Tom Kane explains why our best officers are leaving the military:
It’s convenient to believe that top officers simply have more-lucrative opportunities in the private sector, and that their departures are inevitable. But the reason overwhelmingly cited by veterans and active-duty officers alike is that the military personnel system — every aspect of it — is nearly blind to merit. Performance evaluations emphasize a zero-defect mentality, meaning that risk-avoidance trickles down the chain of command. Promotions can be anticipated almost to the day — regardless of an officer’s competence — so that there is essentially no difference in rank among officers the same age, even after 15 years of service. Job assignments are managed by a faceless, centralized bureaucracy that keeps everyone guessing where they might be shipped next.
The Pentagon’s response to such complaints has traditionally been to throw money at the problem, in the form of millions of dollars in talent-blind retention bonuses. More often than not, such bonuses go to any officer in the “critical” career fields of the moment, regardless of performance evaluations. This only ensures that the services retain the most risk-averse, and leads to long-term mediocrity.
When I asked veterans for the reasons they left the military, the top response was “frustration with military bureaucracy” — cited by 82 percent of respondents (with 50 percent agreeing strongly). In contrast, the conventional explanation for talent bleed—the high frequency of deployments — was cited by only 63 percent of respondents, and was the fifth-most-common reason. According to 9 out of 10 respondents, many of the best officers would stay if the military was more of a meritocracy.
The US military has a long history of innovative thinking — and a long history of punishing it:
General Mitchell was court-martialed for insubordination in 1925; and who can forget the hostile treatment afforded General Eric Shinseki in 2003 after he testified that “something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers” would probably be required to stabilize post-invasion Iraq?
In a 2007 essay in the Armed Forces Journal, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling offered a compelling explanation for this risk-averse tendency. A veteran of three tours in Iraq, Yingling articulated a common frustration among the troops: that a failure of generalship was losing the war. His critique focused not on failures of strategy but on the failures of the general-officer corps making the strategy, and of the anti-entrepreneurial career ladder that produced them: “It is unreasonable to expect that an officer who spends 25 years conforming to institutional expectations will emerge as an innovator in his late forties.”
Wow. This stinks.
To my mind, there are three major factors that conspire to create this state of affairs.
The first is the narrowness of the promotion pyramid. At every level, for every 4-6 officers of your rank, there is only one spot for the next higher rank. At the low levels, this is not a terrible problem, as many officers do their commitment and leave the army, but it makes it nearly impossible to achieve Colonel.
The second is the up-or-out policy. As an officer, if you are passed over for promotion twice you are kicked out of the Army. This, plus that first policy combine to weed out the risk tolerant and unlucky. With so many competitors for each slot, any blot on one’s record is grounds for getting passed over… and in a peacetime army, there is really no way to distinguish one’s self from one’s peers in a meaningful way.
The last factor is the political nature of upper level – Colonel and above. Essentially, the primary skill of a general is public relations and politics, not just with other members of the Army, but with members of Congress and the White House as well.
To reiterate, the narrowness of the promotion pyramid and the up-or-out policy only become destructive when there is no way to distinguish one’s self from one’s peers in a meaningful way. The goal, in peacetime, is not to excel, but to avoid even minor failures. (Our academic system shares a similar nature, where good students get straight As. There’s nowhere to go but down.)