The Atlantic: U.S. military personnel practices causing brain drain

Great Debates
21

As I’ve stated, promotion right now is at an all time high. So I don’t know how one can bitch about that.

Institutional inertia and bureaucratic nonsense. I don’t even know what that means. Does this organization of one million people have a bureaucracy? Yep. I guess that just seems like buzz word bingo to me. When I’ve talked with people that have left the military and I hear that, it usually means that they wanted to do something really cool and they were too junior or not qualified to do it and were angry that “the bureaucracy” wouldn’t let them do it.

A lot of the issues now come down to the fact that we’ve been at war for 15 years straight, and people are just worn out.

22

I’ve heard second-hand from intelligent young folks in the military that their is a cancerous strain of incompetent, hard-headed leadership which is unwilling to listen to new ideas.

This, obviously, is pushing out many bright young recruits.

23

I see a parallel to this in private business and think it’s a generational gulf thing versus an issue with the military. Young people are being hired who have a huge array of knowledge, but lack the discipline and experience to use it properly. (My opinion is that this knowledge level is high in comparison to what the elder folk came in with, but I might just be getting old.)

When the natural youthful exuberance hits the wall from the next level of managers, it creates drama and the young people naturally wash out - from frustration, anger, depression, or what have you.

I could see it exacerbating a command structure that wasn’t prepared to deal with it, but the military has built enough disciplined soldiers over the years that they probably have it in the bag better than the private sector.

24

I understand what the idea is. I’m just questioning whether the idea is right.

Look at police departments. You join the department as a uniformed police officer. Some people want to move up in the ranks; they want to be sergeants, lieutenants, and captains. Other officers want to move over to the investigatory side and become detectives and then inspectors. Some may want to go all the way up to the ranks of chief or commissioner.

But some don’t. They’re happy to be a patrolman working a beat. And the department needs good patrolmen working those beats. So what’s the sense of taking a police officer who’s happy with his current rank and doing a good job at that current rank and telling him that he has to give up that rank within ten years and take a promotion or he’ll have to resign? You either end up with an experience police officer leaving the department or leaving a job he knows how to do so he can do a job he doesn’t. And either way you’re creating a vacancy in your patrolman ranks that you’ve got to fill with an inexperienced recruit. How does that benefit anyone?

25

What the highest ranking current/fmr US Military or Naval service member here? Maybe they can give us some better insights?

26

IME most ex-military people are at best neutral toward ‘up or out’, many are negative, few positive. Then again pretty much by definition almost all ex-officers went ‘out’ at some point rather that ‘up’ to the very top, albeit often purely by choice.

And just on first principles it seems hard to argue with some kind of up or out in a pyramid, unless you want to make the pyramid more top heavy. But arguably the US military is already too top heavy.

It seems criticism of ‘up or out’ is sometimes kind of a bumper sticker to represent potentially more valid but complicated complaints about the personnel system.

The US military keeps losing wars. Obviously that’s also to do with civilian leadership decisions, but it becomes extreme at some point to blame everything on civilians unless they enter into the ‘perfect’ war. Another fairly recent Atlantic article argued not to ignore potential problems in senior uniformed leadership. That’s not exactly the same issue as general quality of the officer corps but again the final key product of the military personnel system is flag officers. Also, recent wars haven’t tested USN and USAF senior leadership as much (except in some cases at the very top where non ground force flag officers are in charge of major joint commands or Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs). But that doesn’t mean we can assume all’s well. So I’m not saying we shouldn’t examine personnel policies.

27

I have 30 years as a line Officer in the Navy as I noted up thread. I work in one of the offices in OSD that does this type of policy. Are you shopping for an opinion you like better, or just a better poster?

As I noted preciously, I think the military has made many significant personnel policy changes over my 30 years. DoD continues to do so. Hell, we just changed the retirement policy, partially due to money and partially due to portability that the millennials desire. You don’t think that’s a sign of flexibility?

I spend a lot of time among nieces and nephews fairly new to the job market. They generally all believe that the “bureaucracy” keeps them down, the “old guys” don’t listen to their great ideas and they know they’re smarter than the VPs who should just hurry up and retire already. Only one of them works for DoD. This is a standard thought process today. Might have been when I was young as well.

28

Anyone talking about this issue who isn’t starting out by bifurcating the officers from the enlisted isn’t going to make any good sense. The two worlds have utterly different dynamics.

Also, “up or out” is nowadays shorthand for lots of loosely related issues. IOW, it doesn’t matter what specific personnel policy somebody is beefing about, “up or out” is the label applied in the civilian press. As such it interferes with understanding; it doesn’t contribute to understanding.

Here’s my take gleaned from 8 years as an active duty USAF officer (O-1 to O-3) roughly corresponding with Reagan’s terms as President:

The officer personnel and promotion system was essentially a seniority system. By and large, everybody moved up in seniority order. The rate of which was mostly controlled by whether the headcount was expanding or contracting vs. whatever demographic bulges happened to be how far upstream of you.

There were pressure relief valves starting at the promotion to Major = O4 level. In my era this happened at about the 12 year point in one’s career. This was where the service could jettison excess people as they tried to manage the taper of the pyramid. Using what they thought of as quality metrics. At each higher promotion step the pressure relief valves dumped a larger and larger percentage. Again according to roughly the same criteria.

The issues I saw:

  1. The organization was ill-equipped to recognize and advance the tiny fraction of truly amazingly outstandingly talented people. Note I’m NOT saying everybody else is a buffoon. By and large USAF had very talented people all the way up & down. But within all these folks who deservedly were A-level players in an absolute sense, it was very hard to reward the 1% who were AAA players in a relative sense.

There were small promotion speed-ups available along the way, but nothing like the relatively meteoric rises possible in civilian startups or in some spots within Fortune 100 scale corporations which were our scale peers.

A direct result of this was that those uber-talented folks are almost all squeezed out real early while they are still junior officers with negligible influence on the organization as a whole.

How much this very real effect was/is actually a problem depends on how we propose to solve it and how much the rest of the USAF can absorb the flexibility. And is the subject for a much longer post I probably won’t make.
1a) Because rank = pay USAF had the problem of no way to increase pay without increasing rank. There are blunt tools like fixed extra pay items for all pilots or all doctors. But no way to do what they do in private business where you have 5 salesmen whose compensation outcomes differ by 5x between the ordinary schlub and the super productive one. IT often has 2:1 or 3:1 pay differences for similar jobs performed by schlubs vs. stars. Before considering start-up stock options. USAF had zero ability to do anything anywhere near merit pay, much less get-rich-young pay.
2) Widespread ignorance on the part of officers, including myself, about the reality of how staid and seniority-based promotion was within those Fortune 100 scale peer corporations. A direct result of this was lots of whiny assumptions that the USAF was stupid and slow moving with no understanding of how stupid and slow-moving Bank of America or General Motors might be.
3) The then-current retirement system was simple. Stay in for 19 years and 364 days then receive exactly bupkiss when you quit. Stay 20 years or more then receive a very nice pension for your entire remaining life, plus low-cost medical care for you and your spouse also for life.

A consequence of this is that at around the 12 year point, folks are motivated to do exactly one thing: stay in no matter what to obtain the cookies at the end of the road. Competence, zeal, etc. don’t matter. When I voluntarily separated at the 8 year point the pull of the 20 year retirement was not decisive to me. But its gravity was already tugging at me and all my contemporaries a little bit. It pulled on many hard enough to get them to stay. Not all of those who stayed were the best suited for USAF’s needs.

By and large the pressure relief valves between 12 and 20 years did not have the ability to identify and remove the time-servers. Which if they did so, would have greatly increased the promotion rate for folks below. Affording the opportunity to inject more merit and less seniority into the earlier phases of the career. Which IMO can only be good.

The personnel management challenge is how to *fairly *walk away from the [20 years or nothing] deal? Which is not unlike the defined benefit vs. defined contribution retirement funding challenge in private businesses, or the future of social security.

One approach would be to erect the new system for everybody starting their career on/after some date certain. Then wait 20 years for the old system’s pig to flow through the manpower python.

**Spifflog **mentions a new system. I know nothing of it but would be interested to learn more.
4) For *some *technical fields there is the problem of the expert journeyman; the person who wants to be a shop-floor expert worker for his / her whole career. Perhaps they want to advance to team lead, but they have no desire to switch from doing to supervising. This is a real issue for some officers and many, many more enlisted folks. In USAF obviously the pilot job is the poster child for this effect and the airlines provide a way to be a career shop floor worker for those so inclined.

As warfare gets more complex, the number of different jobs that could benefit from a lifetime journeyman track only increases. In the 1910 US Army other than the command track there weren’t too many skills that could so benefit. So the entire promotion & retention system in 1910 was built around that model: creating and growing commanders able to command ever larger formations. The challenge is that to a 90% approximation we’re still using that system. Or at least were in my era.

In my era there were lots of jobs that would have benefited from lifetime journeymen workers. But the promotion / retention system was still single track for command. (Net of the special cases like doctors, chaplains, etc. who collectively are 5% of the total). IMO there are many more such jobs today.

In effect the low standards required of the time-servers waiting for 20 amounted to a way for them to be ineffective and unnecessary supervisors who’re “compensated” for doing a job they detest (and often suck at) by the carrot at the end of the ever-shortening stick of 20 total years. A side effect of this is the tendency of the bureaucracy to create ever more regulation and policy to micromanage those non-command supervisory roles. the goal being to limit the autonomy of these goofs to actually wreck anything. Which at the same time inhibits any innovative folks in parallel positions from actually innovating.

The real challenge IMO for any lifetime journeyman program is the need to pay civilian-competitive wages, especially once you remove that huge 20-years-or-bust annuity effect. Which again requires breaking the rank=pay model.

Bottom line:
I want to emphasize that I’m talking about my experiences as a JO 30 years ago. I do work with people who are currently Guard or Reserve, so I get some rumor and innuendo about current practices. But not much anymore.

I’m not trying to disagree with spifflog’s vastly more current info. And as a 30 year officer he’s obviously of much greater rank than I ever attained. With all the perspective differences that entails.

I’m hoping here to peel the onion a bit and maybe break out some distinct issues that some folks may have conflated.

29

Spifflog, I read your post, but missed the 30 years as an officer bit. Sorry.

My reason for asking was since someone who achieved high rank would at least be cognizant of both the advantages and disadvantages of the current officer promotion system.

So in no order.

i) How much does connections, visibility to senior officers, being of the right regiment/arm of service matter? It obviously matters, as in any human organisation, but is it a case of being the cherry on top of an excellent CV, or a case of a mediocrity been promoted regularly. And how has it varied.

ii) Your comrades who were not promoted, did you see a pattern of people being hard done by regularly or as much as one would expect.

iii) Was there an overemphasis on ticking all the right boxes ,having done the right courses, qualifications, command and staff tours or did they promote unconventional and original thinkers. How did this vary between war and peace

iv) How did the service handle paper tigers? Happens with every service, but when the wars began in earnest did you see more highly regarded officers fail at actual command than what you would have expected or not. How quick was the service to recognise those?

v) Conversely, how quick was the service to recognize Sherman type officers, i.e those who were actually better in higher posts than lower ones.

30

Once you make field grade it’s not strictly up or out. There’s a thing called selective continuation that allows continued service despite being passed over twice. For Majors it’s up to 24 years of commissioned service. For Lieutenant Colonels it’s 28 years. You fall behind making sure they have slots for those still on track as having potential to keep moving up. It’s not a guaranteed out though.

The issue of boards trying to pick and choose the best from board packets looked at for less than 2 minutes with things like inflated evaluations is real. I’ve had those conversations with other field grades during my time. How to encourage creativity and prudent risk taking in an environment that can be brutal comes down to leadership. The systemic challenge is that those who focus on gaming the system aren’t in great positions to mentor, evaluate, or underwrite mistakes once they do achieve rank.

31

And then there was the guy who spent a good chunk of his career (JO, XO, and CO) on the same boat…
His name was John, IIRC, and his wife’s name was Luisa, but I can’t think of their surname…

32

I think you’re missing the point. What they’re trying to say is that the best and brightest these days are looking for more than the standard career path that the military offers, and are leaving the military for more challenging and higher paying civilian jobs. Or they don’t want to put up with the colossal helping of penny-ante bureaucratic BS that by all accounts, the military serves up hot and fresh, while putting in their time for promotion to doing cool stuff.

That doesn’t necessarily contradict what you’re saying, except that the people being promoted at record rates aren’t necessarily the best and brightest, or the ones who we as a nation, want to keep. This isn’t anything new either- it’s just somewhat exacerbated by a reviving economy and decreasing force levels. This article half implies that we were seeing the results of something similar in Iraq and Afghanistan, even though it’s main thrust is about the idea that we tolerate mediocrity in flag officers in a way that we never did in the past.

It’s not so much a matter of keeping competent junior officers- it’s more that the people O-6 and above are the ones who stayed in, and managed to avoid being weeded out at each level. Doesn’t come close to meaning that they were the best of their starting crop of O-1s though, and that’s the point the OP’s article was trying to make. As a nation, we need to try and ensure that those people making O-6 and above are the BEST of the crop of O-1s that we see each year, not merely the ones with the most tolerance for bullshit or tedium.

33

I’ll write a short response to this, as it’s been a long day in the office reviewing promotion plans and the cost of the new military retirement system :smiley:

I think the number one problem that we have today is that we’ve been at war for 15 years straight. And with the current optempo, people are just getting warn out. Most of the junior Officers that I talk to that are getting out, are saying that going back to sea or in theater is just too much or a sacrifice to them or their families. Most folks at their four year point are making about $64K (Officer) or $31K (Enlisted) It’s good money but for most of them who will deploy again, it’s not enough.

With that said, the military life has always been a bit of a calling. None of us were ever going to be rich. We all say, if I wanted to be rich, I wouldn’t have joined the military. So if your so called “best and the brightest” want to be the richest, it’s never going to be us. And for a lot of these folks, the military was never going to be what they wanted to do for a career, now or in 1940. As I said, there are some fundamental things that the military requires that your “best” just aren’t willing to do and that we can’t change. Fighting wars in the middle east and being on a ship for 6 months at a clip are two of those things.

You say they don’t want to wait to do cool stuff? You can go from civilian into an FA-18 fighter in two years. Want to command a navy destroyer? 12 years. How much faster do you want that to be?

I think the biggest issue we have now are optempo and the required military lifestyle. And we are working to change those things as best we can be to be an effective fighting force there are limits.