I see a lot of people rejoicing because our Secretary of Defense has decided to implement another new core promotion strategy that will take on all the advantages of Up or Out and combine it with stroking out on any and all virtues for military competence and professionalism. In short, we are going to extend the battle space for just plain stupid, again.
Here is what they claim is the goal and intent of the new promotion regime coming at us at warp speed. To paraphrase, after coddling these pathetic drones for 20-22 years in some sort of pampered military service bearing a striking resemblance to living in an eastern European or Asian palace*, we are going to take 06's who have never done a single military thing in their whole lives and we are going to give them a one-size-fits-all test on how well they'd do at playing a war game we just invented.
This ranks right up there with declaring that overweight air conditioning and refrigeration technicians on a 173 foot long warship abroad in the Persian Gulf during a naval war with Iran must be sent home and discharged from the Navy pronto because they're not as fit as most tank crewmen or infantry privates. Never mind that the two have nothing at all in common. The physical standards demanded of the one outweigh the technical skills and work environment of the other.
On a good day about 15% of the military is in combat or in a place where imminent danger pay gets paid. Why would you hold the Disbursing Officer back in CONUS to the same mythical war fighting standards as Master Chief or George Patton? Why would you waste oceans of man hours trying to create a scheme for weighing and balancing every feather on the planet instead of just picking the ones you want/need?
The promotion boards these officers go before are/should be rigorous but I'll let you in on a secret, they've been fucking off for the last 30 or 40 years. I mean they literally shove concrete up their noses and take power naps while sitting on promotion boards. I know this even though I've never been within a thousand miles of such a board. I'll tell you how I know this:
The military has two kinds of officer boards that matter to us. One is the Promotion Board and the other is the Screening Boards. In the Navy, your career as a surface line officer is over if you failed to select for Department Head School. That winnowed a lot of officers right there at the 4 or 6 year point. You had to be selected by the screening board.
The next screening board winnowed out the vast number of officers by screening all officers for Command. If you failed to select for command, your career was essentially over. You might make it to 20 years but you would not serve in command.
Did any of you notice that the thing that killed a navy officer's career was right there where he/she failed to select for command as a Commander? You know what that means? It doesn't mean as much as you think it does because the Navy still needs an enormous number of officers to manage and do other things that officers with time in grade and experience do. Oddly enough, those jobs are important enough that officers can be promoted to Captain and stay in the Navy for 30 years.
Well, they could up until Congress got involved and declared a set of wickets of little meaning and no significant advantage. Congress declared that all senior officers must have Joint Experience! They must also have completed some form of Joint Professional Military Education! They must weigh no more than X, a constantly shifting variable that really has zero meaning or value in war fighting! They must also be really really nice and never fault or upbraid a junior who will then report them to the IG for some alleged misconduct or fraud.
I mentioned the Promotion Board and said they snorted birds and ate worms instead of actually doing anything related to reviewing promotion eligibility because over time the evidence was pretty clear that they didn't actually open up service records, look at fitness reports and weigh all the evidence of an officer's career up to that point in order to determine whether or not he was a good fit for promotion. Nope. All they did was rubber stamp the same exact names as promulgated by the Screening Board for Department Head and for Command.
An officer could have been a hopeless failure as a Commanding Officer and STILL get promoted because a Command Screening Board put him or her at the head of the list of all officers of his/her rank and so, no matter how dismally they performed in their 05 Command Tour, they had one and no peer that did not get command could measure up. This is a really stupid way to select senior midgrade officers.
If you think that is stupid, you should see how the Flag and General Officer Promotion Boards work for 07 and then consider the whole new game they invented for promoting 08, 09 and 10s. The 07 boards relied on merit but included a smell test and an aura check. Two stars still had a tiny veneer of competence and merit but it was mostly smell and aura and you see that just in the DIE promotions over the last 30 years. The 09 and 10 selections are pure smell and aura and a little bit of politics thrown in.
The time to measure officers for higher rank starts on day 1 and includes a buffer zone large enough to allow for them to learn and grow. The final measure of an officer's competence is not some idiotic game that panderers and sociologists dreamed up based on some big lie about a war game over 80 years ago.
Marshall didn't fire officers based on their performance in some stupid war game. The Army back then was small enough that every senior officer knew every other senior officer and every single one of them had a well formed opinion on everyone else's professional reputation. That was the Army of the 1930s.
You start the winnowing process early, not at the end. Doing it with a single pass/fail test at the end of the day simply makes it clear that you have been fucking up by the numbers in every way possible for the last 30 years. Take a look at the link in the paragraph above. It goes to the heart and soul of what I'm driving at. The tactical proficiency you ever expected out of an officer was what you got out of him when he was an 02, 03 and 04. After that the system demands professional expertise, solid communications skills, program management proficiency and the ability to work with others to accomplish the goals all share and agree on.
Every CNO for the last 30 years has been a complete failure. The Army is so inept at selecting senior general officers that it has now been forced to go outside the existing structure to bring in someone talented enough to actually try to get the Army to work. In this, it has largely failed over the last 30 years. For the naysayers who say Desert Storm I would like to point out that that was over 30 years ago and that those 3 and 4 star officers who made that work so well were the direct products of Vietnam and the wildly accurate systems all the services put into place to make sure that no more Vietnams happen.
In this regard we may have exceeded expectations. We literally cannot conduct a Return of Forces To Germany. A, the force is greatly diminished, B, the strategic lift is gone, C, the officers who knew how to do it are long gone and finally the will to do it, is gone.
If you were to ask me what I think I would say we are in the process now of recreating the force that General Smedley Butler wrote about in, War is a Racket.
I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909–1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
Why are so many people, many of them professional military types, so insistent that we gear up our industries, our shipyards and our war machines and our weapons and ammo stocks to fight China? Admittedly, if we thought we could fight China and somehow win, that would perfectly set us up to continue to keep fighting everyone else as we have been doing for the last 80 years. Naturally, as with the Soviet Union, we wouldn't actually have to fight China, just pay exorbitantly for the potential to fight a devastating war that both sides could only lose.
Some people are surprised that China, after maintaining a tiny retaliatory nuclear missile capability has decided to dramatically expand the numbers and types of strategic nuclear deterrents to start bringing their actual numbers on hand to something more on par with the US and Russia. Actions and bluster have consequences that anyone can see coming a mile off.
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