Officer Retention

[AdaptAndOvercome]

About the distance between the officer corps and professional classes, I have been ruminating on that for awhile. Not long ago I was on an airplane and happened to sit next to a wealthy businessman and a lawyer, both from New England. I took that time to chat about world affairs and offer them a perspective from the profession of arms.

Towards the end of the flight, the businessman asked me what sort of things officers study to be ready for war. I happened to have my copy of Roots of Strategy and showed him a few diagrams from Frederick the Great's "Instructions to his Generals", explaining how the principles of war used in those maneuvers are applicable today.

By discussing warfare at an intellectual level, I think I removed many Vietnam-era stereotypes that these men had accepted for forty years. I think we need to engage professionals at the same level that their professions engage them.

That said, I believe there are many barriers between the military and the professional classes, and one very large one is terminology. Why do we say "land navigation" instead of orienteering? The word navigation has a maritime connotation. Adding the word "land" does not change the connotation, it only makes the term sound as though it were created by someone with a small vocabulary. Why do we say "human terrain" instead of "demographics" or "anthropology" when both of these are established and esteemed disciplines? Do we discourage demographers, anthropologists, and other professionals from working with the military because we appear meddlesome, unwilling to respect the venerable terms used by the scholars of their discipline? Too often we invent new terms instead of consulting a thesaurus.

One of my friends argues that a profession must have terms which are used almost exclusively by that profession in order to be taken seriously. I agree. If I have to explain to someone what Clausewitz meant by tactics, I feel that I am acting as an ambassador of the profession of arms. If I have to explain that a VBIED is a car bomb or that a DFAC is a cafeteria or that HMMWV stands for High Mobility Multi-Wheeled Vehicle (a term which could arguably be applied to a bicycle); I cringe inside because these terms are esoteric for the sake of being esoteric.

What's more, many officers I know are not very good with spelling, grammar, nor oration. I have seen many slide shows with 2-3 misspellings per slide and a few officers who used the phrase "in terms of" as a crutch. We cannot give the impression of war as a thinking person's game unless we show the same level of literacy as other professions.

To that end, the Army needs to spend time in its basic courses on grammatical instruction and writing. From my personal experience, the average high school graduate can only discern a subject from a predicate. They do not know the parts of speech, cases, nor how to diagram a sentence. If the officer does not receive any more instruction in college (which many don't), then that is the level of ability we see after commissioning. This makes instruction in language very difficult. Some people have an aptitude for learning languages; they can just "pick it up". I learn best through comparing the grammars, as I think do many people, but they are handicapped by their insufficient instruction. I, personally, suffered in my studies because the course work was written for learners who understand the mechanics of speaking naturally and do not need to be explicitly told the rules and phonetics of the language to become conversational.

Commanders must also encourage professional development through reading classics. The Art of War is a very short book, yet I have immense trouble convincing my peers to spend an hour reading it. They expect the Army to train them in everything they need to know. What they really need to know is that the body of martial thought is larger than any set of field manuals.

In conclusion, the Army can improve its retention of officers by using three methods to raise the esteem of the officer corps in the eyes of the professional classes. Firstly, encourage professional development through reading from BOLC I to the end of an officer's career. This will allow officers to engage other professionals in discourse at the theoretical level. Secondly, ensure that officers have writing and speaking skills comparable to other professions in order to remove any prejudices other professionals may have against them as uneducated. Finally, offer language instruction that takes advantage of the officers' mastery of English syntax. Other professionals will view a bilingual person as more educated than an unilingual one. Taken together, these measures will show the professional classes that the officer corps is a good place for young, ambitious, college graduates who yearn for more initiative and adventure than they could ever have in the private sector.