Quote Originally Posted by typos-R-us View Post
There is a quick, cheap and easy transformation available. Make the trade schools joint.
Have the Students spend their Sophmore and Joinor years at a sister school.
This will start them thinking purple at an early age.
It will never happen because the MIC cannot make Billions off of it. It would be effective, since it's men, not weapons that win wars.
It would be even better if the US went to a semi-german type system, where Officer canidates spend 2 years in the ranks before even going off to trade school. Something needs to be done, since the current system produces long lines of mediocre ticket punchers. The best bow out at about the O-5 level, not seeing anything in their future worth going thru the BS for.
That is why the best trained, best armed Military in the world cannot subdue medieval savages. Management will never replace Leadership.
Coulda, Shoulda, Woulda, lots of pie in the sky stuff here.

You may have something of a point on the "semi-German" system of spending time in the ranks. On the other hand, the US Military in general, and the USMC in particular, does an excellent job of filling its officer corps with folks from the ranks, from the academy, from OCS, and from ROTC. Such a system has lots of intellectual diversity and I doubt that advantages could be accrued by homogenizing the entry of officers by use of a single system.

And the remark about O-5s and above is entirely uncalled for. On the contrary, I've seen lots of burned-out field grades who want nothing more than to "make 20" and punch out. They tend to be Majors with prior-enlisted experience or LtCols without such prior experience. Furthermore, I've known some utterly outstanding Colonels in my short 4 years in service to my country. And the generals? Mattis? Amos? Castellaw? Toolan? Helland? Yup--lots of ticket-punching in those guys. Ha.

A little more discipline in thought would be appropriate before we castigate the bird colonels and stars.