Junior officer cage matches: blocking returns

Who's ready to talk Army officer evaluation policy? Because there was a big change announced on Friday that was brought to my attention on Twitter (James Joyner, Mike Lyons, Jimmy Sky, Crispin Burke, and RB Stalin). And it all stems from this media release from the Army's Human Resources Command. Firstly, I think it's funny that HRC would put out a "media release" on this topic - they might as well just fax a copy to the Army Times as I don't imagine anyone else will be covering this story (What? You're not interested NY Times? Why ever not?).

So here are the two major changes from this release:

1. Junior Officer check boxes. Back in the day all officers were "blocked" against each other (rated as above center of mass, center of mass upper half, center of mass lower half, below center of mass) and senior raters could only allocate so many officers to the top block as a percentage of the number of officers he senior rates of that rank (i.e., if a LTC battalion commander senior rates 15 lieutenants, only 2 could get top block). The limitation was a hedge against the "everyone's great" mentality of the zero-defect Army of the 1990s.

The Army did away with this type of blocking for lieutenants, captains, and the lower ranks of the warrant officer corps in 2004 or so because it didn't much matter anymore because of pressing personnel needs in higher ranks. With promotion rates to captain over 100% every year and rates to major in the high 90s, it didn't matter if you were a shitty platoon leader. You were needed as a captain (some guys still didn't get promoted, but it was mainly because they broke the law). There were other reasons involved - allowing LTs to take some risks and not be punished for it; LT evaluations are all masked from promotion boards once you've made captain so it didn't much matter anyway.

So what does this mean? It means the Army is getting serious again about effectively and honestly evaluating its junior officers. It means that captains are being truly evaluated again for their company command time - a massive indicator of competence for battalion command. It starts weeding out the weak early and is hopefully an indicator that promotions (and the commensurate increases in responsibility) won't be automatic anymore. It gives junior officers something to strive for: to get that top block to work towards earlier promotions and more responsibility. If you can't tell, I think this is change for the better.

2. 360 assessments. I had no idea the Army had started doing this, but the evaluation form will force the rater to indicate if the reviewed officer has had a 360 degree assessment done in the past 3 years. The assessments are apparently not part of the review, accessible only to the rater, and only for self-development of the reviewed officer. For now. There's been a lot of talk over the years to introduce actual rating by this method to smoke out "toxic leaders" and this is a step in that direction. I have conflicting views on idea of subordinates evaluating their leaders, but I can honestly say a terrible assessment from my subordinates when I was a cadet was a real eye-opener for me. I doubt I would have been a very successful officer at all without it. So this is probably a good change as well - or at least a good step in the right direction for holistic evaluations.

This all suggests that Army is about to get much more serious about evaluating its officers. It could be to get ready to cull the herd once austerity measures are put in place. It could be a response to the toxic leadership surveys. It could be some general just wanted to do it. It could be all of these. Whatever the reasoning, these are good changes and I hope the Army makes more of them.

Attempts to address lack of continuity and expertise hampered by lack of continuity, expertise

Apparently the Af-Pak Hands program, designed to create from scratch a pool of language-trained area experts to help fill critical billets related to the Afghan war, is having some trouble getting going. As it turns out, one of the big problems is a.... lack of language-trained area experts. And some other stuff, like the significant disincentive to volunteerism that comes from a career-killing five-year commitment to a program that no one understands well enough to fit service there into the context of a competitive rating system.

The military’s effort to build a seasoned corps of expert officers for the Afghan war, one of the highest priorities of top commanders, is off to a slow start, with too few volunteers and a high-level warning to the armed services to steer better candidates into the program, according to some senior officers and participants.

The groundbreaking program is meant to address concerns that the fight in Afghanistan has been hampered by a lack of continuity and expertise in the region among military personnel. But some officers have been reluctant to sign up for an unconventional career path because they fear it will hurt their advancement — a perception that top military leaders are trying to dispel as they tailor new policies for the complex task of taking on resilient insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Perhaps most disappointingly, Admiral Mullen just put out a letter to the services in which he expressed concerns over the quality and/or appropriateness of many of the volunteers. So not only are we short of willing candidates, but many of those who have signed up probably aren't suited for duty in a program of this type, and we're faced with the reality that there probably just aren't enough of those people around. (Sort of reminds me of the argument that "unnamed captain in the Pentagon" made on Ricks' blog a few weeks ago: we need more Special Forces! Like, 700,000 of them! And they need to be special!)

Me fail English? That's unpossible!

There's something seriously ironic about misspelling the names of prominent highly-educated members of other services in a published article advocating for more educational opportunities for senior Marine officers.

Military professionals pursuing advanced education at the doctoral level is not something that only exists outside of the United States. Indeed, all three of our sister Services have formal doctoral education programs, the results of which are inarguably successful. The United States Army has developed many of its own homegrown counterinsurgency experts with names like Patraeus (doctorate in international affairs from Princeton), McMasters (doctorate in American history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), and Mansoor (doctorate in military history from Ohio State University). These are officers who have obtained doctorates while in uniform and yet remained operationally relevant, serving in combat as commanders at the brigade, division, and corps levels.

I wonder if Patraeus and McMasters ever crossed paths with GEN Petraeus and BG McMaster...? (Sic. Emphasis above is mine.)

Seriously, the article is fine and makes a good argument, but I laughed out loud when I saw that. I'm really not making fun of Marines here. (Ok, only a little bit.)

UPDATE: If if makes you feel better, Devil Dogs, I misspelled "misspell" on first publication. (But it was a typo.)

He's Talking About What???

SWJ put out an announcement for a conference titled Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond scheduled for late September at the National Press Club. There will be a lot of good speakers there, even if it appears that half of them are just walking up from Penn and 13th.

As we're picking on Tom Ricks lately and to add evidence to Gulliver's post, why on earth is Ricks on the panel for "Officer Development in the U.S. Military"??? What expertise or experience does he have to offer on this topic? None as far as I can tell. Unless you consider the blog posts he had at Best Defense expertise or experience - which mainly consisted of picking out letters from people who agreed with him and insulting those that didn't (At this point I should caveat that I went to one of these schools he derides so much). It is just more sensationalism for its own sake instead of having a useful discussion about how to improve the service academies, as I'm pretty sure they're not going to go away just because Tom Ricks wants them to. Community college education indeed.

So go see the panel if you want to. I'm going to go ahead and put money on the fact that there will be a lot of blustering about closing West Point and the War Colleges. And then hopefully Mssrs. Fick and Kaplan will actually add to the conversation on how we improve the institutional education for our officer corps.