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Originally Posted by The Reaper
Excellent read on the Army's leadership crisis, nonetheless.
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You know I have heard all this stuff since I was but a wee brown bar and I think the "leadership crisis" is but a symptom of a dumb personnel management "program". For those of you that are officers, stop and look back at your careers to date and tell me which one of you really spent enough time in any command or leadership position that you thought was really enough to prepare you to move to the next higher echelon. Now tell me just how long is really enough and tell me that when it came time to move on to the next "job" that you hadn't either left things undone, under done, or not honed to the level to which you thought they should be. I mean damn, most folks just are getting a handle on what a particular slot is all about and then they are moved for "professional development (ticket punching)" reasons to remain competitive with their contemporaries. Now look at folks sporting stars and tell me just how long did they spend in each grade and at each position that would merit the moniker of a leadership position. I have always thought that the military was made up of warriors and those that supported warriors and while you can have some that can walk in the shoes of both they are few and far between, yet we measure career development more in terms of how well a person performed at a particular job be it commanding a unit or teaching a course and some how identified that person as having the potential to move on to the next higher grade, but the next higher grade doing what? Some folks are just good at doing one thing, or working at one echelon, or in one career field and that's it. How many times have you said, "Damn he was a hell of a team leader but what a jackass Bn Cdr he turned out to be." Or something similar to that. The personnel management field looks at the wrong indicators for who should be doing what and why. I realize that this is an over simplification but just thinking of what needs to be done makes my hair hurt.