"Standards of Excellence"

[bumperplate]

You may be right. From what I've seen, all the comments from our senior leaders have been directed at the GWOT for the past decade or so, telling us our force is the most disciplined and most capable in the history of mankind, yada yada yada. Now, all of a sudden we are lacking fitness, discipline, and a professional ethos, or so it seems, based on their most recent comments.

So, perhaps you are right...maybe that garrison mentality was simply put on hold, by those that grew up in garrison and made their way to the top in a garrison environment.

[Steve Blair]

You may be right. From what I've seen, all the comments from our senior leaders have been directed at the GWOT for the past decade or so, telling us our force is the most disciplined and most capable in the history of mankind, yada yada yada. Now, all of a sudden we are lacking fitness, discipline, and a professional ethos, or so it seems, based on their most recent comments.

So, perhaps you are right...maybe that garrison mentality was simply put on hold, by those that grew up in garrison and made their way to the top in a garrison environment.

Same thing happened during the Vietnam era. Vietnam was a distraction or interruption from the "real" business of soldiering.

[JMA]

... that garrison mentality...

Remembering back to 1979 I read a book War on the Mind

It had a chapter/section on Garrison Leaders which struck a cord with me to the extent I wrote a piece on it for the Rhodesian Army Quarterly Magazine.

Google Books provides the following snippets:

"Good garrison leaders, for example, were found to be aggressive, as were combat leaders, but were also found to do better if they were sticklers for the rule book, athletic, possessed a passion for detail, had a good physical bearing and personal tact. None of these were found to be relevant for an officer to be effective as a leader in wartime."

Quick in and out six month tours also suit these garrison types as they can get the campaign medals with the least effort (and probably in a post with the least risk).

[jkm_101_fso]

I'm a two-time "go" at the Fires Center of Excellence...based on my performance on both occasions, it should be renamed the Fires Center of Mediocrity.

[bumperplate]

The question is, do we want to change this? Should we be purging the 'warrior' mindset after a war? Should we go back to a garrison mentality, then transition again when war starts again? What are the consequences of having a lot of combat-hardened veterans in your formation that are good at fighting but not so much at parade field antics?

My opinion is that our military would be better off keeping those fighters in the ranks, and learning how to best deal with that, nurture it, and put things in place to ensure a good transition to civilian life once they leave the military. To me that's better than the alternative which means we will surely fill more body bags than necessary each time we go to war.

[Fuchs]

It's really a relatively simple issue of forcing a bureaucracy to stay away from pursuing its natural path and interest and forcing it to focus on its mission.

The mechanics and psychology of bureaucracy are quite well-understood, all it takes to force it on a better course than its default autopilot is leadership.

Then again, in war and bureaucracy all simple things are difficult.

[bumperplate]

Interesting how that leadership thing keeps coming up, or do we not do leadership any longer? Do we just do mission command? Or command & control?

We've dissected this so much I don't know the party line any longer.

[Fuchs]

It's not mutually exclusive at all, in fact it's reinforcing each other.

Someone (I think he was registered here) once helped me to understand how unusual the famous 1930's Truppenführung (TF) field manual actually was when he pointed out that it's unusual for a field manual to spend 28 pages on a "leadership" chapter (as 2nd chapter, directly behind a quick overview of the macro organisation of the army).

That chapter wasn't about the kind of leadership that I meant, though. It was rather about the tasks and principles of a leader and about techniques of leadership.

I meant that leaders are responsible for steering the ship into the right direction, and must not allow that drifting becomes the primary method of movement.


A bureaucracy builds a self-licking ice cone in which the majority of personnel becomes "excellent" or "outstanding"? That is what I meant with "drifting".