

Why our best officers are leaving - bobf
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/why-our-best-officers-are-leaving/8346/1/

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drblast
Let's talk about the problems in the Navy. I'm an officer. I don't agree that
all of the best officers are leaving. Some are, but probably not in greater
percentages than the mediocre and bad ones. The promotion system is as
horrible as this article indicates.

There are some extremely talented officers at the higher ranks in the Navy, at
least, that at least stay until they are able to retire. The incentives to
stay after retirement are few unless you either really love the job, or are
very ambitious. There is an extreme financial disincentive to stay after about
22 years.

The Navy, at least, has an extremely backward promotion system that is at odds
with its own interests. Many, many times I've been in the position where I've
wanted to move people around to their areas of expertise but to do so would
hurt their chances of promotion. If I have a Chief, for example, who is one of
the best in the Navy at Job A, but Job A doesn't supervise a lot of people,
chances are he won't be promoted no matter how well he does in that job. Some
of these jobs are extremely specialized and there is a huge gulf between
someone who is an expert and someone who isn't.

There is a big emphasis on officers getting advanced technical degrees, but
very few jobs available to make use of those skills, and those that are aren't
necessarily good career moves. We have a large contingent of officers with
Masters degrees in electrical engineering and computer science doing middle-
level management work while brand new sailors with six weeks of training get
the technical jobs. When this setup fails miserably, contractors are brought
in to fix the problem at great expense.

The entire world has pretty much decided over the last century that increased
specialization leads to greater efficiency and cost effectiveness. By
promoting and operating the way the Navy does, the Navy has decided to take
the opposite tack; the path to success in the Navy is to become a generalist
and do a little bit of everything.

One of the most insightful remarks I've heard in my entire career was when the
Navy changed the promotion system to try to promote more based on merit than
favoritism. This caused an uproar as the system we adopted was rather
bureaucratic and ham-handed, and seemed to put some of our best sailors at a
disadvantage. While everyone was complaining, an LT I knew at the time said,
"You know what, none of this matters. As soon as everyone figures out how the
system works, they'll work within the system to ensure that the best people
get promoted." And that's pretty much how it works today. The only time the
system really makes a difference is when it hinders decision making.

~~~
lelele
> The entire world has pretty much decided over the last century that
> increased specialization leads to greater efficiency and cost effectiveness.
> By promoting and operating the way the Navy does, the Navy has decided to
> take the opposite tack; the path to success in the Navy is to become a
> generalist and do a little bit of everything.

My understanding is that generalists thrive and collect promotions everywhere.
Specialists get stuck with their area of expertise. Wanna be the CTO? Then be
a specialist. Wanna be the CEO, which rules them all? Then be a generalist.

------
count
I think one of the reasons for the strange 'assignment' and 'orders' system of
filling job needs is overlooked by the author. 'Randomly'[1] rotating people
around in the service has a side effect (or, actually, it's main purpose) that
is very beneficial to civilian society in the United States - it virtually
eliminates any situation where soldiers are more loyal to their chain of
command than to the country/Army as a whole.

Getting a new boss every 3-4 years means you'll never really cultivate that
lifelong attachment to the one boss you'd do anything for. This stems the a
huge amount of potential military coup/uprising/etc., and keeps the armed
forces focused on their jobs and loyalty to the mission and their country.

Has there ever been a military vs. govt/civilian situation in the US once this
policy was put in place?

[1] It's not random at all - it's a 'who you know' system. 'Detailers' are
staffed at the personnel bureau, and if you know your detailer well (or have
other connections), you get the job you want. Just like any other major
organization.

~~~
jackfoxy
The potential for military coup had never been a problem in the U.S. military
for the reason of well-established civilian control of the military as well.
The closest thing to a real problem having been MacArthur's insubordination to
Truman. That problem arose in part through the old system where senior
generals kept their positions forever in a hard-wired seniority system. Many
of the problems of that antiquated system were dealt with by the Goldwater-
Nichols act <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldwater-Nichols_Act>

~~~
locopati
There was the 1934 Business Plot

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot>

~~~
jackfoxy
Gerald C. MacGuire was a $100 a week bond salesman for Murphy & Company.
Smedley Butler was retired military and _the one who blew the whistle on the
whole affair_ , which most contemporaries and historians dismiss as a
_cocktail putsch_ , i.e. wild talk at a cocktail party. I don't think there's
a way to spin any military involvement in an attempted, or even contemplated
coup in this case.

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Umalu
It is a common complaint in pyramid-shaped hierarchies that the "best" people
leave. This is because they have to leave. As they climb the ladder, the rungs
get smaller so fewer can fit. Each year, many of the people who were the best
the year before (and got to the next rung on the ladder) have to leave. So
people in organizations like this naturally come to think that the "best"
people leave -- because eventually they all do. Of course, it is possible to
design a hierarchy so dysfunctional that the best people leave and the worst
people stay, and I don't know enough about the armed services to assess
whether that's the case here, but whenever I read about the best leaving, I
wonder how much of that's an intended feature or an unintended bug.

~~~
dvdt
I also wondered about how much the survey results of disaffected officers
could be attributed to problems inherent to any organization. It would have
been nice to see comparable survey results for the private sector on questions
like "does a good job retaining the best leaders."

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dave_h
ex-Naval Officer: I left because I knew the most incapable officers around me
would be promoted at the same time I would be and that after a few years on
shore duty I would be back on a submarine working with them. Except now they
would be in a position that their level of ability would affect more people.
After a few more years, most of those people would be promoted to the next
level with me.

It was just my experience, I don't know about other ships but some of the
officers at the level higher than me were not worth the oxygen they displaced.
The Captain of the ship was unable or unwilling to deal with them. It
eventually degraded into the Captain making jokes, I think he thought that
would motivate them to work harder.

The worst thing for me was that there was no mechanism to filter out the
underachievers. The evaluation system is useless, everyone gets the same
grade.

~~~
jseliger
_ex-Naval Officer: I left because I knew the most incapable officers around me
would be promoted at the same time I would be_

I actually thought about teaching high school, and in many ways my skill set
and temperament are well-suited to that occupation. But public school systems
offer zero reward -- and I'm not only or primarily speaking of the financial
kind -- for skill or merit. Even the very worst teachers can't be fired for
merely being bad at their jobs, as many of the articles I collected here:
<http://jseliger.com/2009/11/12/susan-engel-doesnt-get> indicate.

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john_horton
I'm skeptical that (a) the personnel system is a huge driver of attrition and
that (b) the proposed solution would work well.

On (a), deployments are generally pretty terrible, esp. if you have a family.
Most officers I know that got out didn't say it explicitly, but they made a
comparison of life in the military vs. life outside the military. In this
comparison, deployments are such a huge factor that the other stuff is pretty
secondary.

On (b), officers have very few objective measures of performance. Those that
exist have lots of noise. Good platoon sergeants can make incompetent platoon
leaders still look pretty good. You can pencil-whip maintenance records. You
get good or bad draws of soldiers & assignments etc. This encourages
politicking and focusing on appearance over substance. Adding more
"flexibility" to such a system could have some bad second-order effects, by
ramping up the incentives to _appear_ good to your commanders, without
actually being good.

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mattdeboard
As a former enlisted Marine of 10 years, I would like to see if the same
conclusions hold true for Marine officers. I would be very surprised if so.
The U.S. Army, as a whole, is a damaged organization. (That is not to say
there are not exemplary units within.)

The best officers are leaving _the Army_ , not the military as a whole.

~~~
limmeau
What differences between Army and Marines do you see?

~~~
mattdeboard
A comprehensive response to this question -- which deserves nothing but a
comprehensive response -- would require too much writing to explain it all to
an outsider. Too much relative to how much I'm willing to write on it, of
course. :)

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lispm
The pointless wars did not make them leave the military? Like invading Iraq
based on lies and then making a complete mess in Iraq because of total lack of
planning? Or the daily UAV attacks in foreign countries which are outside of
US and international law? Military prisons in foreign country to be able to
torture and prosecute people without access to lawyers, etc.? The military
sucking in about a full trillion (military budget + war budget + nuclear
weapons + + + +) of tax payer money?

That did not make the military officers think?

~~~
colinplamondon
Howdy Reddit.

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nhangen
I think what it comes down to is that you either love and accept the military
way of life or you don't. If you do, then you'll stay and accept the good with
the bad. If you don't, then no amount of promotion is going to keep you.

I wasn't an officer, but I was an NCO in SOCOM, and we had a lot of very
intelligent Soldiers. We had one of the lowest retention rates in the Army
(I'm guessing) simply because we had other options in the civilian world that
paid more, challenged us more, promoted us based on talent and potential, and
kept us home.

Overall, the military promotion system is backwards and archaic. Until it is
fixed (at least in the Army), I think you'll continue to see a steady decline
in re-enlistment of talented people.

In the Navy, I can only assume that it's the same way.

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julius_geezer
De Tocqueville made similar remarks, obviously based on the history of War of
1812. For that matter, consider the Civil War: Grant and Sherman were out of
the service at the start,

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philwelch
The history of the US military is full of highly effective wartime leaders who
would never have survived the politics and bureaucracy of a peacetime
military. It's hard to imagine colorful personalities like General Patton or
Chesty Puller surviving in a system where politics and bureaucracy have had
decades to get entrenched, unhindered by the need to win serious wars. And,
compared to WWII or even Korea and Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Iraq, and
Afghanistan just don't have the same weight of necessity.

And really, even the WWII era army was political enough that Patton got into
plenty of trouble.

~~~
hga
Except ... Patton did exactly that ("survived the politics and bureaucracy of
a peacetime military"), from before the Mexican expedition or whatever it's
called through the post-WWI period. Heck, one of his officer evaluations said
something to the effect that he was a real pain in peacetime "but would be
invaluable in time of war".

Granted, in today's "zero defects" system that wouldn't have happened, but at
least prior to WWII we weren't that insane. On the other hand, in peacetime
prior to the Cold War the military was generally on starvation rations and
retaining capable men was a major objective, sometimes to the detriment
wartime effectiveness. E.g. the IJN frequently cleaned our clock in night time
action, even when we had an advantage in RADAR, since our Navy hadn't
seriously exercised at night prior to the war.

The latter is based on my current study of the WWII US Navy in the Pacific and
specifically a couple of biographies of two of our best Admirals in it, Mark
Mitscher and especially the more detailed one on Arleigh Burke.

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btilly
I can absolutely believe this. My brother was in the Marines. He wanted to
become admiral. His performance was good. According to him, if he got promoted
to captain before 40, he'd make admiral, otherwise he was on a track to become
a military attache in a random country. He was on track to become captain at
41, but every year someone who had been an enlisted man first got promoted to
captain a year early.

When he wasn't promoted early, he quit with a full pension.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Ummm, the Marines don't have admirals, and you should make captain in the
Marines pretty fast, since it's only O-3, as opposed to O-6 in the Navy. You
sure he wasn't in the Navy?

~~~
btilly
When I think about it, I think he was an enlisted man in the Marines for
Vietnam, then an officer in the Navy. He left the military service somewhere
in the 80s.

This is a much older brother that I am not close to.

~~~
hga
And note that Navy (or Coast Guard) Captain is understandability a much higher
rank than in the other services, O-6, Colonel elsewhere, the last rank before
flag AKA General or Admiral. I can see an unofficial requirement for reaching
O-6 before 40 for then being in the running for flag rank.

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gcv
I'm under the impression that certain units within the armed forces do, in
fact, have somewhat decentralized job assignment systems. Dick Couch writes in
The Finishing School, for example, that SEAL platoon assignments result from
individual platoon OICs and Chiefs picking people from the entire Naval
Special Warfare community.

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speleding
If entrepreneurial people are leaving the Army to become tax paying citizens
and less entrepreneurial people stay in the government service, then that's
much better for the economy than the other way around.

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Nate75Sanders
"Why does the American military produce the most innovative and
entrepreneurial leaders in the country..."

stopped reading right there

