Army Officers: Are You Leaving or Staying? Why?

[Bob's World]

I thought 10 years at war would have reduced the stupidity and purged the weak leaders from our ranks, but I see that isn't happening.

Bill,

If we had been at war for the past 10 years, with some 500,000-2,000,000 military casualties and god knows how many civilians, to show for it, this evolution of perspective you look for would likely have happened. Of course it would have also reverted back to this peace-time norm shortly after the war was over.

The reality is the US is not really at war. We have military men involved in combat, but our Nation, our Government, and in truth, even our Military, is not on a wartime footing. We misuse that word "war" a great deal of late, and it causes problems much larger than this one of officer management.

The same peacetime constraints of effectiveness that you describe for training operations at home affect effectiveness for combat operations downrange.

Admiral Eric Olson from his position as the Commander of USSOCOM describes the current environment as "the new normal." While I largely agree with what I believe he means by that (that we are not at war, but that this is just the way things are), I would quibble that our response is not appropriate to that assessment. If this is the new normal, we need to take a breath and quit fighting it. We are attempting to militarily force the clock to turn back to those glorious days following the Cold War when major state threats were in check, and suppressed populaces had not yet began to push back against the controls the sat upon them.

One key perspective to fully appreciating the "new normal" is to first appreciate how abnormal the Cold War era and the era of US hegemony over other states immediately following the Cold War really was. Just because this has dominated our lives for the past 65 years does not mean it was not an artificial bubble created by the unique circumstances of the era.

For the military and officer management? The only real solution is to go to more peer/subordinate input and abolish the "making your boss happy and never doing anything "headline worthy" wrong" as the standard for advancement. We can't blame this on "the war," civilian leadership, or any other boogieman. We do it to ourselves; and senior military leaders lack the moral courage to change. Why? For fear it will invalidate the very methods that they employed so well to get where they are today.