Officer Shortage Looming in Army

[dusty]

I'm currently the BICC for a Infantry BN - lots to learn, but not much fun to be a junior LT on staff. As a 35D, the only platoon I'm likely to get is a UAV/SIGINT one, which is about the size element I had as a Sergeant.
I envy the 11A's these days.

[Old Eagle]

Hippasus --
As you probably know, that is one of Tom Hammes' theses in The Sling and the Stone.

[Hippasus]

OE,
Yep, it's on my nightstand. It seems disingenuous of us, as the Army, to be saying that we are short officers when we have CPTs assigned managing one or two powerpoint slides for some BUB. Wasting people and other resources and then crying for more is a disservice to our nation. And adding to staff bloat, our solution to every problem seems to be another "study group" or "tiger team" instead of simply holding established Chains of Command responsible for their jobs. I wish I could say this problem was getting better instead of worse, but its not.

[120mm]

After spending some time at a corps level staff to remain unnamed, I would say that we do not have a shortage of mid-level officers so much as we have created too many positions in bloated staffs. We have too many folks working on worthless projects for too many GOs rather than in units. Perhaps if we were to eliminate some of these, in my view unnecessary, HQs, we could man the part of the Army that really matters...

You sound like a 3d COSCOMer.

I was one of them, once. As an Armor/CAV guy to boot. My success parameters: Shooting neither one or more of them, nor myself, by the end of my year. I accomplished that mission, but only by a whisker

[Hippasus]

Nope, not the Coscom, though it sounds as if your experience was similar to mine. The irony it that there were important things to plan and do...but getting past the nonsense to do them was a Herculean task. I keep listening to arguments that the Army needs more more more...more people, more money, etc, and I'm just not sure we're serving our nation well. The argument is that the US "only" spends 3% of GDP on defense....ok, let's look at it another way - of total discretionary spending (i.e., what the gov't can spend after paying interest on debt, medicare and social security payments, etc) we spend 56% on the military. So we, as servants of our nation, are taking 56% of what it can realistically "choose" to spend and we still cry for more? And I haven't noticed senior officers taking fewer tdys...or traveling by commercial travel rather than expensive gov planes. Every staff is still filled with plasma tvs and two computers (sipr and nipr) on every desk. Just makes me wonder....
BTW, I'm a Cav guy too, will soon be back on the line, thank goodness.

[Steve Blair]

OE,
Yep, it's on my nightstand. It seems disingenuous of us, as the Army, to be saying that we are short officers when we have CPTs assigned managing one or two powerpoint slides for some BUB. Wasting people and other resources and then crying for more is a disservice to our nation. And adding to staff bloat, our solution to every problem seems to be another "study group" or "tiger team" instead of simply holding established Chains of Command responsible for their jobs. I wish I could say this problem was getting better instead of worse, but its not.

They get it from business, which is really sad.