How to lose great leaders? Ask the Army

Wednesday, December 17th, 2014

Tim Kane recommends that we move our military to a total volunteer force — one that treats officers as human capital with autonomy rather than as physical capital in inventory:

High quit rates are just a symptom of the deeper problem that too many military members are mismatched with their jobs.

In truth, military officers are only volunteers for one day: the day they sign up. Afterwards, they’re treated with the same kind of inflexible, coercive management that has defined militaries since history began. No electronic “job boards” list openings for the thousands of available jobs in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. No junior officers know where their next job assignment will be, or if it will fit with their interests, strengths and talents. And no commanders are trusted to directly hire the subordinates they feel their teams need.

Rather, junior officers are generally limited to rank-ordering the base locations they prefer. Commanders are limited to making a “by-name request” of some officers, but this is more often than not ignored by higher-ups. Labor supply is coordinated with labor demand by large bureaucracies that haven’t changed much since Harry Truman was president in the 1950s.

Why does this nonsensical and anachronistic approach persist? The mantra from the central planners in the bowels of the Pentagon has always been that the “needs of the military come first.” That’s dumb. Smart organizations in the private sector have learned that putting employees’ needs first — ahead of corporate ones — only seems unproductive to short-term thinkers.

This stat caught my eye:

Since the 1950s, America’s defense budget shrank from 17 percent of GDP to less than 4 percent today.

Comments

  1. Coyote says:

    4% of GDP? WTF? This must be the gazillions of non-existent derivative “assets”. GDP, what a joke. The “defense” budget is so grotesque it boggles the mind. Homeless kids eat rats in the New York sewers while the MIC ships tanks to the Ukraine. Gawd, when will this cesspool of a empire go down. Please barbarians, start eating more Eloi!

  2. The budget is large. What we get for it… less so, especially in comparison to what we got out of it in the 50′s.

  3. AAB says:

    Here is a graph that shows the UK Defence budget as a percent of GDP 1700–2014. Most of the time it’s less than 10%, only peaking during wartime, maxing out during WW1 and WW2 (~40% and ~45% respectively). Evidently spending more than 10% of GDP on defence isn’t sustainable over a long period of time (in a market-based economy at least).

    The chart was sourced from here, where you can find other data on UK government spending circa 1692–2014.

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