No worries, nothing will change...

Quote Originally Posted by Skullbiscuit View Post
...
And finally forgets that it too has a culture and a system which fosters that culture, and that culture with its underlying system lead it in great part, to the situation it finds itself in when kinetic operations cease and then it is "now what?".
Exactly. Now what? Isn't that about where we were five years or so ago?
But no worries, we'll train ourselves out of this problem....
Good luck with that. I don't think you can train yourself out of any problem. What you can do is train better so that you have less problems.
... We'll forget about Force Management...
That would be a good start; we survived without it for almost 200 years and through more complex times than today.
...OPMS...
That would really help as DOPMA is a big part of the problem. Only real difficulty there is Congress who forced it on the Army -- and I'll easily acknowledge that's the hardest impediment to better capability to remove from your list.
... Branches...
Great plan -- they and their parochialism are an impediment. The Marines get by without them (and at the rate the USMC is going, they'll be bigger than the Army in fifty years... ). As do other world armed forces (at least to the extent of clout we give them). Look at the bright side, the Navy's Bureaus were even more parochial and powerful than our branches, yet, the Navy finally got rid of them (They now have 'communities' ). Maybe if we did that, the M8 wouldn't disappear as a quid pro quo for Armor support of Infantry's Bradley. Maybe the troops could have a better rifle due to less Building 4 lobbying for the status quo...
...the Senior Rater driven OER with its total subjectivity...
Absolutely no way to get rid of subjectivity in personnel performance rating or evaluation. You can clarify it by adding Peer and Subordinate rating (Horrors!!!). you can also rig the OER so that no raters names show on the front page the board sees (Just joking, the Generals will never buy that).
... career "tracks"...
your quotation marks say it all, don't they? They are a big part of the problem; DOPMA again...
In a word we will forget about OPMS politics and through training alone we will overturn (permanently) deeply entrenched institutional biases and their underlying often unspoken cultural prejudices.
Well, that would be a start -- of course, if you think they're beneficial, by all means hang on to them. You'll have a lot of allies, many in high places.
I have a bridge....it is in Brooklyn SB
Really I thought that was a Tree grows in Brooklyn. The Bridge connects Manhattan and Brooklyn so it's in both. Well actually, it's over the East River, so... Oh, never mind...

Nobody said changing a monolithic organization chock full of its own long standing culture and tons of biases and skewed systems would be easy. Nor did anybody say anything about tearing up all the norms and forms. Branches don't need to disappear; they do need to lose some of their clout. DOPMA will be hard to amend; hard is not impossible. The issue is, simply -- are some changes needed? If so what? What's achievable?

Better training IS achievable and as those better trained Privates become 1SGs and those LTs become COLs over time, they will change the culture...

Of course, not giving new entrants the best possible training can always be justified by citing the cost. Has nothing to do with not wanting smarter folks. surely...

A WW II Intel Officer, David Ogilvy said:
"If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.”
Makes sense to me.

As always for those not so inclined in any study of courses of action doing nothing is always an option.