Captain Crisis

Never been a captain. Never been officer.

Andrew Tilghman's article about retaining junior officers strikes me as being mostly on target. However he skirmishes around a major point and misses another altogether.

To be a success in the Army, one must have a high tolerance for B.S. I served for a time in the early 80s. The officers I served under ranged from outstanding to incompetent. This is not a new phenomenon, even in the US Army. Even a cursory reading military history that focuses at all on company level will show that enlisted have a keen understanding of who is they would follow to hell and those they would stay as far away as possible in a scrape. It is as it has ever been.

I loved being a soldier. I hated the Army. The balance of my willingness serve hung on the thin thread of serving under competent commanders and my willingness to tolerate the inevitable B.S. This was true for me and for many other veterans I have spoken to over the years. No sane individual enjoys beating their head against a wall.

Captains set the tenor for the entire company. You can have psycho sergeants and idiotic second lieutenants but a solid captain will keep that all in check. The reverse is also true, an incompetent captain can destroy the morale of a unit no matter how good the sergeants and lieutenants are. Having experienced both situations in a peace time capacity, it can only be even more amplified in during wartime.

Back to the B.S. factor in Army life. By the end of my enlistment, I was in the midst of experiencing an incompetent leader who allowed and perhaps encouraged his senior NCOs act out on the junior NCOs and enlisted personnel.

After the Army, while I was in college, I got friendly with an NCO, a ranger, assigned to the ROTC unit on campus. I began to think maybe my experience at the end of my enlistment was an exception rather than a rule. I decided to take a military history course run by an ex-naval officer/tenured professor and the Major assigned to lead the ROTC unit. I once again to flirt with the idea serving. Long story short, during the recruiting effort, the Major lied to me.

The Major reminded me that having a good military experience requires solid honest leadership and that nitwits will inevitably be promoted so long as they don't make waves.

I did not re-up. I have a low tolerance for B.S. and I dislike failure, particularly predictable failure. The point that Tilghman skirmishes around is that it is my bet most of the officers leaving do not have a sufficient tolerance for B.S.

The Army that I experienced is not a place that encouraged independent thinking. Yet independent, even entrepreneurial thinking is exactly what the Long War requires.

The point that he misses? That as good officers leave there will be a trailing factor of good enlisted personnel leaving too.

Its somewhat encouraging that General Petraeus that is sitting on promotion boards. I would be more encouraged if it was clearer that men like Petraeus were in a position to at least shaming the bureaucracy into at least moving in the right direction.

During World War I, General John Pershing acquiesced to Secretary Newton Baker's request to having General Peyton March, an effective combat leader, come back to Washington to kick some bureaucratic butt. I have seen little inclination of today's civilian leadership to act in a correspondingly clear sighted way. For heaven's sake we have a sailor acting as the Chairman of the Joint Chief's of Staff during a land war!

All is not lost. General Pershing turned a largely constabulary force into first rate army with aid and support of clear thinking civilian leadership. Our war fighting capabilities can be reconfigured again, but if the will exists to do this, precious little has been on display from the current administration. Little if any mention of it has surfaced the current presidential candidates. Iraq may be simmering down, but the Long War will continue.

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I'll be writing on things that interest me. Current events, technology, the Long War and anything that strikes my fancy.