Donald E. Vandergriff: Effective Personnel Systems Are Critical
Donald E. Vandergriff: Effective Personnel Systems Are Critical
About
the Author
Major Donald E. Vandergriff, USA, an armor officer, teaches military science at Georgetown University Army ROTC. Vandergriff began his military career with the United States Marine Corps, and has had extensive experience in the field with the Army. After he transferred from the Marine Corps to the Army National Guard, he initially served as a cavalry platoon leader in the 278th Armored Cavalry Regiment (TNARNG). Upon entering active duty, he served in the Republic of Korea as a tank platoon, tank company executive officer and scout platoon leader for almost two years; at the National Training Center (serving both as an observer controller and in the OPFOR); and in the Middle East and Germany.
He has his undergraduate degree in education from the University of Tennessee, a graduate degree in military history from American Military University, and began his PhD studies in military history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Major Vandergriff has lectured extensively on military effectiveness and cultural impacts in the United States and Europe. He has also been the subject of several articles that deal with military effectiveness and military transformation, including features in the Washington Post, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker Magazine, The National Journal, Government Executive Magazine, The Washington Monthly, Army Times, Stars and Stripes, Norfolk News-Gazette and Pittsburg Star.
He currently lives in Woodbridge, Virginia with his wife Lorraine, and their three dogs and one cat. Vandergriff has always been athletically competitive, playing Rugby at the University of Tennessee 1982-1984, at Fort Irwin 1987-1990, in Germany 1993-4, and in Northern Virginia 1996-97. Vandergriff also participated in Iron Man competitions from 1987-1990, and was an avid snow skier. His current hobbies include Tennessee college football, military wargaming, mountain biking, hiking and his dogs.
With the United States committed to a global war against terrorism that will probably last for years, debate over the effectiveness of the armed forces has intensified in the Pentagon, Congress and the news media. Unfortunately, it is wrongfully focused on weapons and command-and-control systems while ignoring the critical issue of maintaining a combat-effective force through effective management of the officers and enlisted personnel who have to do the fighting.
It is my belief that even before developing space-age weapons and communications systems that comprise the so-called "Revolution in Military Affairs," the Defense Department and uniformed services should undertake what I call the "Revolution in Human Affairs" - a transformation of the antiquated personnel management systems in place today that threaten to weaken and dilute the effectiveness of our combat units.
More than anything else, what will guarantee our victory in this difficult war is success in creating and sustaining strong "esprit de corps" throughout the various military commands and units that deploy to distant battlefields. In this and two subsequent articles, I hope to demonstrate how the little-studied area of personnel management holds a key to transformation of the U.S. military into a far more effective fighting force, at a cost far below that of simply buying more advanced weapons.
First, let's look at how other armies have promoted morale and fighting spirit in the past.
The classic embodiment of esprit de corps is the British Army's regimental system. While the regiment, with between 750-1,000 soldiers in its ranks, was always too large for an individual soldier to personally know everyone else - except after a long time in the unit - they generated immense attachment, loyalty, instant mutual recognition and trust, and lifelong acknowledgement of this identity, creating cohesion.
Once cohesion and trust are fulfilled the unit is on the road to excellence - the mastery of complex wartime unit tasks. As a result, agility becomes second nature to the unit, which in turns increases the options available to commanders. This in turn increases the commander's decisiveness.
Personnel systems are defined as individual-based or unit-based with variations of both. Those nations that conduct what is called maneuver warfare or 3rd Generation warfare employ unit-based systems. These systems can be further divided into three types: the regimental system, a regionally- or nationally-based system, and the "Swiss" personnel system.
The most well known is the British Regimental system that came into being under Oliver Cromwell in 1644, where local British regions were responsible for providing regiments to a national but decentralized army. Each regiment includes several field battalions and a depot, with the latter unit responsible for recruiting, training - socializing - and transferring regimental levies to the deployed battalions for replacements. These regiments historically have showed great pride and were stalwart against an array of threats in the last three centuries. Throughout modern British history the strength of the regiment - particularly its NCO cadre and unit cohesion - more than compensated for the lack of professionalism in the British officer corps.
However, British regiments at the same time have been very poor in their ability to cooperate and communicate with neighboring infantry units and other branches of the army (e.g. armor). This directly stemmed from the way they practiced cohesion and esprit. Lack of trust and communication with fellow British infantry battalions in the field led to the habit of very sharp unit boundaries and prohibition of initiatives that would cross those boundaries. Until the post-World War II era, regimental officers tended to stay confined to their units, resulting in limited operational and strategic initiative and imagination in carrying out the war efforts.
Up to and during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Swiss personnel system defined Israeli military effectiveness. The Israelis relied on a small professional army to buy time at the outset of war, but just importantly, to train the reserves. The background of the Israeli system was its ready reserve system, where units revolved around local communities and where crews and platoons stayed together for years, ensuring unit cohesion.
More importantly, the Israelis could maintain a ready army at little cost to their small nation. Today, the Israelis employ parts of two systems, both an IRS and the Swiss system.
The Germans employed a regional personnel system that evolved from Frederick the Great's day and was institutionalized under Gerhard Scharnhorst after the Prussian defeat at Jena. This system was capitalized and expanded in the mid-1800s by the German general staff into an army that could rapidly transition from peace to war. While the German general staff provided the brains to focus on war plans and mobilization, it was left to several geographical corps districts to raise, train and sustain units (and officers).
With their well-known reputation for efficiency, the German army insisted on policies that supported unit cohesion. In World War I and World War II the Germans maintained a large pool of divisions (with less overhead and logistical support than other western armies) for the purpose of rotating units. When units became combat ineffective, they were rotated back to the homeland to be rebuilt and retrained. The new division would take in replacements from the same region with the new soldiers trained by a cadre of veterans. The unit would then rotate back to the front with little or no diminishment in its effectiveness. As a result, units maintained a high degree of combat effectiveness. For example, during World War II, the Germans inflicted four casualties for every one they suffered.
In sum, all three military personnel systems provided for units that were generally effective in combat, although the British weakness in operating with other battalions because of the lack of "trust" from one regiment to another hampered the army's combined-arms capability. The Israeli system satisfied the regional requirements and short-term life dictated by economic and geographical factors unique to that country.
However, the German system, open to a larger population, was more adaptive to combined arms and engendered a "trust" across the entire army that made it the most effective system for creating and sustaining military combat units.
Major Donald E. Vandergriff, an armor officer, is author of Path to
Victory: America’s Army and the Revolution in Human Affairs. He can be
reached at vandergriffdonald@usa.net
