Initial Officer Selection

[Fuchs]

SOMEBODY will find out. There's always opposition, to everything. Especially inside the bureaucracy.
They WILL use lame complaints like stupid Reichswehr analogies and myths.

Just look at the "Kriegsnah ausbilden" drama. Politicians hardly read it, but somebody read it and launched the PC complaint campaign.


We can propose smart yet non-PC stuff as outsiders or at least with protection of anonymity, but even a simple memo in the bureaucracy itself would be a powder keg.

[jmm99]

Hey South Africa,

Change of Command Ceremony, 2nd Battalion - 4th Infantry Regiment, ~ 2007-2009 (youtube, 22 Mar 2009; LTC Watson to LTC Rickard)

Rebalancing Forces In Response to the QDR (Army Mar 2011):

LTC Timothy F. Watson is a Senior Service College Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. Previously, he was assigned as a senior task farce observercontroller at the Joint Readiness Training Center, Fort Polk, La. LTC Watson commanded the 2nd Battalion, 4th Infantry Regiment, at Fort Polk and deployed to Baghdad, Iraq, to perform full spectrum counterinsurgency operations.

The Officer Core (Letter to Editor - Atlantic Apr 2011) - still LTC.

And finally to vindicate your more than less on target crystal ball - this time (November 17, 2010 CONGRESSIONAL RECORD—SENATE S7993):

THE FOLLOWING NAMED OFFICERS FOR APPOINTMENT TO THE GRADE INDICATED IN THE UNITED STATES ARMY UNDER TITLE 10, U.S.C., SECTION 624:

To be colonel
.....
TIMOTHY F. WATSON

Regards

Mike

[JMA]

Hey South Africa,

Change of Command Ceremony, 2nd Battalion - 4th Infantry Regiment, ~ 2007-2009 (youtube, 22 Mar 2009; LTC Watson to LTC Rickard)

Rebalancing Forces In Response to the QDR (Army Mar 2011):

The Officer Core (Letter to Editor - Atlantic Apr 2011) - still LTC.

And finally to vindicate your more than less on target crystal ball - this time (November 17, 2010 CONGRESSIONAL RECORD—SENATE S7993):

Regards

Mike

One wonders if Col Watson's views on this issue have changed over the years?

A paragraph of his Letter to the Editor of April 2011 is worth a quote here:

Much of what combat commanders do can’t be learned in a classroom. Education and innovation, while important, are no substitute for experience. This is a significant difference from the business examples the author relies on. A better comparison is to a surgeon rather than a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Some hotshot officer with fewer years in service and fewer deployments under his belt is probably not going to perform better in combat than an older guy who’s been there before. We’d rather work for the graybeard.

Could not have said it better myself

[Ulenspiegel]

SOMEBODY will find out. There's always opposition, to everything. Especially inside the bureaucracy.
They WILL use lame complaints like stupid Reichswehr analogies and myths.

Just look at the "Kriegsnah ausbilden" drama. Politicians hardly read it, but somebody read it and launched the PC complaint campaign.


We can propose smart yet non-PC stuff as outsiders or at least with protection of anonymity, but even a simple memo in the bureaucracy itself would be a powder keg.

OK, the Bundeswehr had officer schools for the first 18 years, then switch to the university system. So I am optimistic that the political issues could be solved when the wheel is re-invented.

[JMA]

OK, the Bundeswehr had officer schools for the first 18 years, then switch to the university system. So I am optimistic that the political issues could be solved when the wheel is re-invented.

In another 20 years?