Military News
02-17-2010, 12:02 PM
02-17-2010 12:41 PM
An era in which military officers find themselves in combat, on humanitarian relief missions, training foreign militaries or hunting pirates demands a new system of training, assessment and promotion that can produce leaders nimble enough to take on such varied challenges, a new think tank study argues.
“The U.S. military must develop a model that trains and educates officers for the complex interactions of the current threat environment while being agile and versatile enough to adapt to a swiftly changing world beyond,” wrote study editors John Nagl and Brian Burton of the Center for a New American Security.
“The military must also be agile enough to change its personnel policies, its promotion procedures, and even its vision of itself in order to attract and retain the people it needs to lead the armed services in this new era.”
The study, “Keeping the Edge: Revitalizing America’s Officer Corps,” argues that the officer corps is “at the forefront of an ever-increasing array of challenges” the nation faces and that the military “must prepare itself better for the inevitability of such challenges.”
“The need is clear for a model that trains and educates officers for complex interactions in current threat environments, and to promote those who demonstrate the ability to adapt swiftly to complexity and ambiguity,” the study states. “The military’s capacity to carry out the missions assigned to it in the 21st century operating environment is inseparable from the effectiveness of the education and training it provides to its personnel, especially its officer corps.”
But the solution, Nagl and Burton write, can’t be as simple as adding even more to the already-packed training and professional military education curriculum for junior and intermediate-grade leaders.
They acknowledge that the current training and education system is “constrained by limited capacity and rigorous deployment schedules” and that this demand on available time is “particularly challenging within the Navy and Air Force, as well as the more technically oriented military occupational specialties within the Army and Marine Corps, where the demands of mastering a specific system or platform absorb a greater amount of effort.
“Trying to make every officer a jack of all trades means that every officer will be a master of none,” it states. Instead, the military should develop “an appropriate balanced distribution of talents across required knowledge areas within segments of the services’ officers through more differentiated career paths.”
This new system of officer development, the study states, would include lifelong professional military education and allow for increased use of no-penalty sabbatical years for outside study.
Importance of sabbaticals
“Encouraging the accession and retention of more of the best available talent into the officer corps will require offering more diverse and flexible career paths that encourage risk-taking and unconventional assignments,” the study states. “Increased use of sabbatical years — particularly to pursue higher education or gain additional experience in an unconventional assignment while also allowing ‘downtime’ `from deployments for families — would provide additional career flexibility for future generations of officers who will not be satisfied with the military’s current Industrial Age personnel management.”
Officers who return to the service from this “gap year” should not incur a career penalty, Nagl and Burton write.
The editors also argue for increased opportunities for earlier joint, interagency, intergovernmental and multinational experience for officers, which would reflect the on-the-ground realities military officers in Iraq and Afghanistan have dealt with over the past decade. They also call for language training — or at least, awareness — earlier in an officer’s career, or even before careers begin.
The study notes that students at the U.S. Military Academy and Air Force Academy must take two semesters of language training, four if they’re in a non-technical field.
Nagl and Burton also place a premium on the need to enhance communication skills so that officers have the ability to compete in the “battle of the narrative, ... understanding that their role in this endeavor may be as important to the success or failure of American policy as is their skill with executing combined arms operations against the enemy.”
Enhancing this kind of specialization without modifying promotion standards would be viewed as patently unfair. This, too, must be changed, the study states.
“Currently, promotion instructions favor some skill sets that are relatively less useful than they were during the Cold War, while neglecting to reward those of greatest importance in the emerging national security climate,” Nagl and Burton write. “Tactical excellence often determines who gets promoted, but this results in tacticians being promoted to positions of strategic leadership for which they are often poorly suited by temperament, ability, or training and education.
“Future selection boards will need clear instructions to properly assess those holistic attributes in candidates for promotion that will be most valuable for anticipated future conflicts, and they should be chaired by officers cognizant of their responsibility to shape the future force to prepare for and meet those demands,” the two editors continue. “Moreover, guidance and oversight for vital selections to three- and four-star rank, made without promotion board input by service chiefs, must be closely examined. This is the single most critical step in creating the officer corps America needs to protect itself in this century.”
The report will be discussed in a Thursday afternoon roundtable hosted by the Center for a New American Security in Washington, D.C. Roundtable participants are scheduled to include Nagl, president of CNAS; as well as Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis, chief of U.S. Joint Forces Command; and Vice Adm. Ann Rondeau, president of the National Defense University.
More... (http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2010/02/military_officers_revitalize_021710w/)
[Clicking on more will open up a popup box with the complete news story from the news source. MilitaryWoman.org is not responsible for content.]
An era in which military officers find themselves in combat, on humanitarian relief missions, training foreign militaries or hunting pirates demands a new system of training, assessment and promotion that can produce leaders nimble enough to take on such varied challenges, a new think tank study argues.
“The U.S. military must develop a model that trains and educates officers for the complex interactions of the current threat environment while being agile and versatile enough to adapt to a swiftly changing world beyond,” wrote study editors John Nagl and Brian Burton of the Center for a New American Security.
“The military must also be agile enough to change its personnel policies, its promotion procedures, and even its vision of itself in order to attract and retain the people it needs to lead the armed services in this new era.”
The study, “Keeping the Edge: Revitalizing America’s Officer Corps,” argues that the officer corps is “at the forefront of an ever-increasing array of challenges” the nation faces and that the military “must prepare itself better for the inevitability of such challenges.”
“The need is clear for a model that trains and educates officers for complex interactions in current threat environments, and to promote those who demonstrate the ability to adapt swiftly to complexity and ambiguity,” the study states. “The military’s capacity to carry out the missions assigned to it in the 21st century operating environment is inseparable from the effectiveness of the education and training it provides to its personnel, especially its officer corps.”
But the solution, Nagl and Burton write, can’t be as simple as adding even more to the already-packed training and professional military education curriculum for junior and intermediate-grade leaders.
They acknowledge that the current training and education system is “constrained by limited capacity and rigorous deployment schedules” and that this demand on available time is “particularly challenging within the Navy and Air Force, as well as the more technically oriented military occupational specialties within the Army and Marine Corps, where the demands of mastering a specific system or platform absorb a greater amount of effort.
“Trying to make every officer a jack of all trades means that every officer will be a master of none,” it states. Instead, the military should develop “an appropriate balanced distribution of talents across required knowledge areas within segments of the services’ officers through more differentiated career paths.”
This new system of officer development, the study states, would include lifelong professional military education and allow for increased use of no-penalty sabbatical years for outside study.
Importance of sabbaticals
“Encouraging the accession and retention of more of the best available talent into the officer corps will require offering more diverse and flexible career paths that encourage risk-taking and unconventional assignments,” the study states. “Increased use of sabbatical years — particularly to pursue higher education or gain additional experience in an unconventional assignment while also allowing ‘downtime’ `from deployments for families — would provide additional career flexibility for future generations of officers who will not be satisfied with the military’s current Industrial Age personnel management.”
Officers who return to the service from this “gap year” should not incur a career penalty, Nagl and Burton write.
The editors also argue for increased opportunities for earlier joint, interagency, intergovernmental and multinational experience for officers, which would reflect the on-the-ground realities military officers in Iraq and Afghanistan have dealt with over the past decade. They also call for language training — or at least, awareness — earlier in an officer’s career, or even before careers begin.
The study notes that students at the U.S. Military Academy and Air Force Academy must take two semesters of language training, four if they’re in a non-technical field.
Nagl and Burton also place a premium on the need to enhance communication skills so that officers have the ability to compete in the “battle of the narrative, ... understanding that their role in this endeavor may be as important to the success or failure of American policy as is their skill with executing combined arms operations against the enemy.”
Enhancing this kind of specialization without modifying promotion standards would be viewed as patently unfair. This, too, must be changed, the study states.
“Currently, promotion instructions favor some skill sets that are relatively less useful than they were during the Cold War, while neglecting to reward those of greatest importance in the emerging national security climate,” Nagl and Burton write. “Tactical excellence often determines who gets promoted, but this results in tacticians being promoted to positions of strategic leadership for which they are often poorly suited by temperament, ability, or training and education.
“Future selection boards will need clear instructions to properly assess those holistic attributes in candidates for promotion that will be most valuable for anticipated future conflicts, and they should be chaired by officers cognizant of their responsibility to shape the future force to prepare for and meet those demands,” the two editors continue. “Moreover, guidance and oversight for vital selections to three- and four-star rank, made without promotion board input by service chiefs, must be closely examined. This is the single most critical step in creating the officer corps America needs to protect itself in this century.”
The report will be discussed in a Thursday afternoon roundtable hosted by the Center for a New American Security in Washington, D.C. Roundtable participants are scheduled to include Nagl, president of CNAS; as well as Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis, chief of U.S. Joint Forces Command; and Vice Adm. Ann Rondeau, president of the National Defense University.
More... (http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2010/02/military_officers_revitalize_021710w/)
[Clicking on more will open up a popup box with the complete news story from the news source. MilitaryWoman.org is not responsible for content.]