When dealing with officer accessions, I also think some attention needs to be paid to how ROTC targets its people. Dealing with a student environment, and given some of the very diverse students (including MANY non-traditional students who bring valuable experience to the force), ROTC has the chance to get at a target audience other avenues may miss. But they hurt themselves by remaining heavily focused on engineers and technical majors to the exclusion of much else. It may also help the services to loosen up some of the programs that allow promising enlisted personnel to get out and go through ROTC with a wider variety of academic majors (currently ALL of our prior enlisted types at my detachment are engineering majors).

I tend to side with the views expressed by Douglas MacGregor regarding force structure and Donald Vandergriff about the personnel system and structure within the forces. A draft of the sort Tom mentions can help, but there must also be some fundamental changes in the way the military deals with the careers of its people. Up or out is a failure, and has been for years. The same goes for many of the individual replacement systems that have been tried. It's been my feeling for some time that we need to make changes at this most basic level before we should start spending tons of time and money on the tech stuff that tends to grab headlines and look good at trade shows.