The Army Gropes Toward A Cultural Revolution

AUSA: A new generation of generals is rising in the Army. It’s a generation forced to get creative by more than a decade of ugly unconventional conflicts. It’s a generation disillusioned by the mistakes of superiors, military and civilian alike. It’s a generation willing to take on the Army’s bureaucratic culture of top-down management, which dates back to Elihu Root becoming Secretary of War in 1899.

But can they shift the notoriously slow-moving service? “I think the Army would acknowledge they are in the earliest stages of figuring out how to design and field the force we will need in the future,” Michele Flournoy, former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, told my colleague Colin Clark today at the Bipartisan Policy Center.