My critique has nothing to do with social divergence or distance (I think the latter is the term Charlie Moskos used back in the 70s when he wrote on the impacts of the all volunteer Army--probably worth a literature review by others on this thread). Instead it has to do with how Americans today raise their sons and daughters. I suspect that the kinds of things the LT suggested that parents make their kids do are not being accomplished. I will not elaborate further because my information is only anecdotal.
To AP's edit point, I am reminded of the quotation attributed to Mark Twain:"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
Statistical analysis has value as long as the assumptions underlying the statistics are made clear. And, as we should all be aware from the nice scatter plots AP shared earlier, in what are the most interesting cases for decision makers (my assumption/bias), outliers are usually present. As another representation of my bias, I tend to plan for the worst case outlier, not the best case or the average case, unless I have reasons to do otherwise. BTW, calling them reasons is actually somewhat of a misnomer because reason usually plays little part in it. It is instead more often the qualitative/emotional kind of gut feeling that Hollywood can portray so well.
Some knowledge management folks today now describe two categories of knowledge: explicit and tacit. Knowing when to go with your gut is part of tacit knowledge--something that comes with experience and mentoring or working with other expert practitioners. Explicit knowledge is the kind of stuff we get from textbooks and classrooms. Creating a useful spreadsheet includes both explicit knowledge (how to use Excel for example) and tacit knowledge (what data to select and how to display it).
Given this distinction between explicit and tacit knowledge, I think the Curmudgeon is on to something with slowing down promotions. I would, however, not wait until the field grades to start identifying and utilizing officer specialists--explicit knowledge acquisition should start as part of the early officer development classes as well--including BOLC and MCCC. Of course to do this will mean the bean counters will have to accept end strength trade offs because of the number of officers in the school account. Such is life when resources are scarce and the competition for them is fierce.
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