A good friend of mine, who is active in the military and in the intelligence community, made me aware of this stunning article published this week in Foreign Policy - National Security magazine. Written by retired Lt. General David Barno, the article is a scathing indictment against our senior military brass and their cavalier attitude towards losing the top young talent as the numbers of active duty soldiers, sailors airmen and Marines shrink due to budget constraints.
The points that Barno makes in this piece are completely consistent with my observations covering almost fifteen years of working closely with transitioning military officers. I am torn. As an executive recruiter, I am delighted that I am in a position to make available to my client companies the best and the brightest that our military has trained. As a citizen and a tax payer, I am concerned that we are driving away from our armed forces the men and women who have the broadest understanding of a complex and rapidly evolving geopolitical jigsaw puzzle.
Military Brain Drain -- The Pentagon's top brass is driving away all the smart people
In his recent book “Bleeding Talent,”
Tim Kane joins a growing chorus of serving and former junior officers to
deliver a wake-up call to today's military leadership in the face of a major
drawdown. Their message: If you ignore the expectations of today's young,
combat-experienced leaders as you shrink the force, your most talented officers
and sergeants will exit, stage left.
The military bureaucracy's response?
"Good Riddance."
During any military drawdown,
equipment, training, force structure, and end-strength will inevitably be
sacrificed. But the "crown jewel" that must be preserved in order to
be able to fight and win in the years ahead is human capital. Recruiting and
retaining highly talented people remains the best guarantor of success in
future conflicts. No distant campaign against a wily and unpredictable enemy in
the 21st century will be won without innovative and creative military
leadership. And that leadership is most at risk in the coming thinning of the
military's rolls. And the officer corps most of all.
A colleague told me of a recent
meeting with a roomful of senior generals in which he outlined the looming
"talent drain," highlighting the prospect that the most exceptional
officers will flee the force in droves over the next five years. Their response
echoed the one I hear all too often from both active and retired generals:
"If they want to leave the team, we'd be better off without them."
Astonishing.
In no business enterprise would the
large-scale loss of an organization's top performers be greeted with such
indifference. In fact, given the likely impact of such losses on any firm's
bottom line, corporate chieftains would likely soon be looking for new jobs
themselves if they dismissed their responsibility for managing their best
talent. In today's competitive and uncertain environment, any company that
loses its top talent will go out of business.
But in the military, not so much.
With more people than it needs as
budgets shrink, and no management redlines to alert service leaders to the loss
of their best young leadership, the military simply assumes there will always
be more than enough talent to go around. Managing decreasing numbers becomes more
important than fighting to retain the best manpower. And a "so what"
attitude among senior military leaders toward the loss of highly skilled talent
is seen as acceptable, a bravado that is often encouraged by those who
"stayed on the team" through previous drawdown’s. After all, many of
today's generals think, "As junior officers, we stayed while others left,
and we've made out just fine." Plenty of talent will stay, as it always
has. Why worry?
There can be no more deadly,
pernicious outlook from current or former senior leaders. It conveys a
fundamentally flawed message to the military's young leaders that individuals
don't count, that talent doesn't matter, and that even in the hyper-competitive
world of the 21st century, in the U.S. military, "parts is parts."
This outlook has the potential for deadly consequences as end-strength plunges.
Secretary Bob Gates challenged the
Army in a February 2011 speech at West Point to change in order to retain and
empower the kinds of leaders it will need for the 21st century. Gates observed:
"[The] greatest challenge facing your Army and my main worry [is]: How can
the Army break up the institutional concrete, its bureaucratic rigidity in its
assignments and promotion processes, in order to retain, challenge, and inspire
its best, brightest, and most battle-tested young officers to lead the service
in the future?" Cadets cheered, junior officers were encouraged, and the
bureaucracy changed not at all.
Two years later, the worry described
by Gates remains -- while the primary response from the military services has
most often been silence and a denial of the problem. As I've noted before, and
as Gates pointed out in his West Point speech, the Army (and military writ
large) is competing for talent with Google -- not a 1950s widget factory. And
it is going to start losing, dramatically.
It does not have to be so. There is no
reason not to listen and respond to the concerns of younger officers -- while
also fully meeting the needs of the service. But you can't do it with a World
War II mindset, an insular outlook, or an Industrial Age personnel system --
all of which are markedly in evidence today. And in the coming years, throwing
money at the problem is not likely to be as easy as in the past.
So what must the senior military
leadership -- the service secretaries and four-star generals -- do?
First, know your talent inventory.
Make sure you can identify your performers -- the top 1, 5, and 25 percent, and
subsequent percentages below. Measure your attrition against each category, and
hold your personnel managers accountable for keeping as many of those in the
top tiers as possible and disproportionately shedding poor performers. If the
reverse happens -- if the best leave and the worst stay -- you have failed.
Know your intellectual capital, which
may not always correlate with your "top performers." Know what
percentages of your officers score in the top mental categories at each rank to
monitor potential loss of intellectual capital. Look for non-standard
undergraduate degrees and unusual life experiences and find a way to weight
those factors.
Know your outliers. Exceptionally
gifted individuals often struggle in their one-size-fits-all initial
assignments, and their early ratings may reflect poor performance rather than
growing pains. The best platoon leader in a brigade may not grow up to be the
best four-star strategic leader. Collect every leader's SATs and GREs and
analyze against who fits where on the performance curve, and fight to avoid
wholesale losses of your future intellectual capital. Balance current
performance against intellectual potential as you shape the force.
Empower your personnel managers -- and
hold them accountable -- to create the coming smaller force with the
performance and intellectual specifications you want. Don't let the end result
of who stays in fall to happenstance or whim, and don't accept marginal
outcomes because it's simply too hard to individually manage top performers and
sharp thinkers. Demand that managers incentivize the best to stay, and
rigorously examine quality leaders who depart so you can correct the system.
Don't settle for mediocrity and call it success.
Get your field commanders into this
fight. Require them to take on the mission of keeping the best on board. The
best will already be doing this. Give them access to strong retention
incentives -- graduate schooling, assignment overrides, broadening
opportunities -- that can be decentralized to those on the cutting edge who
know talent the best. Insist commanders at all levels in the field make this a
top priority.
Finally, find a way to give today's
officers more of a voice in their assignments and in their lives. If there is
one key generational difference between today's young officers and those of my
generation (and there are many), expecting a voice in their future is the one
that most stands out -- for the officer, for his or her spouse with a separate
career, and for their family. One answer may be the creation of "yellow
pages" to apply for assignments as Tim Kane suggests. Officers and their
families want choices, not simply orders. Another is simply more humane
one-on-one dialogue between human resources directors and individual officers.
During a rapid drawdown, the human resources impetus is to "dump"
officers, and no one is held accountable for the ensuing quality drain as many
of the best exit. That meat-ax approach to management has to end if the
military is to retain critical talent in this drawdown as a hedge against a
very dangerous world.
It's time to listen to Kane and Gates
-- they have it mostly right. Senior service leaders must take a harder look at
themselves in the mirror when defending a 60-year old personnel system. It is
2013, not the Mad Men era of 1963. And sustaining the military
preeminence of the United States starts with a uniquely American ideal --
cultivating the best and brightest, so they can lead the force into a dangerous
future. It should be the first priority of today's senior military leaders, not
their last.
Lt. Gen. David Barno (ret.) was
commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan from
2003 to 2005 and is a Senior Advisor and Senior Fellow senior
fellow at the Center for a New American Security.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
General Barno, (http://www.cnas.org/barno) a highly decorated military
officer with over 30 years of service, has served in a variety of command and
staff positions in the United States and around the world, to include command
at every level. He served many of his early years in special operations forces
with Army Ranger battalions, to include combat in both the Grenada and Panama
invasions. In 2003, he was selected to establish a new three-star operational
headquarters in Afghanistan and take command of the 20,000 U.S. and Coalition
Forces in Operation Enduring Freedom. For 19 months in this position, he was
responsible for the overall military leadership of this complex
political-military mission, devising a highly innovative counterinsurgency strategy
in close partnership with the U.S. embassy and coalition allies. His
responsibilities included regional military efforts with neighboring nations
and involved close coordination with the Government of Afghanistan, the United
Nations, NATO International Security Assistance Force, the U.S. Department of
State and USAID, and the senior military leaders of many surrounding nations
and numerous allies.
From 2006-2010, General Barno served as the Director of the Near
East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies at the National Defense
University. Concurrently, he was the Chairman of the Advisory Committee on
Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom Veterans and Families
from 2007-2009. He frequently serves as an expert consultant on counterinsurgency
and irregular warfare, professional military education and the changing
character of conflict, supporting a wide-range of government and other
organizations. General Barno is widely published and has testified before
Congress numerous times. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign
Relations and the International Institute of Strategic Studies.
A 1976 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point,
General Barno also earned his master’s degree in National Security Studies from
Georgetown University. He is a graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General
Staff College, and the U.S. Army War College. General Barno has received
numerous awards for his military and public service.
Here is a link to the entire on-line article:
foreignpolicy.com Article : Military Brain Drain
I would love to see and hear your thoughts in the Comments section below.
Al
No comments:
Post a Comment