"Does the Army Need a Full-Spectrum Force or Specialized Units?
From Steven Aftergood at FAS and passed along for you a CRS.
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL34333.pdf
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This report is intended to provide information that might be of interest to Congress on the current debate surrounding the creation of special U.S. Army units and organizations, which some believe are needed to address current and future security requirements. While the Army has recently changed from a division-based force to a brigade-centric force, it has resisted the creation of special units to deal with counterinsurgency, stabilization, and training/advisory operations. In contrast, there have been a number of proposals to create new units and organizations better suited to address the challenges of these mission areas. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s recent challenge to the Army to organize and prepare for asymmetric warfare and advising and training foreign armies could renew and elevate this debate.
Oh Boy, Congress is gonna help.
That's always scary...
All in all not a bad review though my antennae twitch in frenzied disagreement at the way he's pointing. He says early on; "While the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and future military operations may indeed require that Army leaders be “pentathletes,” it may prove to be an unrealistic expectation that the majority of Army NCOs and officers will attain this extremely high standard of performance." That's garbage, the Officers and NCOs can handle it, all the Army has to do is train 'em right. He pronounces the soft bias of low expectations -- and he very subtly continues to head that way.
All the while ignoring one simple fact -- a volunteer Army and its costs today can only be so big. With an Army of a given size, if you over specialize, you decrease your capability in all specialties and I question whether we can afford to do that. We have no guarantee that we will conduct any COIN or stability operations in the next few years and we have proven that we can adapt to do that if required. We do generally agree that we can afford to bobble COIN -- we cannot afford to lose a major conventional war. Ergo we have to be prepared for the big one and cope with the smaller ankle biters.
One thing of interest; "For example, the Army’s Command and General Staff College (CGSC) at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, used to include only about 30 hours of counterinsurgency course work for the majors attending the year-long course but now includes 200-plus hours of counterinsurgency core courses and another 40-plus hours of counterinsurgency electives." Don't know whether that's true or not but it would seem to directly contradict something said on the topic only last week on this board. :confused:
Thanks all, that's about what I suspected
The CRS and I go back a long way... ;)
They and the GAO bear considerable watching -- and skepticism. There is ALWAYS an agenda...
Wrong question. Wrong answer
"Does the Army Need a Full-Spectrum Force or Specialized Units?"
I assume I am not alone in considering the nature of the question as part of the problem. There maybe no stupid questions but this one indicates a real lack of understanding.
The Manoeuvre Warfare crowd always tout the old focus on "the enemy and not terrain" and yet that has clearly produced a very limited mindset, where enemy and terrain are seen as defining the problems and not opportunities.
One well trained and rationally equipped army can do anything you want it to. What someone needs to ask is why some armies fail to be able to do it.
Without a direct discussion of Army officer culture, OPMS, & previous reform attempts
Once again, the Army comes up to a problem representing an external threat which does not play to its preferred COA of force on force attrition, - goes through a lot of pain in coming to grips with the fact that it does not like to do small wars and working non-kinetic solutions
- says its got to get smart on training for COIN and training will be the solution to all the inadequacies of the current force
- says learning about other cultures is an important part of COIN and we need to do it
And finally forgets that it too has a culture and a system which fosters that culture, and that culture with its underlying system lead it in great part, to the situation it finds itself in when kinetic operations cease and then it is "now what?".
But no worries, we'll train ourselves out of this problem. We'll forget about Force Management, OPMS, Branches, the Senior Rater driven OER with its total subjectivity, career "tracks". In a word we will forget about OPMS politics and through training alone we will overturn (permanently) deeply entrenched institutional biases and their underlying often unspoken cultural prejudices.
I have a bridge....it is in Brooklyn :rolleyes:
SB
Well, if everyone believes as you do
No worries, nothing will change...
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Originally Posted by
Skullbiscuit
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And finally forgets that it too has a culture and a system which fosters that culture, and that culture with its underlying system lead it in great part, to the situation it finds itself in when kinetic operations cease and then it is "now what?".
Exactly. Now what? Isn't that about where we were five years or so ago?
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But no worries, we'll train ourselves out of this problem....
Good luck with that. I don't think you can train yourself out of any problem. What you can do is train better so that you have less problems.
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... We'll forget about Force Management...
That would be a good start; we survived without it for almost 200 years and through more complex times than today.That would really help as DOPMA is a big part of the problem. Only real difficulty there is Congress who forced it on the Army -- and I'll easily acknowledge that's the hardest impediment to better capability to remove from your list.Great plan -- they and their parochialism are an impediment. The Marines get by without them (and at the rate the USMC is going, they'll be bigger than the Army in fifty years... :D). As do other world armed forces (at least to the extent of clout we give them). Look at the bright side, the Navy's Bureaus were even more parochial and powerful than our branches, yet, the Navy finally got rid of them (They now have 'communities' ;) ). Maybe if we did that, the M8 wouldn't disappear as a quid pro quo for Armor support of Infantry's Bradley. Maybe the troops could have a better rifle due to less Building 4 lobbying for the status quo...
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...the Senior Rater driven OER with its total subjectivity...
Absolutely no way to get rid of subjectivity in personnel performance rating or evaluation. You can clarify it by adding Peer and Subordinate rating (Horrors!!!:eek:). you can also rig the OER so that no raters names show on the front page the board sees (Just joking, the Generals will never buy that).
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... career "tracks"...
your quotation marks say it all, don't they? They are a big part of the problem; DOPMA again...
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In a word we will forget about OPMS politics and through training alone we will overturn (permanently) deeply entrenched institutional biases and their underlying often unspoken cultural prejudices.
Well, that would be a start -- of course, if you think they're beneficial, by all means hang on to them. You'll have a lot of allies, many in high places.
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I have a bridge....it is in Brooklyn :rolleyes: SB
Really I thought that was a Tree grows in Brooklyn. The Bridge connects Manhattan and Brooklyn so it's in both. Well actually, it's over the East River, so... Oh, never mind...
Nobody said changing a monolithic organization chock full of its own long standing culture and tons of biases and skewed systems would be easy. Nor did anybody say anything about tearing up all the norms and forms. Branches don't need to disappear; they do need to lose some of their clout. DOPMA will be hard to amend; hard is not impossible. The issue is, simply -- are some changes needed? If so what? What's achievable?
Better training IS achievable and as those better trained Privates become 1SGs and those LTs become COLs over time, they will change the culture...
Of course, not giving new entrants the best possible training can always be justified by citing the cost. Has nothing to do with not wanting smarter folks. surely...
A WW II Intel Officer, David Ogilvy said:
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"If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.”
Makes sense to me.
As always for those not so inclined in any study of courses of action doing nothing is always an option.
Thanks for a good and accurate reponse
Everything you say is true.
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"1. Left to their own devices and without any checks on them (and you cannot say there are any substantive checks on SR profiles save keep it within the 49/51 distro mandated by OPMS XXI) people will pick people like themselves.
2. If they can't pick someone like themselves they'll pick someone who is less then themselves (no threat --- the dwarves)
3. The last thing people will do is pick people who are not like themselves and represent a threat. There be Giants!
You started off with the crux of it; which is great -- a lot of folks don't recognize how significant a problem those points are. In fact, I agree they are the most significant problem; that and jobs at HRC, a driver of more import than many know. Shy Meyer tried to kill the HRC Mafia and they trooped up on the Hill and they won; they outlasted Meyer and went right back to business as usual.
One of the better Generals I ever knew was on a roll one day and told me that the basic problem was that we'd made the system too competitive. He Said. "All Generals are mediocre -- I'm mediocre. If you aren't mediocre your contemporaries or their godfathers will kill you on the way up..." He'd had to tell his just entering OBC son to be good but not too good. That bothered him.
He and another guy fought the 49/51 block at the time of issue but to no avail (though I thought it had been lifted for CPT and below? I hung up my tree suit in '77 and retired from my DAC job 12 years ago, I'm beyond outa touch :wry:). The other guy had as a COL been the Dir of OPD in the early 70s and he and the then XO came up with an OER that had all the rating chain names and signatures on the reverse and which the Board would not see -- it got rave reviews as it circulated in the building until it hit the first GO reviewer. Where it died...
So I hear you and know this is the truth:
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"If the Army want's to really change then all conversation should begin and end with a discussion of OPMS and DOPMA. Otherwise we are just merely rearranging the furniture.If the Army want's to really change then all conversation should begin and end with a discussion of OPMS and DOPMA. Otherwise we are just merely rearranging the furniture."
Sad but accurate. As I acknowledged earlier that's the ol' big pole. Still, we both know frontal assaults are a bad idea. Flanking is in order. That or trap some Beavers and put 'em to work on that pole... :D
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"Ken, I hear you and I'm not saying that training can't fix things....given enough time.....but that is the rub.....time. Cultures cannot be created quickly..."
Totally true this one has been building for over 200 years and in its current form, since the end of WW II. It will be exceedingly difficult to turn around. It will also take time. I mentioned the LTs to COLs -- it'll, I think, take two iterations of that to achieve marginal success in changing the culture (unless we have a big war and someone finds another Saint George -- difficult in this age).
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"... And the culture of head down political risk aversion which is fostered by the OER is not one to be overturned by training..."
I agree, in my view it'll take a minor internal revolt; a mass exodus; or an exceptionally strong CofS,A pulled up a couple of stars. The latter is an admittedly unlikely prospect, the other two are, unfortunately, more likely.
Much of this as you know is thanks to Congress which is a BIG part of the problem and which fostered DOPMA to preclude the Armed Forces from being 'unfair' to anyone and give everyone an 'equal' shot at the gold ring. They did what legislators are too prone to do, they tried to guarantee equality of outcome when what was needed was equality of opportunity
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"...Historically when the Army could not reorganize itself internally in order to cope with a new threat, it either decided to, or more often had someone outside decide for them on the creation of a new function within the Army in order to deal with the problem. Special Forces is one such example. Thus their current position of being able to do this in house without functional specialization defies their history and also ignores the parochialism the branches and respective communities (heavy, light, and SOF) have exerted over time."
Having been on SB Hill in another lifetime shortly after the birth and before there was a Beanie, I hear that. The same mission argument was around then. With a serving son, I get random unclas updates from time to time. Not all that much change. Like you said, the culture is old and deeply embedded.
The problem is that the "new threat" seen by the pachyderms is rarely the evul enema -- it is any threat to the institution; they will put aside branch and personal squabbles to repel boarders in a heartbeat. Still, most of 'em I've met, though constrained by the system they grew up in, generally mean well. They will select those in their own image and conformity is the guiding mantra as you say. What remains to be seen is whether they will act on the realization that I suspect most have deep in their minds -- all today is not well in the institution and some changes will HAVE to be made. Many will try to keep those changes to an absolute minimum, no question. You may be right and the minimalists will win -- but I'm a hopeless optimist; there's gotta be a Pony in there somewhere... ;)
I can't disagree with any of that.
I've long told every Officer I meet, "When you get to be Chief of Staff, nuke the Hoffman Building."
The only thing that keeps me optimistic is the kids -- the LTCs and below make it work in spite of the impediments in the system. The technology and the massive amounts of money help keep us from looking like bumbling idiots -- but the kids do their part and more as well and that in spite of the way they're trained (or not) and treated.
All you say is true, two things you say are particularly important, I think:
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"...Revise the OER, open up assignments to a more competitive and dynamic pool of human capital outside of HRC's control; and to paraphrase Brando's Kurtz "our problems here would soon be over."
. . .
Had we a threat with deeper pocket books, better technology, and without the constraints of our personnel mgt system to systematically suffocate innovators and mavericks....things could be different."
True dat...
Keep the faith.
Most recent attempt at OPMS reform
Shinseki tried only a modest assault on the status quo with his pitch beginning in 1997 to introduce technical literacy into the operational culture of the Army via the creation of the simulations operations officer (functional area 57) which he took great pains to point out was supposed to have been within the operations career field and within the command track, thus keeping would-be technologist operationally current and potentially in the drivers seat to help change the culture.
This modest effort failed. I was one of the first seven officers to be selected for the program back in 95 and I was the only special forces officer in the history of the program to date. Instead of us staying within operations we moved into the new (and ironically now after only five years --- defunct --- information operations career field). By putting us there we no longer had any possibility of command or S3/XO tenure; and therefore were relegated to a tier 3 staff position where we had even less influence over ongoing Army material developments in simulations. The effort was effectively neutered by HRC because it broke their "model". At the time their model called for no dual track, only single track. Thus the technologically literate were separated from the operational class (the seat of authority) and relegated to a brokering and essentially rear area support role --- away from the decision making table and where the action was.
Ironically, HRC in its latest zig zag to maintain one if its tenants --- flexibility in being able to assign officers to structure where ever it needs to --- has reversed itself on its single track mandate and is now entertaining the notion of dual tracks --- yet it must be emphasized that HRC is not doing this because they realize that single tracking overly specializes or dumbs down the officer corps --- they are doing this so as to have the flexibility of pushing officers into marginalized assignments --- the branch immaterial assignment.
However, they still have the class (branch) system. In fact an aviation O6 I know was very upset that in spite of the new BDE's that the Army has created it is not considering aviation officers as eligible for command of those units --- that these same officers would have served in such a brigade as jrs appears not to have been enough to assault entrenched prejudices and parochialisms. So the branch parochialism of BDE CMD for the iron triad --- infantry, armor, and artillery; was only slightly breached --- by the engineers --- they are eligible but not aviators.
So back on subject. Shinseki fought HRC from 97 until 2002 when he gave up and signed a memo consigning his "baby", as FA57 was know then, to the oblivion of technical specialization at the margins of the Army with no seat at the decision making table.
Thus from this recent battle; I have no confidence that the system can reform itself unless Congress has the will to do so. And they have shown no inclination. I suspect that they "like" the system the way it is. It would be dangerous to have a system which regularly turned out Boyd's and other mavericks. As my colleague put it earlier --- the system has a strong preference for made men.
