Adams, this is an interesting article and of course it validates the old adage that junior NCOs and Warrants will tell you what you may not want to hear, but need to hear. I am hesitant to write this, because I risk offending everyone and that isn't my intent, because we still have quite a few good NCO and officer leaders in our ranks, but sadly they are not the norm. After 30 plus years of service, I have seen a remarkable decrease in the "general" quality of leadership in the Army. It isn't something we can measure, it is a perception, but a perception based on years of observation. I think the Army is still teaching the correct principles of leadership, but these principles are not being reinforced in the units, and of course this is where behavior is really learned. What behavior is actually rewarded? How do you reward principled behavior? You can't write a measurable comment in an NCOER about principled behavior, instead you check the box that everyone checks that the soldier demostrates Army values, which makes it a meaningless item on the NCOER and OER.
Real cultural change take time, strong leadership, and a system that encourages-mandates it. The officer problem will be harder to fix with the ingrained priorities "me, my rater, and me", but god help us if we destroy the NCO corp, the real leaders in our ranks (at least they should be). I have found our CSMs-SGMs to be either very effective leaders (often undue the negative impact of poor officers) or to put it bluntly complete morans focused on trivia that I would expect someone in 4th grade to be focused on. Assuming the Peter Singers story is true that a CSM used a UAV to spy on his troops when they were on patrol in Afghanistan and then berated them when they returned because he noted a uniform deficiency is a case in point. Why can't we fire idiots like that on the spot? In other situations, why can't we promote them on the spot?
Slowing down promotions is one answer that may help the masses in the long run, but as others have pointed out some people are exceptional leaders based on their inate intelligence and character and should have the option of moving up quicker. How do you identify those people with our current system for assessing who should get promoted? I don't think you can. Again we are held hostage to a mass production personnel system where one size fits all, which by default allows low level performers to continue to progress, while it hinders high level performers from moving ahead of their lower performing peers. We have taken fairness to the extreme in our military. Personally I and I believe most others in the ranks knew some of our peers were better than us and deserved to be promoted quicker, while others didn't deserve to be promoted at all, but in general we all progressed in mass with few exceptions. Something is wrong with that model.
One problem that we should be able to fix is the up or out system. We have many great enlisted soldiers who are not leaders, but they have a lot of knowledge and are contributing members of any team they are a part of. I recall one senior E7 engineer sgt we had who was well done as being one of the most knowledgeable engineers in Special Forces. His performance in Vietnam was lauded, one of the few left (I'm going back a few years) that had experience in building and sustain SF base camps. He repeatedly told his supervisors he did not want to make E8. The system being the system promoted him to E8 and they made him a team sergeant which he failed at and was relieved (at least we relieved people in those days). The sad part was he ended his stellar career on a disappointing note that hurt him and his team, and if we only had the option to retain him in his current grade the Army and the Soldier would have been better off for it.
In the 90s is when I started hearing the cowardly phrases, "not on my watch", "there is no need to conduct risky training" (it might hurt my career), "general order number 1 for everyone" (because if I treat everyone like children, it reduces the possibility of black mark on "my" record, and of course we are all careerists first, leaders second). 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.
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