daftandbarmy
Army.ca Dinosaur
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I would say that the US is not alone in struggling with this issue.... or any big business for that matter.
Why Can’t the U.S. Military Grow Better Leaders?
Military personnel policy is equal parts art and science. If it were all science, the Pentagon and its military services would have figured out long ago how to get the most out of each man and woman in uniform, give them rewarding careers, and win wars to boot.
The fact that the U.S. military’s personnel engine isn’t firing on all cylinders is the topic of Tim Kane’s new book, Bleeding Talent: How the U.S. Military Mismanages Great Leaders and Why It’s Time for a Revolution.
The one-time Air Force officer will elaborate on the topic at the Hudson Institute on Jan. 31, where he serves as chief economist (wow: two dismal sciences in a single scholar!). Battleland conducted this email chat with Kane last week.
What is the key point you’re trying to make in Bleeding Talent: How the U.S. Military Mismanages Great Leaders and Why It’s Time for a Revolution?
The personnel bureaucracy in the Pentagon is destroying the human capital invested in its troops, bleeding good people out into the civilian world but bleeding even more talent internally through mismanagement.
I learned while researching the book that presidents as far back as Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower tried to get the problem fixed. Only thanks to the constant patriotism of fresh generations of Americans is the Pentagon able to cover up the talent mismanagement. Recognizing that the U.S. military went through one successful radical transformation – adopting the All Volunteer Force in 1973 and ending the draft – I am calling for the next logical step.
A Total Volunteer Force will institute volunteerism during the entire career of our soldiers, not just on the first day. Currently, the military has one foot in the coercive past and one foot in the professional future, and it’s time to go all the way towards respecting and trusting the men and women who serve.
Speaking of revolution, as your subtitle does, what three changes would you make, if you could order them to happen to the military personnel system?
Number one, commanders at all levels would have hiring authority, which means that a wing commander in the Air Force or brigade commander in the Army would select their own unit commanders, executive officers, and so on.
On the flip side, officers would be free to apply to any open position and would be free to take any job offered so long as they met the qualifications. The whole inefficient mess of centrally-planning the job-assignments process would be eliminated, but HR officers would be more important than ever as mentors and advisers to local units.
The second priority would be to institute a more honest system of performance evaluations.
The current system lacks moral courage and really erodes the integrity of the people on both sides of evals. A better system would use forced rankings across multiple categories, meaning that only 10-20% of officers in a unit would be deemed top performers overall, and 10-20% would be ranked the weakest overall.
However, given multiple categories, many officers would might be ranked “top” in technical proficiency, leadership, or integrity. A separate evaluation from peers and subordinates would also be part of the performance record. This would help identify the best leaders as distinct from the best warriors, and the military should allow officers to do what they do best.
The third priority is lateral entry.
Allowing former officers to exit and re-enter and re-exit and re-enter, and to serve as long a career as they want without career-tenure constraints is essential to bringing fresh thinking into the U.S. military. Why in the world are we gearing up for cyber warfare and simultaneously barring veterans now working for Symantec, Cisco, or Google to rejoin the ranks? That is folly.
By most accounts, we have the best military in the history of the world. Why risk tinkering with success?
Our military is the best, and that is almost entirely because of what the military does right: recruiting, training, and educating the best leaders and soldiers in the world.
But the Army has gotten this good by constantly innovating – new weapons systems, new operational structures, new branches (Air Force!). What the Army hasn’t done is to fundamentally innovate its HR system since 1973. In fact, the bureaucracy has gotten worse. Evals are inflated. Force shaping is a disaster. Career planning is impossible as the technology battlespace evolves.
My survey and others identify a rise of toxic leaders as a result, and 55% of active-duty officers want the system to be radically reformed.
You say that military leaders are naturally “entrepreneurial” and that the Total Volunteer Force would capitalize on that by allowing much faster promotions for the best and brightest. Do you risk creating a generation of George Custers without the necessary experience before command?
Look, the U.S. has had something like 10 top commanders of our forces in Afghanistan over 10 years because the incentives today generate ticket-punching, not experience.
Mid-level officers rotate in and out of jobs so fast that they are not operationally optimized, and that merry-go-round costs lives. The military-promotion system now is on the far end of the spectrum biased toward seniority and away from merit. That’s a problem. It rules out the George Custers, true, but also the Jack Gavins and Elmo Zumwalts.
The bottom line is that the U.S. military aims for senior officer mediocrity.
The alternative is to let commanders hire and promote the best men and women possible. That may mean a few 30 year-old colonels. It also means a lot off 40-year old captains who are natural pilots and warriors, but neither interested or talented at being high-ranked staffers.
In my ideal Navy, Maverick would still be flying his Tomcat. Today, he’s either working on a spreadsheet or PowerPoint in the Pentagon basement, or he’s flying a 747 out of Hong Kong as a civilian pilot for United Airlines.
http://nation.time.com/2013/01/21/why-cant-the-u-s-military-grow-better-leaders/
Why Can’t the U.S. Military Grow Better Leaders?
Military personnel policy is equal parts art and science. If it were all science, the Pentagon and its military services would have figured out long ago how to get the most out of each man and woman in uniform, give them rewarding careers, and win wars to boot.
The fact that the U.S. military’s personnel engine isn’t firing on all cylinders is the topic of Tim Kane’s new book, Bleeding Talent: How the U.S. Military Mismanages Great Leaders and Why It’s Time for a Revolution.
The one-time Air Force officer will elaborate on the topic at the Hudson Institute on Jan. 31, where he serves as chief economist (wow: two dismal sciences in a single scholar!). Battleland conducted this email chat with Kane last week.
What is the key point you’re trying to make in Bleeding Talent: How the U.S. Military Mismanages Great Leaders and Why It’s Time for a Revolution?
The personnel bureaucracy in the Pentagon is destroying the human capital invested in its troops, bleeding good people out into the civilian world but bleeding even more talent internally through mismanagement.
I learned while researching the book that presidents as far back as Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower tried to get the problem fixed. Only thanks to the constant patriotism of fresh generations of Americans is the Pentagon able to cover up the talent mismanagement. Recognizing that the U.S. military went through one successful radical transformation – adopting the All Volunteer Force in 1973 and ending the draft – I am calling for the next logical step.
A Total Volunteer Force will institute volunteerism during the entire career of our soldiers, not just on the first day. Currently, the military has one foot in the coercive past and one foot in the professional future, and it’s time to go all the way towards respecting and trusting the men and women who serve.
Speaking of revolution, as your subtitle does, what three changes would you make, if you could order them to happen to the military personnel system?
Number one, commanders at all levels would have hiring authority, which means that a wing commander in the Air Force or brigade commander in the Army would select their own unit commanders, executive officers, and so on.
On the flip side, officers would be free to apply to any open position and would be free to take any job offered so long as they met the qualifications. The whole inefficient mess of centrally-planning the job-assignments process would be eliminated, but HR officers would be more important than ever as mentors and advisers to local units.
The second priority would be to institute a more honest system of performance evaluations.
The current system lacks moral courage and really erodes the integrity of the people on both sides of evals. A better system would use forced rankings across multiple categories, meaning that only 10-20% of officers in a unit would be deemed top performers overall, and 10-20% would be ranked the weakest overall.
However, given multiple categories, many officers would might be ranked “top” in technical proficiency, leadership, or integrity. A separate evaluation from peers and subordinates would also be part of the performance record. This would help identify the best leaders as distinct from the best warriors, and the military should allow officers to do what they do best.
The third priority is lateral entry.
Allowing former officers to exit and re-enter and re-exit and re-enter, and to serve as long a career as they want without career-tenure constraints is essential to bringing fresh thinking into the U.S. military. Why in the world are we gearing up for cyber warfare and simultaneously barring veterans now working for Symantec, Cisco, or Google to rejoin the ranks? That is folly.
By most accounts, we have the best military in the history of the world. Why risk tinkering with success?
Our military is the best, and that is almost entirely because of what the military does right: recruiting, training, and educating the best leaders and soldiers in the world.
But the Army has gotten this good by constantly innovating – new weapons systems, new operational structures, new branches (Air Force!). What the Army hasn’t done is to fundamentally innovate its HR system since 1973. In fact, the bureaucracy has gotten worse. Evals are inflated. Force shaping is a disaster. Career planning is impossible as the technology battlespace evolves.
My survey and others identify a rise of toxic leaders as a result, and 55% of active-duty officers want the system to be radically reformed.
You say that military leaders are naturally “entrepreneurial” and that the Total Volunteer Force would capitalize on that by allowing much faster promotions for the best and brightest. Do you risk creating a generation of George Custers without the necessary experience before command?
Look, the U.S. has had something like 10 top commanders of our forces in Afghanistan over 10 years because the incentives today generate ticket-punching, not experience.
Mid-level officers rotate in and out of jobs so fast that they are not operationally optimized, and that merry-go-round costs lives. The military-promotion system now is on the far end of the spectrum biased toward seniority and away from merit. That’s a problem. It rules out the George Custers, true, but also the Jack Gavins and Elmo Zumwalts.
The bottom line is that the U.S. military aims for senior officer mediocrity.
The alternative is to let commanders hire and promote the best men and women possible. That may mean a few 30 year-old colonels. It also means a lot off 40-year old captains who are natural pilots and warriors, but neither interested or talented at being high-ranked staffers.
In my ideal Navy, Maverick would still be flying his Tomcat. Today, he’s either working on a spreadsheet or PowerPoint in the Pentagon basement, or he’s flying a 747 out of Hong Kong as a civilian pilot for United Airlines.
http://nation.time.com/2013/01/21/why-cant-the-u-s-military-grow-better-leaders/
