Why our best officers are leaving

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/why-our-best-officers-are-leaving/8346/1/

by bobf • 16 years ago

82 28 16 years ago

De Tocqueville made similar remarks, obviously based on the history of War of 1812. For that matter, consider the Civil War: Grant and Sherman were out of the service at the start,

john_horton• 16 years ago

I'm skeptical that (a) the personnel system is a huge driver of attrition and that (b) the proposed solution would work well.

On (a), deployments are generally pretty terrible, esp. if you have a family. Most officers I know that got out didn't say it explicitly, but they made a comparison of life in the military vs. life outside the military. In this comparison, deployments are such a huge factor that the other stuff is pretty secondary.

On (b), officers have very few objective measures of performance. Those that exist have lots of noise. Good platoon sergeants can make incompetent platoon leaders still look pretty good. You can pencil-whip maintenance records. You get good or bad draws of soldiers & assignments etc. This encourages politicking and focusing on appearance over substance. Adding more "flexibility" to such a system could have some bad second-order effects, by ramping up the incentives to appear good to your commanders, without actually being good.

mattdeboard2• 16 years ago

As a former enlisted Marine of 10 years, I would like to see if the same conclusions hold true for Marine officers. I would be very surprised if so. The U.S. Army, as a whole, is a damaged organization. (That is not to say there are not exemplary units within.)

The best officers are leaving the Army, not the military as a whole.

limmeau• 16 years ago

What differences between Army and Marines do you see?

mattdeboard2• 16 years ago

A comprehensive response to this question -- which deserves nothing but a comprehensive response -- would require too much writing to explain it all to an outsider. Too much relative to how much I'm willing to write on it, of course. :)

Volscio• 16 years ago

Former enlisted Army. Most of my friends with officer experience are still in. They are superb leaders. They're Marines and Army. I wonder if Air Force and Navy are having problems, because I don't hear too much about them -- the ones I do know left to go to school.

I would argue that the ongoing wars have forged some great officers and have exposed many more as being frauds (see most of the last joint chiefs of staff). I'm kind of happy that Gates just announced he'd push out 100 out of 900 top officers. Definitely need to cut out some of the deadwood.

I don't think the Army is damaged -- why would you say that?

drblast• 16 years ago

Let's talk about the problems in the Navy. I'm an officer. I don't agree that all of the best officers are leaving. Some are, but probably not in greater percentages than the mediocre and bad ones. The promotion system is as horrible as this article indicates.

There are some extremely talented officers at the higher ranks in the Navy, at least, that at least stay until they are able to retire. The incentives to stay after retirement are few unless you either really love the job, or are very ambitious. There is an extreme financial disincentive to stay after about 22 years.

The Navy, at least, has an extremely backward promotion system that is at odds with its own interests. Many, many times I've been in the position where I've wanted to move people around to their areas of expertise but to do so would hurt their chances of promotion. If I have a Chief, for example, who is one of the best in the Navy at Job A, but Job A doesn't supervise a lot of people, chances are he won't be promoted no matter how well he does in that job. Some of these jobs are extremely specialized and there is a huge gulf between someone who is an expert and someone who isn't.

There is a big emphasis on officers getting advanced technical degrees, but very few jobs available to make use of those skills, and those that are aren't necessarily good career moves. We have a large contingent of officers with Masters degrees in electrical engineering and computer science doing middle-level management work while brand new sailors with six weeks of training get the technical jobs. When this setup fails miserably, contractors are brought in to fix the problem at great expense.

The entire world has pretty much decided over the last century that increased specialization leads to greater efficiency and cost effectiveness. By promoting and operating the way the Navy does, the Navy has decided to take the opposite tack; the path to success in the Navy is to become a generalist and do a little bit of everything.

One of the most insightful remarks I've heard in my entire career was when the Navy changed the promotion system to try to promote more based on merit than favoritism. This caused an uproar as the system we adopted was rather bureaucratic and ham-handed, and seemed to put some of our best sailors at a disadvantage. While everyone was complaining, an LT I knew at the time said, "You know what, none of this matters. As soon as everyone figures out how the system works, they'll work within the system to ensure that the best people get promoted." And that's pretty much how it works today. The only time the system really makes a difference is when it hinders decision making.

lelele• 16 years ago

> The entire world has pretty much decided over the last century that increased specialization leads to greater efficiency and cost effectiveness. By promoting and operating the way the Navy does, the Navy has decided to take the opposite tack; the path to success in the Navy is to become a generalist and do a little bit of everything.

My understanding is that generalists thrive and collect promotions everywhere. Specialists get stuck with their area of expertise. Wanna be the CTO? Then be a specialist. Wanna be the CEO, which rules them all? Then be a generalist.

count• 16 years ago

I think one of the reasons for the strange 'assignment' and 'orders' system of filling job needs is overlooked by the author. 'Randomly'[1] rotating people around in the service has a side effect (or, actually, it's main purpose) that is very beneficial to civilian society in the United States - it virtually eliminates any situation where soldiers are more loyal to their chain of command than to the country/Army as a whole.

Getting a new boss every 3-4 years means you'll never really cultivate that lifelong attachment to the one boss you'd do anything for. This stems the a huge amount of potential military coup/uprising/etc., and keeps the armed forces focused on their jobs and loyalty to the mission and their country.

Has there ever been a military vs. govt/civilian situation in the US once this policy was put in place?

[1] It's not random at all - it's a 'who you know' system. 'Detailers' are staffed at the personnel bureau, and if you know your detailer well (or have other connections), you get the job you want. Just like any other major organization.

jackfoxy2• 16 years ago

The potential for military coup had never been a problem in the U.S. military for the reason of well-established civilian control of the military as well. The closest thing to a real problem having been MacArthur's insubordination to Truman. That problem arose in part through the old system where senior generals kept their positions forever in a hard-wired seniority system. Many of the problems of that antiquated system were dealt with by the Goldwater-Nichols act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldwater-Nichols_Act

locopati• 16 years ago

There was the 1934 Business Plot

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

Umalu• 16 years ago

It is a common complaint in pyramid-shaped hierarchies that the "best" people leave. This is because they have to leave. As they climb the ladder, the rungs get smaller so fewer can fit. Each year, many of the people who were the best the year before (and got to the next rung on the ladder) have to leave. So people in organizations like this naturally come to think that the "best" people leave -- because eventually they all do. Of course, it is possible to design a hierarchy so dysfunctional that the best people leave and the worst people stay, and I don't know enough about the armed services to assess whether that's the case here, but whenever I read about the best leaving, I wonder how much of that's an intended feature or an unintended bug.

dvdt• 16 years ago

I also wondered about how much the survey results of disaffected officers could be attributed to problems inherent to any organization. It would have been nice to see comparable survey results for the private sector on questions like "does a good job retaining the best leaders."

Nate75Sanders• 16 years ago

"Why does the American military produce the most innovative and entrepreneurial leaders in the country..."

stopped reading right there

nhangen• 16 years ago

I think what it comes down to is that you either love and accept the military way of life or you don't. If you do, then you'll stay and accept the good with the bad. If you don't, then no amount of promotion is going to keep you.

I wasn't an officer, but I was an NCO in SOCOM, and we had a lot of very intelligent Soldiers. We had one of the lowest retention rates in the Army (I'm guessing) simply because we had other options in the civilian world that paid more, challenged us more, promoted us based on talent and potential, and kept us home.

Overall, the military promotion system is backwards and archaic. Until it is fixed (at least in the Army), I think you'll continue to see a steady decline in re-enlistment of talented people.

In the Navy, I can only assume that it's the same way.

dave_h• 16 years ago

ex-Naval Officer: I left because I knew the most incapable officers around me would be promoted at the same time I would be and that after a few years on shore duty I would be back on a submarine working with them. Except now they would be in a position that their level of ability would affect more people. After a few more years, most of those people would be promoted to the next level with me.

It was just my experience, I don't know about other ships but some of the officers at the level higher than me were not worth the oxygen they displaced. The Captain of the ship was unable or unwilling to deal with them. It eventually degraded into the Captain making jokes, I think he thought that would motivate them to work harder.

The worst thing for me was that there was no mechanism to filter out the underachievers. The evaluation system is useless, everyone gets the same grade.

jseliger• 16 years ago

ex-Naval Officer: I left because I knew the most incapable officers around me would be promoted at the same time I would be

I actually thought about teaching high school, and in many ways my skill set and temperament are well-suited to that occupation. But public school systems offer zero reward -- and I'm not only or primarily speaking of the financial kind -- for skill or merit. Even the very worst teachers can't be fired for merely being bad at their jobs, as many of the articles I collected here: http://jseliger.com/2009/11/12/susan-engel-doesnt-get indicate.

btilly2• 16 years ago

I can absolutely believe this. My brother was in the Marines. He wanted to become admiral. His performance was good. According to him, if he got promoted to captain before 40, he'd make admiral, otherwise he was on a track to become a military attache in a random country. He was on track to become captain at 41, but every year someone who had been an enlisted man first got promoted to captain a year early.

When he wasn't promoted early, he quit with a full pension.

ryanwaggoner• 16 years ago

Ummm, the Marines don't have admirals, and you should make captain in the Marines pretty fast, since it's only O-3, as opposed to O-6 in the Navy. You sure he wasn't in the Navy?

btilly2• 16 years ago

When I think about it, I think he was an enlisted man in the Marines for Vietnam, then an officer in the Navy. He left the military service somewhere in the 80s.

This is a much older brother that I am not close to.

gcv• 16 years ago

I'm under the impression that certain units within the armed forces do, in fact, have somewhat decentralized job assignment systems. Dick Couch writes in The Finishing School, for example, that SEAL platoon assignments result from individual platoon OICs and Chiefs picking people from the entire Naval Special Warfare community.

lispm• 16 years ago

The pointless wars did not make them leave the military? Like invading Iraq based on lies and then making a complete mess in Iraq because of total lack of planning? Or the daily UAV attacks in foreign countries which are outside of US and international law? Military prisons in foreign country to be able to torture and prosecute people without access to lawyers, etc.? The military sucking in about a full trillion (military budget + war budget + nuclear weapons + + + +) of tax payer money?

That did not make the military officers think?

colinplamondon• 16 years ago

Howdy Reddit.

speleding• 16 years ago

If entrepreneurial people are leaving the Army to become tax paying citizens and less entrepreneurial people stay in the government service, then that's much better for the economy than the other way around.

philwelch• 16 years ago

The history of the US military is full of highly effective wartime leaders who would never have survived the politics and bureaucracy of a peacetime military. It's hard to imagine colorful personalities like General Patton or Chesty Puller surviving in a system where politics and bureaucracy have had decades to get entrenched, unhindered by the need to win serious wars. And, compared to WWII or even Korea and Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Iraq, and Afghanistan just don't have the same weight of necessity.

And really, even the WWII era army was political enough that Patton got into plenty of trouble.

hga2• 16 years ago

Except ... Patton did exactly that ("survived the politics and bureaucracy of a peacetime military"), from before the Mexican expedition or whatever it's called through the post-WWI period. Heck, one of his officer evaluations said something to the effect that he was a real pain in peacetime "but would be invaluable in time of war".

Granted, in today's "zero defects" system that wouldn't have happened, but at least prior to WWII we weren't that insane. On the other hand, in peacetime prior to the Cold War the military was generally on starvation rations and retaining capable men was a major objective, sometimes to the detriment wartime effectiveness. E.g. the IJN frequently cleaned our clock in night time action, even when we had an advantage in RADAR, since our Navy hadn't seriously exercised at night prior to the war.

The latter is based on my current study of the WWII US Navy in the Pacific and specifically a couple of biographies of two of our best Admirals in it, Mark Mitscher and especially the more detailed one on Arleigh Burke.

Why our best officers are leaving

Related Stories