Quote Originally Posted by Uboat509
Over reliance on officers has been a weakness in many military organizations throughout the world and history. The solution to our problems today is NOT more officers and more micromanagement which is what will you will get by adding more officers or pushing them down to lower levels of command like squads. Doing that will weaken the NCO corps and no professional army can afford to do that. One of the best assignments I had on the conventional army was as an infantry fire teamleader in 1/509. The is the OPFOR at JRTC. During the Low Intensity Combat phase of each rotation the each fire team would be given its own sector where the teamleader would have significant autonomy. We would be given specific missions from time to time particularly toward the end of the phase but mostly we just had a commanders intent and specific parameters to work within. My point is that many of those E4 E5 fire teamleaders excelled in that situation. There is a tendency in the conventional army toward group think and a strict adherence to very specific guidelines. Initiative is encouraged but only in certain directions. In other words a subordinate leader may be expected to take the initiative to do what his higher would have told him to do anyway but not to do something on his own. Part of what makes SF good at what they do is the training that they receive, of course, but also it is the mindset. In SF the ability to work autonomously with little guidance is not only encouraged, it is required. I believe that in part at least, the NCO corps has lost focus. NCOnet is a prime example of this. If you go to the COIN forum there you will find a few topics with generally few replies whereas in other forums you can find long scholarly discussions about whether or not pens should be visible in the ACUs or detailed discussions on the minutia of uniform regs. Not all NCOs are like this by far but there are enough in influential positions that I believe that there has been a shift in the culture of some organizations from NCOs as trainers and leaders first to NCOs as guardians of the regulations first. This is what fosters the strict adherence to the letter of the reg rather than its intent and the unwillingness or inability to act autonomously. That is what we need to fix, not Lieutenants as squad leaders. That's my opinion anyway.

SFC W
I believe that the answer isn't shoving higher-ranking officers lower down the food chain. All that would do (in reality) is create more micro-managing and even more jockeying for command positions than exists now. I also believe that it would take the weight out of the NCOs that come up under such a system, as they'd be so used to being 'lead' by officers that they would have precious little incentive to develop the needed skills on their own. In a related vein, one reason you may see NCOs becoming the guardians of regulations is that their officers tend to rotate through faster and thus they end up being the pillar that gets the unit through each inspection. In the heavy peacetime mentality getting Outstandings on inspections can often be more valued than having a well-led unit. Obviously that's a generalization, but the mentality does tend to creep in.

At some point in the culture, maybe during Vietnam, we seem to have stopped trusting our NCOs to actually lead and relegated them to more administrative roles. Again, something of a generalization but it clearly does happen in many instances. I see that every day working with the Air Force. It produces good technicians, but poor leaders simply because they are never really expected to lead for the most part (with some exceptions based on AFSC, of course) until they reach E-8. Then *boom* instant leader time! It of course doesn't work. It's a shame, and a trend that must be reversed if we're to be successful in the coming conflicts.