"Standards of Excellence"

[Pete]

One of the things that has bothered me since around 1980 has been this obsession with "standards of excellence" and being "outstanding" all the time. It's not that I don't thing we shouldn't pursue those goals, it's that we're not there yet, in most cases have not been there, but pretending that we are can lead to a kind of dangerous self-deception and an atmosphere in which even to acknowledge that things could be better can come back on you for saying it in the first place.

We all agree that training in the U.S. Army should be better. But to admit that combat skills and overall efficiency could be better within an element under one's own control can be tantamount to confessing to professional dereliction of duty. Thus you better have a solution to the problem, or better yet, not say anything at all about it to any superiors. Just fix it as best you can, even if the solution is half-a**.

Thus these "standards of excellence" and this "outstanding" phenemonena can turn into a self-winding problem within the command atmosphere that leads to deficiencies not being resolved and things being covered up.

I remember around 1980 when U.S. Army Europe put a big emphasis on individual training in battalions while they were in garrison. The problem is the higher HQs sent so many inspectors around with clipboards with evaluation checklists that our NCOs and junior officers got stage fright and were afraid be torn a new one. Thus this conceit about being excellent all the time can prevent you from being even mediocre.

[selil]

This problem is very similar to other areas of education and assessment. Assessment by nature is tied to measurement. What you measure is usually an output of a process or a defined task. What you value though may be only tangentially tied to that process or task. When you look at "excellence" you add to the problem by now setting an external value to what has been assessed, may only be partially tied to what you value, and often is tied to inappropriate methods of measurement.

Take the word "command". If I ask you to define the word command you will make basic assumptions on what to do. You will likely pick one of a few desired paths:
1) You reach for a doctrinal publication and find the word command and report back on that as the gospel or definitive source.
2) Perhaps you do something similar and "google" or find a dictionary definition of the term.
3) Maybe you express yourself and how you perceive the word and what it means to you.

But, notice I didn't say what I was assessing and provided no rubric for that assessment. For all intents in purposes I could be assessing your thinking strategies and ability to think outside the box. I could be evaluating your adherence to certain traits I obliquely am testing in military matters. Perhaps I could care less about the word command, but I want to assess your ability to express the traits and qualities that a rubric or other method of assessment values.

The superlative of "outstanding" though can have no reasonable metric or value applied to it without having a real principle of measurement to base the resulting valuation. As a result it is meaningless regardless of what it is measuring unless the strategy of evaluation has been determined. This though can lead to the second problem which is measuring everything with no plan or strategy in place for what to do with those measurements. So you send a lot of people around measuring a bunch of things but there is no real standard to meet and no assessment mechanism for that standard. Just a bunch of metrics. Metrics are not measurement. 50 guys in the company are a size 10 boot. So what. To be valid there must be associated data (even if just a normalized curve).

So.. the principle of "outstanding" is less than an outstanding result of lazy leadership. Or, so IMHO it must be.

[120mm]

In an army of incompetents, superlatives is all they have, really.

Take ISAF's ISAF Joint Command (IJC) (How messed up are you when your acronym has an acronym in it?)

Their psyop shop is called the "Information Dominance Center".

Too bad the only thing they "Dominate" is a never ending contest for incompetence, stupidity and bad ideas. They consistently get their butts handed to them, I/O wise, by a bunch of uneducated, functionally illiterates living in caves and mud huts.

Or "Warrior" this, or "Warrior" that. You do realize that if you told a real "Warrior" that his socks or PT footgear were improper and started to chew him out for it, he would cut off your head, rip out your guts and eat your liver, raw, don't you?

I've never met anyone who was truly seeking excellence who EVER self-promoted. Mostly, they were too busy working hard to get better at not sucking to crow about how friggin' "excellent" they were.

[Fuchs]

I have a nice anecdote from the German air force that might be relevant to the thread and of (humorous) interest.

There were (are?) those exercises in which wings demonstrate their readiness to NATO. Foreign officers come to the base and observe, give grades.

Flight safety cannot be "excellent" if you have no backup radar for your tower.

Well, what do you do if u have no backup radar, never had one?

You 'organise' some obscure radar from the 60's on a trailer, set it up, plug in the cables safely and show it off.

Now what I heard about this backup radar is that it was
a) not working (and didn't for decades)
b) not legal to use because of excessive radiation
c) quite useless for the purpose (even if it worked)
d) the only one in the Luftwaffe, thus shipped to every wing that has its inspection only to be showed off as backup radar at another wing a few weeks later.


All attempts to institutionalize or fashion-ize "excellence" are stupid in my opinion.

[Pete]

My previous message speaks more to the climate of command rather than the evaluation standards for training.

When you load an M60 Machine Gun which side of the belt should be on top, the clean side or the one with all the links showing? What is the immediate action to clear a malfunction or jam?

If you say that many in your unit can't perform those tasks or answer those questions some of your superiors might think you're a dangerous guy to have around. After all, all of us here are "outstanding" and we have "standards of excellence," except for that guy who said his troops don't know how to load a machine gun. Therefore, shoot the messenger.

Without a doubt in Jessica Lynch's Ordnance maintenance battalion where 80 percent of the M16s jammed the field-grade officers and senior NCOs had all received MSMs when they PCSed and the junior officers and NCOs got ARCOMs. It had probably been going on for 10 years.

"We have standards of excellence around here."

[Ken White]

both 'outstanding' grades and 'excellence' for basic competence any day of the week...

[Stan]

Brass to the grass and close the cover

Wait 5 seconds.... And,

Always assume the M60 is loaded.

[120mm]

Originally Posted by Pete

Without a doubt in Jessica Lynch's Ordnance maintenance battalion where 80 percent of the M16s jammed the field-grade officers and senior NCOs had all received MSMs when they PCSed and the junior officers and NCOs got ARCOMs. It had probably been going on for 10 years.

"We have standards of excellence around here."

Even worse, they got Bronze Stars before their deployment was up.

I've seen Active Duty O-6s relieved for incompetence at the beginning of their tours, being replaced with Reservist O-4s, and then the relived O6 is brought back in for the last month, and is then given a terrific OER, a Bronze Star and put back into the promotion que.

[bumperplate]

I see little reason to believe that our military will avoid purging all of the warfighters and "warriors" once the two current theaters are closed. The trend toward a garrison mentality seems to be creeping back in already.

[Jrizzuto77]

Pete. I agree with your premise but as we begin to downsize I think there needs to be a balanced approach to standards of excellence. Standards of excellence are very important but if we develop a generation of Soldiers/Professionals that fear taking risk then standards will not amount to anything because we will remain stagnant. As a FG officer, I know it is critically important to reward excellence and rewarding those individuals willing to go against the grain in pursuit of excellence. Going against the grain can sometimes lead to marginal results but the ability of our professionals to take risk is critical to remain mentally agile and professional development. I am committed to recognizing and mitigating.
**The views expressed in this are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy of the Department of the Army, DoD or the US Government. **

JR

Originally Posted by Pete

One of the things that has bothered me since around 1980 has been this obsession with "standards of excellence" and being "outstanding" all the time. It's not that I don't thing we shouldn't pursue those goals, it's that we're not there yet, in most cases have not been there, but pretending that we are can lead to a kind of dangerous self-deception and an atmosphere in which even to acknowledge that things could be better can come back on you for saying it in the first place.

We all agree that training in the U.S. Army should be better. But to admit that combat skills and overall efficiency could be better within an element under one's own control can be tantamount to confessing to professional dereliction of duty. Thus you better have a solution to the problem, or better yet, not say anything at all about it to any superiors. Just fix it as best you can, even if the solution is half-a**.

Thus these "standards of excellence" and this "outstanding" phenemonena can turn into a self-winding problem within the command atmosphere that leads to deficiencies not being resolved and things being covered up.

I remember around 1980 when U.S. Army Europe put a big emphasis on individual training in battalions while they were in garrison. The problem is the higher HQs sent so many inspectors around with clipboards with evaluation checklists that our NCOs and junior officers got stage fright and were afraid be torn a new one. Thus this conceit about being excellent all the time can prevent you from being even mediocre.