Finally, the Army is promoting the right officers.

[JJ_BPK]

I think this should make some happy??

Being an FOG long on the outside,, what say you??

Annual General Meeting, Finally, the Army is promoting the right officers.
By Fred Kaplan, Posted Monday, Aug. 4, 2008, at 4:44 PM

http://www.slate.com/id/2196647/pagenum/all/

Last November, when Gen. David Petraeus was named to chair the promotion board that picks the Army's new one-star generals, the move was seen as, potentially, the first rumble of a seismic shift in the core of the military establishment.

The selections were announced in July, and they have more than fulfilled the promise. They mark the beginnings, perhaps, of the cultural change that many Army reformers have been awaiting for years.

Promotion systems, in any large organization, are designed to perpetuate the dominant culture. The officers in charge tend to promote underlings whose styles and career paths resemble their own.

Most of today's Army generals rose through the ranks during the Cold War as armor, infantry, or artillery officers who were trained to fight large-scale, head-to-head battles against enemies of comparable strength—for instance, the Soviet army as its tanks plowed across the East-West German border.

The problem, as many junior officers have been writing over the last few years, is that this sort of training has little relevance for the wars of today and, likely, tomorrow—the "asymmetric wars" and counterinsurgency campaigns that the U.S. military has actually been fighting for the last 20 years in Bosnia, Panama, Haiti, and Somalia, as well as in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 2006 and again in 2007, the Army's promotion board passed over Col. H.R. McMaster, widely regarded as one of the most creative strategists of this "new" (though actually quite ancient) style of warfare. In Iraq, he was commander of the unit that brought order to Tal Afar, using the classic counterinsurgency methods—"clear, hold, and build"—that Petraeus later adopted as policy. When I was reporting a story last summer about growing tensions between the Army's junior and senior officer corps, more than a dozen lieutenants and captains complained bitterly (with no prompting from me) about McMaster's rejection, seeing it as a sign that the top brass had no interest in rewarding excellent performance. The more creative captains took it as a cue to contemplate leaving the Army.

This was why many Army officers were excited when Petraeus was appointed to chair this year's promotion board. Rarely, if ever, had a combat commander been called back from an ongoing war to assume that role. It almost certainly meant that McMaster would get his due. (Some referred to the panel as "the McMaster promotion board.")

McMaster did get his star—but so did many others of his ilk. That's what makes this list an eyebrow-raiser. Among the 40 newly named one-star generals are Sean MacFarland, commander of the unit that brought order to Ramadi; Steve Townsend, who cleared and held Baqubah; Michael Garrett, who commanded the infantry brigade that helped turn around the "Triangle of Death" south of Baghdad; Stephen Fogarty, the intelligence officer in Afghanistan; Colleen McGuire, an officer in the military police (a branch of the service that almost never makes generals). At least eight special-operations officers are on the list (though not all of them are identified as such), as well as the unit commanders of various "light" forces—in Stryker light-armor brigades or the 10th Mountain Division—that have tended to be ignored by the Army's "heavy"-leaning armor and artillery chiefs.

Almost all these new generals have had multiple tours of duty leading soldiers in battle. In other words, they have a depth of knowledge about asymmetric warfare that the generals at the start of the Iraq war did not. And many of them were promoted straight from their combat commands. That is, they didn't have to scurry through the usual bureaucratic maze.

For instance, just last year, nine of the 38 new one-stars had been executive officers to a commanding general—and, in most cases, not a combat commander—at the time they were promoted. This year, only four of the 40 were serving in that role, and all of them under commanders who had something to do with combat.

How this change happened is another intriguing tale. Usually, the promotion board consists of the upper echelon of the Army's bureaucracy—the vice chief of staff or one of his deputies and the generals in charge of various commands. In 2007, the promotion board included only one general who reported in from Iraq.

This year, Petraeus wasn't the only unusual general on the board. Another panelist was Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, Defense Secretary Robert Gates' senior military assistant, who was also a corps commander in Iraq and the author of several articles in military journals calling for an overhaul of the Army's personnel policies. Others included Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, who, like Petraeus, was called back from Iraq to serve on the board; Maj. Gen. John Mulholland, commander of special operations for U.S. Central Command (which covers Iraq and Afghanistan); and Lt. Gen. Ann Dunwoody, commander of Materiel Command and a former parachutist in the 82nd Airborne Division, who, as the Army's top-ranking female officer, is well disposed to the idea of opening doors.

Any officer looking at the names on this panel—and the ones I've listed aren't the only ones—would very clearly get the message: The Cold War is over, and so, finally, is the Cold War Army.

In October 2007, a month before Petraeus was appointed to chair the promotion board, Secretary Gates gave a speech to the Association of the United States Army—usually a forum for back-patting boilerplate, but Gates sounded the trumpet for what many in the audience must have heard as revolution. Speaking of the officers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, "who have been tested in battle like none other in decades" and "have seen the complex, grueling face of war in the 21st century up close," Gates said:

These men and women need to be retained, and the best and brightest advanced to the point that they can use their experience to shape the institution to which they have given so much. And this may mean reexamining assignments and promotion policies that in many cases are unchanged since the Cold War.

That change seems to be starting now.

[Jack Moroney (RIP)]

Originally Posted by JJ_BPK

I think this should make some happy??

Being an FOG long on the outside,, what say you??

There are some good points in this article and some good folks both on the panel and those selected but the proof of the pudding will be in the performance. Selection to the next higher grade is for demonstrating the potential to serve at that next higher grade and should not necessarily be for the creation of "mini-mes" who seem to have grasped the finer points of asymetric warfare or any other strategy. Their roles will still be to provide the leadership for those for whom they are responsible and manage both the resources and civilian leadership to enable soldiers to succeed. I, for one, do not agree with Gates about our likely hood of not having to engage folks in major conflicts with conventional forces. There is a host of threats out there that span the entire possible spectrum of conflict for which we need to be prepared and to do that we need folks that have the ability to adapt to the strategies and threats and look beyond the inability of those that cannot seem to correctly identify threats to our national security. I am not criticizing any of the folks selected, but I think Naylor has failed, like Gates, to grasp the realities of tomorrow which cannot be projected on a power point slide from the battlefields of South West Asia.

[charlietwo]

Originally Posted by Jack Moroney

I, for one, do not agree with Gates about our likely hood of not having to engage folks in major conflicts with conventional forces. There is a host of threats out there that span the entire possible spectrum of conflict for which we need to be prepared and to do that we need folks that have the ability to adapt to the strategies and threats and look beyond the inability of those that cannot seem to correctly identify threats to our national security.

I couldn't agree more. The writing is all of the walls, but as Jack Moroney said, most have their attention to the power point slides. Look at Georgia v. Russia

[longrange1947]

I agree as well and am getting worried that the fight is only urban/guerrilla is going to bite us in the ass.

We always train for the last one, every dam time.

We never predict correctly, look at when they sent all those fresh out of West Point 2d looies to Korea in 1950.