friction of war. A gradual reduction of the officer corps at major and above by 50 percent, while reducing the entire officer corps to 3 to 5 percent of the force, is necessary to eliminate the competitive ethic, bureaucratization and centralization. Reducing the officer corps vastly extends an officer’s time as a platoon leader, company and battalion commander or primary staff member, allowing officers to gain more experience in their duties and to take more time to learn the art of war.

The challenge for the Army (and the entire military because everyone falls under DOPMA) is to prioritize which positions are important, and which are unimportant, those unrelated to combat or the structure necessary to support combat units, and to go to Congress and ask them to change the multitude of laws that mandate the use of officers, i.e., requirements for officers to train the National Guard under Title XI, and Joint Duty under the Goldwater-Nichols Act.

The Army needs to ask Congress to go back and revise DOPMA, tailoring the law to the needs of each service. The Air Force, for example, is more technically and individually oriented, whereas the Army’s polices should revolve around its emerging unit manning and modular unit system. A unit personnel system would:

• Increase the collective training and maintain the “band of excellence” longer,
• Ease Operations Tempo (OPTEMPO) or how much units are deployed in relation to their personnel turnover that counters cohesion or unit stabilization,
• Reduce personnel costs,
• Create a larger pool of readily available units for immediate deployment, and
• Diminish the need to pour massive amounts of money into “surge” training in anticipation of or at the start of a conflict.

Future warfare of the type envisaged by think tanks and doctrine writers will rarely involve anything like the initial drive of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) to Baghdad, where the Army, the 3rd Infantry Division, received by default the personnel cohesion it needed because its decrepit and incompetent opponent allowed it six months to build up and train up. Future operations will more likely consist of rapid deployment and entry operations (pre-emptive offensive operations), where success depends on initial surprise and penetration achieved by the units at the forefront of the operation, supported by units that come in later to protect their flanks from counterattacks. Precision fires and sensors would sweep any future battlefield where an opponent dares to fight the U.S. Army in the open.³⁶

Most operations in the foreseeable future will take place in urban-suburban environments, where the stress of combat will require the highest levels of unit cohesion.

For this reason, the Army must continue its evolution from dependence on physical mass to adaptability, which will be at a premium in urban operations. Past attrition doctrine requires mere numbers and massive firepower, while today’s future operations require quality in the very best units, able to use selective firepower and do more than just fight. The doctrine emerging in FM 3-0, or Army warfighting doctrine, is supported by a unit-focused, decentralized culture that produces a unit system based upon a Brigade Combat Team (BCT) package configured under modularity.³⁷

Modular BCT System

This second part of a unit system, building on a revised DOPMA, is a brigade combat team-type modular and replacement system that enables battle-tried BCTs to be pulled off the line and reconstituted in unit packets from a division depot. This latter part, of course, requires what many analysts in the upper echelons of DOD and those advising Congress would view as extra or uncommitted BCTs as part of Army Generating Force (ARFORGEN).³⁸

Unlike COHORT,39 an earlier attempt at unit manning, where the individual personnel system was divorced from the unit because of concerns for leader career opportunities, under a modular BCT system, all personnel – officers and enlisted – are permanently regimentally assigned and seconded from their division. Divisions become administrative or horizontal headquarters as part of ARFORGEN located in various locations throughout the country, with specified brigade-level units such as those that compose the logistical branches covering broader areas and overlapping those of BCTs. BCTs rotate through three phases through a three- or four-year cycle.

The first and third phase falls under a division for training and rebuilding phases. In the first phase the modular brigade gathers and trains for combat at the individual and team levels, and in the final phase, it draws down and its members form a cadre to conduct many missions including post support, advisors to reserve units that also constitute BCTs within the division, and a host of duties that are normally filled by borrowed military. During the second phase, or the deployment phase, the modular BCTs fall under a vertical or command headquarters of a joint task force for operations in the field or actual combat missions.

Up-or-Stay Promotion System

The new officer management law should eliminate the up-or-out promotion system and replace it with an up-or-stay system. The up-or-out promotion system drives personnel policies that minimize the probability that officers will have the time to develop the abilities to rapidly grasp changes in situations and conditions, as well as exercise initiative by independently planning. Leaders continue to spend their career on a treadmill. It also develops the anxiety about getting promoted in leaders and thus forces them to adhere to the competitive ethic.

The new promotion system will have to become more decentralized. In contrast to the Army, American corporations have given up the concept of centralized personnel management. According to the 1999 8th Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation (QRMC), the changes in corporate personnel systems came about because “traditional systems did not meet organizational needs in the new environment and older policies and practices often worked at cross purposes with other initiatives.”⁴⁰

The QRMC report also explained the changes in corporate practices as follows:

“As organizations’ operating environments became more complex, larger, and more diverse, organizations began moving from the rigidity of ‘one size fits all’ systems toward human resource management systems designs tailored to achieve the strategic objectives of the different operating units.” Finally, the QRMC identifies the current status of corporate personnel management today: “It is rare today for large corporations to centrally manage all human resource practices and insist that all business use all the same pay practices, the same pay systems, the same training packages, the same selection tools, and so on.”

The key principle of promotion should be that only those who know the leaders under consideration could do the promoting and selecting. This means that division boards will have to be established to view fewer officers for longer periods of time.

With commanders remaining at their positions longer, they will be able to better assess, on a first-hand basis, which officers deserve to be promoted or selected for attendance at a staff college. BCT and division commanders should be empowered and trusted to appoint boards to promote officers up through the rank of lieutenant colonel. With the field narrowed by a smaller officer corps, centralized boards could then decide who gets promoted to the rank of colonel and higher, and select officers to command brigades and larger formations.

All boards at all levels will use multiple tools – a 360-degree evaluation system in which an individual evaluation report is written solely in regards to the leader’s character, an examination taken yearly and the personal conduct of the officer in front of the board – to determine promotions and selections. The bottom line in using such stringent tools is the implication that leadership and professionalism are too important to either rest on the 60-second consensus opinions of disinterested officers serving a political agenda or promoting someone based on stacks of reports.

The causes of poor morale – career anxiety, the emphasis on the competitive ethic, and the transformation or elimination of bold personality types – are the reasons to rid the Army of the up-or-out promotion system. This is particularly troubling for the type of Army officer and organizations required to carry out high-tempo operations in conditions that will require us to fight outnumbered and win. We invariably lose our warrior-leaders and our innovators. Only an up-or-stay, “perform or out,” system based on objective measuring tools can create the type of leaders the Army deserves.⁴¹

In an up-or-stay promotion system, if a leader wants to get promoted, he or she will ask for it. The patterns for career management will change to support the number one priority, a unit personnel system. An officer will still enter the officer corps from one of three commissioning sources, but accessions (entry) will be more selective than ever before with a smaller officer corps, while NCOs will continue to use the system they have now for promoting and selecting their leaders.

All potential officers will serve a minimum of two years with a National Guard or Reserve unit (similar to the Simultaneous Membership Program (SMP) employed in conjunction with ROTC programs now).⁴² Officers will then have experience working with the Reserves. Next, the mission of the commissioning sources is selecting and strenuously preparing their candidates to become officers. Filling quotas should not be a concern of the commissioning sources, only having candidates meet standards, quality not quantity is what the sources should strive for and meet. Prior to becoming commissioned, officers will have to pass a comprehensive entrance exam. Those who pass examination will then serve their initial four-year tour with a BCT. Branches for officers will be eliminated and replaced by combined arms, logistics and specialists.

An initial tour in a specific area will not determine the officer’s path for the rest of his career. Officers may move from one area to another throughout their careers or remain in that one area as long as they perform admirably. At the end of this first tour, which aligns with the four-year/three-phase life of a BCT, accession into the professional corps will occur based on how well the new officers scored on their second entrance examination, performance in the regiment and a decentralized selection board examining the above mentioned tools. The board will also determine the specialty of the officer into one of three tracks: tactical, operational or technical, while serving in one of the three areas of combined arms, logistics or specialist. Under this system, the Army would be able to spend substantial time on the development, assessment and evaluation of its officers, instead of the “60-second” perusal officers currently get on promotion-selection boards for the search for the one “discriminator” in one’s file. Instead, the use of a multitude of evaluation tools and a smaller officer corps will enable the Army to become more objective in its personnel decisions with the nation, with both the Army and the officer benefiting from the system.

Specialties

The following paragraphs briefly touch upon the reorganization of the officer management branches and officer specialties. The Army will have to “recode” several military occupational specialties to align with the new, broader fields.

Tactical track

The tactical track ensures officers will remain at the company, battalion, BCT or division level the rest of their careers. After selection to the tactical track, officers will attend the Basic Officer Leader Course (BOLC) II and a course specific to one of the three branch-replacing areas mentioned above using the Adaptive Leader

Methodology

(ALM) currently being accepted by the Army. The ALM constantly puts students in difficult, unexpected situations, and then requires them to decide and act under time pressure. ALM takes students out of their “comfort zones.” Stress – mental and moral as well as physical – must be constant. War games, map exercises and free‑play field exercises must constitute the bulk of the curriculum, while proficiency in drill and ceremonies are not important.

Higher command levels overseeing leader courses must look for high dropout and expulsion rates as signs that the job is being done right. Those leaders who successfully pass through the schools must continue to be developed by their commanders; learning cannot stop at the schoolhouse door. Once passing the ALM, leaders may rotate from positions within one of the tactical levels to instructor positions and back. This track includes all units from both combined arms and logistical units involved at the tactical level. Officers may remain in this track, with the option of being promoted to the level of colonel, and thus with the possibility of commanding a brigade.

Operational track

Those officers who score in the top 15 to 20 percent of the entrance examination to the professional force and demonstrate outstanding performance in front of the board will be admitted to the operational track. Additional requirements to the operational level will include an understanding of the art of war, as demonstrated on the entrance exam, and proficiency in a foreign language.

The operational track will consist of officers who become the operational experts of the Army. They will rotate between command and staff assignments at the divisional or higher levels and back to the Army or Joint Staff. These officers will attend a combined version of intermediate level education (for mid-level officers) (ILE) and the School of Advanced Military Science (SAMS) – a two-year version of graduate school in the art and science of war. These officers become the institutional cradle for proficiency in the art of war at the operational and strategic levels.

Technical track

The technical track relates to the specific technical abilities inherent in the more technologically advanced Army and the management of the tables of distribution and allowances, or TDA army. (This part of the army, TDA, provides the support structure for the combat units i.e., Training and Doctrine Command, Recruiting and ROTC commands, which as noted above, need to be drastically consolidated or reduced.) This field involves far more than the medical and law professions, but includes all positions that require graduate-level, civilian-related education or technical training such as acquisition corps, academic instructors, operations research system analysis, comptrollers, computer programmers, communications specialists and facilities managers.

Officers in this category could remain captains, with pro-rated pay, but would have to continually demonstrate their proficiency with periodic examinations combined with reviews of their evaluation reports. Officers could opt for promotion as the technical experts at division or higher levels, while the appropriate higher-level ranks would correspond with higher headquarters and responsibilities.

Training and Education System

The education system as touched upon earlier will dramatically change as well. A true education is much more than the learning of skills or the acquisition of facts. Rather, it means acquiring a broad understanding of the art of war, its ideas, principles and history. This true education must also give a thorough grounding in the warrior/leader culture, with heavy emphasis on making decisions and welcoming responsibility.

To conduct maneuver warfare, which is needed to facilitate the reductions in force structure and manpower cited above, a shift is needed from mere mental “training” to truly educating Army leaders. A shift is also needed away from the current practice of giving all branches, regardless of their relationship to the battlefield, “equity” in attending ILE or sending favored officers so “they can make contacts.” A maneuver warfare Army demands leaders with a particular mindset, a culture that rewards audacity, tempo and creative decision-making. As a people, Americans possess the requisite skills to be successful in maneuver warfare, but our military professionals also require a military education that will encourage and develop boldness and mental agility.

Instead of forming the repositories for innovative, thorough training and education, most intermediate service schools remain Cartesian in their methods – mired in memorization and adherence to formulas; advancing immutable formats, principles or processes that, if properly learned and applied, will supposedly bring victory.

Schools emphasizing such rules, reinforced with the properly formatted quantitative decision-aids and tables, serve only to numb creativity in leadership. Making military education relevant to future war, with its myriad of changes and challenges, will not be easy. Already, the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan demand that leaders understand the political and strategic implications of their actions, particularly in light of the impact of new, real-time media. With rules of engagement (ROE) that impose limitations on their operational and tactical capabilities, the officers of the next century face unique challenges.

Because the officer corps will be relatively small and there will be fewer in the operational track, ILE should come soon after the officer is selected for the operational track. War college should also come sooner, perhaps as early as after 10 to 12 years of the officer’s service, with selected officers from both the tactical and operational fields attending. There, the curriculum would be dramatically refocused. All officers would also be encouraged to get an education from new universities, such as the American Military University offered online, that provide unique educational opportunities from “cradle to grave” in the military art and sciences.⁴³

How should the curricula at the schools that remain be refocused to effectively fight in the high tempo, nonlinear environment of projected future warfare? The answer is that our officers, commissioned and noncommissioned, and civilians alike must be educated in the classical sense through the Adaptive Leader Methodology (ALM) model that the Army is now grasping. Their education must be grounded in the art of war, but also in aggressively challenging their instructors, questioning a status quo that, in fact, no longer exists. The professional must understand why principles evolved and where they are best used and amended. This demands training that provides not set-piece scenarios, but chaos that is inherent in the nature of war.

Classroom education is still necessary, but it must be focused on the case study, demanding critical analysis of historic examples. Leaders must move beyond mere rote memorization of techniques to experimentation with unorthodox solutions.

Using interactive tactical decision tools similar to those already available in the civilian sector, they should formulate, discuss and debate imaginative solutions. As they progress through the curriculum, they should increasingly encounter the often-missing combat intangible of simulation – a living opponent, possessing his own will with an incentive to win.

Free-play wargaming

Force-on-force, free-play wargaming provides the best available training for leaders and decision-makers. Free play exercises should be taken to their natural conclusion, allowing for a clear winner and loser. Such exercises provide leaders with invaluable learning and the context-based experience necessary for the development of cognitive and intuitive skills. Additionally, they identify those who fully understand the intricacies of command as well as possess the intuition and innovativeness for success.

These must be more than exercises pitting school-trained leaders against similarly trained leaders. There must be an enemy who is asymmetrical in experience as well as armament and weaponry. Here our ability to integrate “reach-back” technology and unorthodox opponents can provide a distinct advantage. A young, former gang member from Los Angeles, for example, can teach our most senior leaders more about modern warfare in an urban environment than most might want to admit. While not skilled in the military art, such opponents offer the conventional soldier a means to assess the challenges of those surviving through instinct. Certainly, our Army could have used this before we occupied Baghdad. Augmenting aggressors by employing and training with local Guard and Army Reserve, and/or foreign area experts (military or academic) familiar with a given area and culture, can also enhance the learning of 21st century students. In the case of the Reserve, this is a win-win situation regarding training and preparedness.

The advantages of this type of competition-based education are found in history. We are all aware of the successes and innovations of the Militärische Gesellschaft, the Prussian Army in the early 1800s, and its successor, the Prussian/German general staff. Less well-known, likely because of a lack of national institutionalization, was

Gen. Al Gray’s reformation of Marine Corps education in the late 1980s, as well as former Brig. Gen. Huba Wass de Czege’s establishment of the School of Advanced Military Studies.

All three initiatives recognized that leader development programs dominated by principles and formulas were outmoded. All three instituted programs to develop leaders with a higher degree of intelligence, possessive of a favorable attitude toward change and innovation, and perhaps most importantly, with a propensity to assess and, as needed, undertake risk. All three also challenged their students to approach problems realistically, rewarding decisions and judgments that demonstrated their ability to incorporate innovation, tactical logic, situational awareness and boldness – essentially “out-decision cycling” their respective competitor. Their mastery was determined not by methodical application of predetermined school solutions, but by their ability to win. The ACM/ALC model will best prepare our leaders for the battles ahead.

Selection criteria

Selection for attendance at these reformed warfighting schools must also be reconsidered. Advanced readings assigned to specific tracks must be accomplished well before attendance to formal school. Officers must clearly demonstrate, at the appropriate level, a capacity for decision-making beyond their current grades. Whether by mentor/board evaluation (as in defense of a thesis) or by examination, officers should be carefully screened prior to selection for attendance. The program of instruction should be arduous and demanding.

Faculty

Finally, to reform our school system, the Army has to change personnel priority for assignments to the faculty at Army schools. As the last drawdown demonstrated, the first officers at the middle grades to be cut were instructors at the service schools. In most Western armies, by contrast, the top officers are selected to be instructors at their service schools. This also occurred in the Army in the 1930s and 1920s with C&GSC and the War College where top-performing officers rotated back to the schoolhouse to teach.

Officers and academics selected for service school faculty must be among the best and well-schooled in their military subject areas. Besides command, no assignment should be more sought after than instructing and teaching. We must institutionalize this mindset among the officer corps, and inculcate our juniors with the desire to become instructors and help shape our officer corps. This is not currently the case and, while change is coming, it needs to be expedited.

The Time is Now, the Future is Too Late

Effectiveness for the Army is not an option; it is imperative. The new culture needed to execute the type of missions imagined in the future is sine qua non to the effectiveness of the Army. Many officers and civilian leaders believe technology makes the difference, but as John Boyd said, people make the difference, especially when there is effective leadership. The personnel system is the linchpin that will directly affect combat effectiveness, doctrine and a host of other critical issues pertaining to the Army of the future. The culture must adjust its course before the Army can execute the high- tempo and rapidly changing warfare of the future.

The fundamental reason for instituting serious reform is that our national security construct, from our national security strategy down to the smallest military organization and how we manage our personnel, is not keeping pace with the rapid changes in the world today. The military’s personnel system is an outdated adjunct to an officer personnel system designed for the Cold War. Most leaders are uncomfortable with our system; they know that it is not sufficient to meet the challenges that are clearly coming, that something’s lacking. They feel this way because officers understand that our current culture is founded on the very organizational model used almost a hundred years ago to reform the War Department (today’s Department of Defense).

We would be among the first to agree that much of the current system that is dysfunctional is the result of good intentions that have had unintended consequences. The people who are upholding the culture of personnel management science for the last 100 years and who put these systems in place were trying to do the right thing. Their only fault is that they have ignored the bad results of their implementations – the use of individual replacements in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and to a certain degree in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the maintenance of an up-or-out promotion system in an age where specialization must occur not only in a given field, but also at a given rank.

Other examples of well-intended practices that have had unpleasant outcomes:

• A larger than necessary officer corps at the middle and senior levels in order to prepare for mobilization of the Army to fight World War III employing an attrition doctrine. In June 2008 the Army added five more generals to its already bloated population of 308 generals.
• Fairness, transparency, objectivity are all good things, but they have led to a system that causes OERs to be “scored,” making quantitatively commensurable things that should not be.
• The personnel system is simply a part of the larger constellation of management science, which in addition to the personnel bureaucracy gave us the program bureaucracy – operations research and cost/benefit analysis.

Instead, the Army and Marine Corps personnel system has become a weighted organization with its own logic, tradition and inertia. The implementation of new doctrinal and unit organizational, as well as educational and training reforms will take a long time given the current way of doing things and the Army bureaucracy’s thick hide, its resistance to taking risks and making change. The journey will be worth the effort, however, as reforms replace DOD’s, specifically the Army’s and Marine Corps’, personnel management science culture that is negatively focused to one that is human resource leadership focused, professional, and steeped in trust.

Conclusion: Where Have All the Mavericks Gone? Long Time Passing

In forcing this implementation, the Army needs to follow the lead of Army chief of staff, World War II and Korean War hero, Gen. Matthew Ridgway, who said, “My greatest contribution as chief of staff was to nourish the mavericks.” To paraphrase the famous folk singers, Peter, Paul and Mary: “Where have all the mavericks gone? Long time passing.”

Mavericks lead with courage, creativity, boldness, vision, and at times irreverence. The services must understand it is acceptable, even admirable, to have a love quarrel with the institution that they serve while still remaining loyal. The Army and the other services must adapt an organizational model and personnel system that will nourish the mavericks and keep them from leaving, thereby nurturing the innovators and not the saboteurs.

It is time the services paid attention to their officer corps and the need to become true professionals. True professional soldiers who are not popular in peacetime must be kept around because the art of war is best learned through the course of several campaigns. They will defend us in our old age, and more importantly, defend our progeny. No utopian, brave new, politically correct, gender neutral, nonlethal, hightech-clean-war generation is stepping forward to replace the hard chargers now abandoning the Army, and none is going to.

It is time that we now lay the blame where the fault lies for this conversion of our Army to something less than it needs to be, and use the “L” word: leadership. Human resource leaders know that embracing change does not mean seizing upon every idea or opportunity. “Civilization didn’t get this far by embracing every idea that came along; it got this far by accepting certain changes that were inevitable and certain others that were demonstrably beneficial, and by opposing, sometimes violently, changes that would have imperiled the species. Interesting, some think a good leader has to be a change killer as well as a change agent.”⁴⁴

In deciding what to keep and what to replace or reform, leaders of the Defense Department must always focus on the probability that in the future, wars may be very short and intense, requiring rapid and important decisions by many different levels of command. Much depends on proper planning and preparation to ensure that leaders and their units can perform in the best way possible during the critical initial days of combat. The Army, the military and nation may not have three years to prepare.

The Army, or any service for that matter, may not have sufficient time to organize to organize, so the Army (and DOD) needs to be ready beyond what technology can provide us. Such complex change requires leadership by extraordinary civilian and military leaders possessing vision. Our leaders must provide the beginnings to a revolution of change that is even more dramatic than the ones conducted by Elihu Root and George Marshall. Indeed, we need a generation of mavericks.

No one makes a better case for military mavericks than Secretary of Defense Gates and retired Col. Mike Wyly, U.S. Marine Corps. Gates and Wyly recognize the brilliance of one of DOD’s most stellar mavericks, the late Col. John Boyd. Wyly wrote in the Armed Forces Journal of July 2008 of how Gates, inspired by “Genghis John” Boyd, called upon a gathering of young uniformed officers to be like the irreverent Boyd. Gates, using Boyd’s own words, challenged these young officers to be principled, creative and reform-minded leaders who “want to do something, not be somebody.” Wyly notes that for a defense secretary to quote the maverick Boyd, who left the Air Force as a pariah in the minds of some, was an incredibly bold and risky step. Nevertheless, Wyly lays bare how, today, we need brilliant mavericks throughout all the services with the abilities “to overcome bureaucratic resistance and institutional hostility.”

Endnotes

1 Background for this paper began in 1998 with research for the book Path to Victory: America’s Army and the Revolution in Human Affairs (Presidio, 2002), and continued with the self-imposed study “Raising the Bar: Developing and Nurturing Adaptability to Deal with the Changing Face of War,” (March-May 2005), which in turn formed the foundation for the book by the same name (Washington, D.C., Center for Defense Information, November 2006).

2 Friedman, T. L., The world is flat: A brief history of the twenty-first century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006).

3 Alan S. Blinder, Paying for Productivity (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1999), 13.

4 Peter F. Drucker, “Management’s New Paradigms,” Forbes Magazine, October 5, l998, 152.

5 Officer Personnel Management System, “Council of Colonels 25-26 Oct 06,” unpublished briefing, (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Army (October 2006), 213-214.

6 John Tillson, “Reducing the Impact of Tempo,” (Alexandria, VA: Institute of Defense Analyses (IDA), 1999), S-3.

7 Rick Mustion, “Personnel Strategy Considerations,” briefing, (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College, 2001).

8 The authors would like to thank Mr. John Tillson, of the Institute of Defense of Analyses (IDA), and now a senior executive working with the Army in Germany for his insights and assistance. Tillson, “Reducing the Impact of Tempo,” S-3.

9 Rickey Gibbs, “Determining the Appropriate Force Size Paradigm for the Army,” Strategic Studies Institute, (Carlisle, PA: Army War College, 2004), 11.

10 Vandergriff, Path to Victory, 45-57.

11 Ibid.

12 Tillson, “Reducing the Impact of Tempo,” 8.

13 Tillson, “Reducing the Impact of Tempo,” 9.

14 Vandergriff, Path to Victory, 35.

15 Donald E. Vandergriff, “Culture Wars,” Digital Wars: A View from the Frontlines (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1999), 78.

16 For a thorough assessment of OPMS 71, see William Hauser, "The Peacetime Army: Retrospect and Prospect," in Robin Higham and Carol Brandt, eds., The United States Army in Peacetime (Manhattan, KS: Military Affairs/Aerospace Publishing, 1975), 217. Also see, David McCormick, The Downsized Warrior: America’s Army in Transition (New York: New York University Press, 1998).

17 Harry J. Bondy, “Postmodernism and the Source of Military Strength in the Anglo West.” Armed Forces & Society 31, no. 1 (November 2004).

18 Ibid, p. 3.

19 Lt. Col. Harry J. Bondy, “New Regiments, New Specialist Corps, and a New General Staff.” Journal of Military and Strategic Studies, Canadian Defense and Foreign Affairs Institute, (Winter 2004): 3-5.

20 Interview with Major David Hunter, June 2, 2007.

21 Col. Stephen Jones, “Improving Accountability for Effective Command Climate: A Strategic Imperative,” Strategic Studies Institute, (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College, September 2003) p. 5.

22 Tillson, Reducing the Impact of Tempo, 19.

23 Author e-mail correspondence with Lt. Col. Harry J. Bondy, Canadian Army, April 2005. Also see: Harry Bondy, “New Regiments, New Specialist Corps, and A New General Staff.” pp. 3-5. Available at http://www.jmss.org/2004/winter/articlesbody5.htm. Bondy and the author have shared many facts and ideas over the last few years. Many of the factors that affect the U.S. Army also affect the Canadian army.

24 Colonel J.B. Burton, “Command’s Feedback on Officer Critical Skills Retention Bonus,” downloaded from the internet, (Iraq, 1st Cavalry Division, May 24, 2007).

25 U.S. Army, “OPMS Council of Colonels,” unpublished power point presentation, (Alexandria, VA: Human Resources Command, October 2006), 4-5.

26 Vandergriff, Raising the Bar, pp. 77-79; while I call it Adaptive Course Model in the book, the Army has changed it first to Adaptive Leaders Course (ALC), then in December 2007, to Adaptive Leaders Methodology (ALM). Except for the name, nothing has changed.

27 John Boyd, “A Discourse on Winning and Losing,” (unpublished briefing, Washington, D.C.: August 1987), pp. 5-7. Available at http://www.d-n-i.net. We are also indebted to Col. T.X. Hammes, William S. Lind, Franklin Spinney, Col. G.I. Wilson and Greg Wilcox for their insights into 4th Generation Warfare

28 Boyd defined the “OODA loop” as a system of knowledge generation and decision-making whose components are observation, orientation, decision and  ction. See Boyd’s “Discourse” for further explanation.

29 Chet Richards, Certain to Win (Philadelphia, PA: Xlibris, 2004), 61.

30 G.I. Wilson, Business is war, (1997) Retrieved November 21, 2007, from www.belisarius.com/modern_business_strategy/wilson/boyd_symposium_1997.htm

31 R. Slater, Jack Welch and the GE way (1st ed.), (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999), 97.

32 Lisa Burgess, “Army Captains Offered up to $35,000 to stay,” Stars and Stripes, September 19, 2007, http://www.military.com/features/0,15240,149817,00.html

33 Chet Richards, A Swift, Elusive Sword: What if Sun Tzu and John Boyd Did a National Defense Review, (Washington, D.C.: Center for Defense Information, May 2001)

34 James Bennett, “So Many Officers Too Little to Do,” Washington Monthly, (Washington, D.C.: Washington Monthly, February 1990), 4. Though this article was written 18 years ago, unfortunately, nothing has changed.

35 U.S. Army, “OPMS: Issues and Answers,” (unpublished briefing, Washington, D.C., U.S. Army Human Resources Command, February 2006), S-2.

36 Donald E. Vandergriff, “An Invisible Revolution Sparked 3rd ID’s Success,” Voice of the Grunt, (October 2003)

37 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigade_Combat_Team

38 U.S. Army, “Army Force Generation,” Army Knowledge Online, http://www.army.mil/aps/07/addendum/h.html

39 U.S. Army, “The COHORT System: Is it meeting the Army’s Needs?”, (Washington, D.C., U.S. Army, June 6, 1988), 3. This was the last Army effort at unit manning at the company and battalion level from 1980-1990. “In its basic form, COHORT model sought to create an environment in which soldiers would feel a more genuine attachment to their fellow soldiers and to their units.” Though considered successful by those who participated, and by the results of unit performance, the U.S. Army abolished the program at the end of the Gulf War citing that it was too difficult to maintain.

40 John Tillson, “Impact of Tempo,” pp. 13-15.

41 Mark Lewis, “Time to Regenerate: A GenX Response to Dr. Wong’s Monograph,” (Arlington, VA: November 2000).

42 http://www.shsu.edu/~mls_www/Opportunities/smp/smp.html

43 http://www.amu.apus.edu/

44 R. A. Lutz, Guts (1st ed.), (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc. 1998), 196-197.

Col. G.I. Wilson (U.S. Marine Corps, ret.) and Maj. Donald Vandergriff (U.S. Army, ret.)

AMERICA’S DEFENSE MELTDOWN

CHAPTER 3: Leading The Human Dimension Out of a Legacy of Failure

World Security Institute’s Center for Defense Information

1779 Massachusetts Avenue, NW

Washington, D.C. 20036-2109

© 2008 Center for Defense Information

ISBN-10: 1-932019-33-2

ISBN-13: 978-1-932019-33-9

http://www.it-aac.org/images/AmericasDefenseMeltdownFullText.pdf