Flunk the SysAdmin, lose the Leviathan

ARTICLE: The Army's Other Crisis: Why the best and brightest young officers are leaving, By Andrew Tilghman, Washington Monthly, December 2007

Why this analysis matters?

If we don't master the SysAdmin, we lose the talent to do the Leviathan anyway. These officers see the pointlessness.

(Thanks: Jamie Ruehl)

Comments

[deichmans]

Very timely, esp. with LTC John Nagl filing his papers for retirement this week....

[Jim]

This isn't just an Army problem. From the beginning of my career as Air Force officer, I've routinely seen the smartest and sharpest officers heading out the door. Meanwhile the less capable officers "drink the blue kool-aid", schmooze with the higher ups, and check the boxes necessary to be promoted.

I see alot of my own experience in this article. When I came in I wanted to make this a career. It was 2004, we'd been in Iraq less than a year, and I wanted to do my part. Now it's 2008, i've been on two deployments, and i'm less than 2 weeks away from the end of my active duty time because I just can't take all the BS that goes on.

It's not the deployments driving me out. As Zeke Austin said in the article, it's the "preoccupation with institutional process. "Rather than focus on important stuff, they focus on PowerPoint slides. They'd have me up all night to make one slide a little prettier..." The amount of man-hours wasted on wordsmithing people's performance reports and awards packages would astonish someone who's never seen the process in action, and is just one example of the mass of administrivia that drowns us so much at home station that deployments become a nice respite. If only we could bring the family along...

Bottom-line, I think every service is probably losing a big chunk of their best and brightest, and I'm happy to finally see somebody list things other than the war that are driving them out.

If Tom ever gets his wish and we create a Sys-Admin force, or Department of Everything Else, count me in. Until then I'll just have to content myself with teaching school kids history, serving in the guard, and an occasional deployment.

[andyinsdca]

Holy crap. This needs to be the lead article on your blog for a few days to make sure everyone sees this. This is probably one of the most important articles written about fighting the insurgency, the Army (and related topics) in a very long time.

Please do whatever it takes to get this article out to the "rest of the world."

[Anonymous]

talk about holy crap! i didn't know Nagl is retiring

High-profile Nagl to leave Army, join think tank

[Lexington Green]

It is as if Hans von Seeckt was leaving the German Army in 1920.

Well, that would have been good.

But we are the good guys, and Leviathan is a key part of the foundation of a stable world order.

The single most important thing any organization can do is find, hire and retain the best possible people. If you don't do that, nothing else matters. That is not Lex's opinion, it is Peter Drucker's.

Based on this article, and many other data points showing the same thing, the US military gets a big fat F on the only grade that really matters.

This is a true disaster. A slow motion disaster is still a disaster.

Maybe Obama could outfox everybody on defense by talking about this, since no one else is? Can someone send him an email?

[Matt R.]

Last August (2007), I finished 6 years on active duty in the Air Force. I too left when I found myself in a staff type job that was both bogged down with incredible amounts of useless paperwork and on the hook for another year "over there". I was one of those greatly interested in solving the future problems of the military, engrossed in reading military history and current discussions (thanks for this blog Tom). My observations of the military are definitely inline with what is reported in the article. From the first moment I set foot on active duty, my unit was 60% manned because 40% were off in Iraq/Kuwait or wherever else. Yet, I still spent countless hours writing and rewriting things just because of the standard set by a peace-time military with relatively little to accomplish and lots of people with which to accomplish it. For instance, the current standard on a performance report was based not only on the content of the report, but also on how little white space was left on the back of the performance report. A critical skill in writing these reports was to know which adjectives would make the sentence just the right length to fill the line completely. If the line had more than 5 blank spaces at the end, you could almost be certain it would be turned back for correction. Simply amazing.Now I find myself navigating the currents of the federal civilian sector, knowing that I will face bureaucracy at its finest, but also knowing that I will not be going to far away places and leaving loved ones behind for another year. I also know that I get to be involved in a culture less focused having matching PowerPoint slides and more on getting the job done and going home for dinner with family. I will say the the attention to detail I acquired in the military is serving me well in the civilian world, but here they look at me like I am off center when I ask why things don't line up or things don't match. It becomes part of you, but how useful?

[William R. Cumming]

Once again it would help open the services to raw brain power if if the Service Academies were made grad schools, competitive merit staffed for both attendees and staff and Congress would remove itself from the appointment process and promotion process except at the Flag Rank level. The services should be a meritocracy not a hereditary class. Enlisted ranks might even be better off if there was generation skipping before family members could enlist. At a recent open house over the holidays met two serice members in enlisted ranks, unmarried parents of a child. I believe in social liberalism but shouldn't the services encourage marriage when a child is involved or is that too passee even for the current military and its political correctness. Also what is the percentage of non-citizens now on active duty? Maybe its time for the Marian reforms to be updated and transported from 1st Century Rome to our legions. Who really runs Officer Ops these days for the services? How open is that process to reform and who really understands its nuances and impact on retention? Is the policy still a contorted up and out? Even major law firms gave up that nonsense.

[Michael]

On Army Bureaucracy: and I thought things could get bad around here. . .

On John Nagl: any room in Enterra for a counterinsurgency expert?

William, is it more married soldiers the military needs or just a better way of dealing with single-parents? What about, say, a communal barracks environment of all the single parents and their kids stationed at a single base? When some parents are on duty, others would be off-duty and able to care for the kids. When some parents are deployed in hazardous areas, others would still be on-base to care for the kids-- even if a parent never comes back.

[Bill C.]

So much like Vietnam that we may see an attempt at a Vietnam-like solution, to wit:

a. The national leadership and the military turns its back on the Gap and counterinsurgency and focuses, instead, on China and the big war.

b. Other concerns/conflicts to be handled as done cir. 1975 - 2000.

So, as has been said, clock gets reset -- but, in this scenerio, to the time before 9/11.

[stuart abrams]

William:The idea of making the service academies grad schools is a brilliant idea. I have never heard that suggestion. I always love it when you hear a completely novel idea.

[Michael]

So how would that work? Raise the requirements for a commission from Bachelors degree to Masters? If done right, that WOULD raise the standards for new officers; it would also reduce the number of people getting commissions only because their jobs require a Bachelors or higher.

You're still left, though, with the question of holding on to good officers-- Masters or no. Putting a guy through years of rigorous grad school and making him crank out a good thesis only to have him spending his days nickpicking paperwork and getting ignored by superiors sounds rather counterproductive.

[Anonymous]

Michael: ROTC for commission-track undergrads

[Gilbert Garza]

In any sizeable organization, a number of good (even outstanding) people will have occasion to present sufficiently good and/or presssing reasons/rationalizations for leaving/having left their present positions, employments, careers. I can begin to appreciate the difficulty of getting any kind of true general picture of the health of the organization from such information.

[Nathan Machula]

The decline in retention rates among company grade officers is certainly cause for concern, but this article is a glass half-empty, overly pessimistic jeremiad. The author begins and ends with a hard luck story about one person, which is merely a rhetorical device to set the intended tone for the piece and leave the reader with the same final impression. However, the plural of anecdote is not data. While some of the officers getting out are among the brightest (LTC Nagl definitely fits this bill, but he's long past the demographic at issue), the author offers little evidence that the best officers are leaving at any greater rate than less capable ones. The statistics for West Point are abysmal, but it supplies only a small fraction of the army's officer corps. As he admits in the article, the retention rate was even worse in 2000, and we weren't fighting any real wars then.

The trend is neither unprecedented nor irreversible. For most wars in American history, the army was too small at the start and too big at the end. So they downsized it, only to repeat the cycle the next time. We've been trying to fight this war on the cheap for 6 years, resulting in multiple deployments for many soldiers. But unlike his repeated comparisons to the post-Vietnam era army, morale today remains high and there aren't systemic disciplinary problems. All we need to alleviate the problem is to substantially increase the size of the army.

With regards to William R. Cumming, your suggested reforms would make it much harder to fulfill manning requirements. Besides, the military already has several competitive graduate schools: each joint and service specific Command and Staff College and War College, plus the Air Force Institute of Technology, Naval Postgraduate School, National Defense Intelligence College, etc.

[Paul Cajka]

I'm reminded of a comment I heard off and on through my Navy career: "When there's a real war all of this garbage goes away." At various times that covered both customs and administrative matters. It generally came from some relatively experienced member who served in a combat zone being thrown into the paper wars. Yes, lots of those who haven't been occupied with more pressing matters get into eval/fitrep editing beyond grammar correction.Power point, ha! I learned to teach everything out of a binder with text and prompting notes. Power point does save paper for handouts, but that's all. And the most perfect Pp slide doesn't replace a copy of the relevant document to clarify the details that come up in life but are too minor for a slide of their own.

[Anonymous]

really great balancing view, Nathan

[TEJ]

Mr. CummingThe services do not encourage marriage period. Still a lot of mindset like "If the Army wanted you to have a family they would issue you one". For example, only E-9 gets a housing allowance based on a single family house. A 20 year, 3 kid senior NCO only merits an allowance based on a 3 bedroom apartment. A sailor gets a shore tour, expects to reconnect with his family, draws Individual Augmentee orders and goes to Iraq, then comes back and starts his next afloat tour. A sailor could pull 2 or 3 consecutive tours in San Diego or Norfolk and let the kids finish school where they started, but these 'homesteaders' are treated like they are gaming the system because they didn't PCS to the other coast and then back again.

Mr MachulaThe service academies indeed provide a minority of the officer corps, but these 'ring knockers' are a much larger proportion of the senior leadership.

[Anonymous]

TEJ: in fact, we might go so far as to say the services are 'marriage hostile' (i'm thinking especially of inflexible deployments). no wonder folks get out (including Nagl).

[J. Mooney]

As a USMA grad, current officer, and future former officer, I feel like I have to weigh in:

I am leaving the Army for variety of reasons, the best I can boil it down to is this: I am sick and tired of being limited by the bureaucratic system, [micro]managed by mediocre field-grade and flag officers, the cultural belief that technology is more important than soldiers, socialist assignment/evaluation/promotion policies, and dealing with the minority of awful soldiers at the expense of the good ones. Putting up with these frustrations and lack of personal satisfaction has made the deployments to Iraq not worth the sacrifice.

Over the past 7 1/2 years, I've seen officers with huge potential leave the service for greener pastures, while I've seen more than my share of second-rates get promoted because they're the best of what's left. I have friends who decided to take the $30k bonus in return for three years of obligation--and are already regretting the decision. This is anecdotal, I know. Mr. Machula--perhaps retention rates were worse in 2000, but the point of the article was not the quantity of retention, but the quality--and I have yet to see the Army attempt to compare the quality of officers departing to the quality of those retained.

[Michael]

I just had a crazy, probably unworkable idea. Require ALL uniformed Army personnel to do at least one tour of duty in Afganistan or Iraq, flags included. If someone's close to retirement or discharge, their retirement or discharge gets put on hold until they've finished. The positions vacated in safe areas could be filled by regular units rotated home or even by disabled vets who can't fight anymore.

I'm not sure what it would do to the situation on the ground, but it would reduce the stress on the normal units and give the surviving paper-mongers and rules-makers a better idea of what is actually needed overseas.

[William R. Cumming]

Postscript! Below the horizon up to 20% of college undergrads are getting degrees online. No on campus requirement for course study for many. Also the ratio of non-profit universities and colleges to profit-making colleges and universities has substantially reversed since 1970. About 3500 true non-profit colleges and universities. About 7500 profit making colleges and universities. What is the military recruitment doing with these statistics? Is it possible company grade officers don't need to all be college grads? Is it possible that field grade talent could or would be enhanced by requiring graduate work in rigorous academic environments? Do the Service grad programs qualify as rigorous? Maybe some do! Maybe some do not. How often is there review of those institutions outside of military circles. I understand few thesis produced challenge the status quo or group think often pervasive even with Title 10 academics salting these programs.