Report Calls for New System for Officer Development
Journalist: William H. McMichael
Original Post: Report Calls for New System for Officer Development
Type: News Article
February 23, 2010 — A new think tank report unveiled Feb. 17 calls for completely revamping the way military officers are trained, assessed and promoted in order to prepare them for the unpredictability of current and future conflicts.
That basic contention was supported Feb. 18 by the four-star Marine who heads the command responsible for transforming the way the U.S. military operates. “Surprise is going to remain a dominant factor in our profession,” Gen. James Mattis, chief of U.S. Joint Forces Command, told an audience gathered in Washington for a discussion on “Keeping the Edge: Revitalizing America’s Officer Corps,” a report from the Center for a New American Security.
“At all leadership ranks, we will have to educate better and reward learning in our officer corps, so our leaders can adapt more swiftly than our enemy,” he said. The study’s editors, John Nagl and Brian Burton of CNAS, argue that in an era in which military officers find themselves in combat, on humanitarian relief missions, training partner militaries or helping maintain regional security in the western Pacific, “the U.S. military must develop a model that trains and educates officers for the complex interactions of the current threat environment while being agile and versatile enough to adapt to a swiftly changing world beyond.”
Nagl and Burton said that such a developmental track also will be key to producing career officers who possess the broader strategic perspective“that is necessary for senior leadership of a branch or service.”
Mattis said he agreed. “We need to build strategic leaders,” he said. “Strategy is infinitely more challenging than tactics and operations. A new strategic awakening is needed in our officer corps. We need flag and general officers who have historically formed, multidisciplinary understanding of the world, and they must be provided the reflective time and education to prepare for their expected responsibilitiesat the strategic level.”
Schedules already packed
Yet, while training and educational changes are needed, Nagl and Burton wrote, “the military must also be agile enough to change its personnel policies, promotion procedures, and even its vision of itself in order to attract and retain the people it needs to lead the armed services in this new era.” However, the solution “cannot be as simple as adding even more to the already packed training and professional military education curriculum for junior and intermediate- grade leaders,”Nagl and Burton wrote.
They acknowledged that the current training and education system is “constrained by limited capacity and rigorous deployment schedules” and that this demand on available time is “particularly challenging within the Navy and Air Force,” as well as the more technical military occupational specialties within the Army and Marine Corps, “where the demands of mastering a specific system or platform absorb a greater amount of effort.”
“Trying to make every officer a jack-of-all-trades means that every officer will be a master of none,” the study states. Instead, the military should develop “an appropriate balanced distribution of talents across required knowledge areas within segments of the services’ officers through more differentiated career paths.”
This new system of officer development would include lifelong professional military education and allow for increased use of no-penalty sabbatical years for outside study, Nagl and Burton wrote.
“Encouraging the accession and retention of more of the best available talent into the officer corps will require offering more diverse and flexible career paths that encourage risk-taking and unconventional assignments,” the editors wrote.
“Increased use of sabbatical years — particularly to pursue higher education or gain additional experience in an unconventional assignment while also allowing ‘downtime’ from deployments for families — would provide additional career flexibility for future generations of officers who will not be satisfied with the military’s current industrial age personnel management.”
Officers who return to the service from this “gap year” should not incur a career penalty, Nagl and Burton said.
The ‘battle of the narrative’
They also argued for increased opportunities for earlier joint, interagency, intergovernmental and multinational experience for officers, which would reflect the on-the-ground realities that military officers in Iraq and Afghanistan have dealt with over the past decade.
They called for language training — or at least awareness — earlier in an officer’s career, or even before careers begin. The study notes that U.S. Military Academy and Air Force Academy cadets must take two semesters of language training, four if they’re in a nontechnical field.
Nagl, Burton and Mattis also placed a premium on the need to enhance communication skills so that officers have the ability to compete in the “battle of the narrative… understanding that their role in this endeavor may be as important to the success or failure of American policy as is their skill with executing combined arms operations against the enemy.”
But specialization without changes to promotion standards would be seen as patently unfair. This, too, must be changed, the study states. Current promotion policies “favor some skill sets that are relatively less useful than they were during the Cold War, while neglecting to reward those of greatest importance in the emerging national security climate,” Nagl and Burton wrote.
“Tactical excellence often determines who gets promoted, but this results in tacticians being promoted to positions of strategic leadership for which they are often poorly suited by temperament, ability, or training and education.”
Mattis said the military doesn’t need strategists who lack tactical experience. “What really scares the dickens out of me is the strategist who’s never had to put body bags on a helicopter,” he said.
Related:
Topic(s): Regional Security Challenges, Terrorism, Irregular Warfare and Crime, Development and Diplomacy, U.S. Military Forces & Operations, U.S. National Security and Defense Policy
Project(s): U.S. Military Forces and Operations
People: Dr. John A. Nagl
