Donald E. Vandergriff: Tools for Transforming the Officer Corps (Part 2 of 3)
Donald E. Vandergriff: Tools for Transforming the Officer Corps (Part 2 of 3)
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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.
In my initial article on how the U.S. military should change how it recruits
and trains commissioned officers (Transforming the Officer Corps,
DefenseWatch, Nov. 6, 2003), I noted how a policy of “Enlisted First” –
requiring future officers to initially serve as enlisted soldiers and NCOs –
would both ensure an effective method of screening candidates into the officer
corps while also providing the service with officers who have significant
prior military experience.
In this article I want to describe a number of prospective selection tools by
which the Army (and other services) can successfully select and strenuously
prepare potential officer candidates to receive their commissions.
Above all else, the process should not have a goal of “meeting missions”
and filling quotas. Rather, it should only focus on having candidates meet
standards – quality, not quantity.
Prior to becoming commissioned, officer candidates will first have to pass a
comprehensive entrance exam.
Then, newly-commissioned officers will serve an initial three-year tour with a
unit under the Army’s new Unit Manning Cycle. (Under this system, the wide
array of current Army branches will be eliminated and replaced by a trio:
combined arms, logistics and specialists. This will in turn push
responsibility back on the shoulders of NCOs as officers “manage” units
and not get bogged down in small unit details.
The initial tour in a specific area will not determine the officer’s path
for the rest of his career. An officer may move from one area to another
throughout his or her career or remain in that one area as long as he or she
performs successfully. This will make room for the “late bloomer,”
something that the existing Army personnel system does not permit now. The
new officer has already proven them a competent leader or they would not have
been commissioned. Now, they have the autonomy to experiment, to make
mistakes, to grow into a professional.
At the end of this first tour (which aligns with the three-year, three-phase
life cycle of a battalion), a junior officer’s accession into the
professional corps will occur based on how well he or she scores on a second
entrance examination, on graded performance in the regiment, and on the
results of a decentralized selection board examining the above-mentioned
tools.
This screening board will also determine the officer’s career specialty in
one of three tracks – tactical, operational or technical – while serving
in one of the three areas of combined arms, logistics or specialist. Under
this system, the Army will be able to spend substantial time on the
development, assessment and evaluation of its officers, instead of the
“60-second look-over” that officers today currently receive from
promotion/selection boards looking for the one “discriminator” in one’s
performance file.
With the use of multiple evaluation tools for a smaller officer corps, the
Army will become more objective in its personnel decisions. The individual
officer, the Army and the nation will all benefit from the new system.
The reorganization of the officer management branches and officer specialties
will be an integral part of this across-the-board change:
The tactical track will ensure that officers will remain at the company,
battalion or regimental/brigade level for the rest of their careers. After
selection to the tactical track, officers will attend a tactical course
(similar to what the Army is going to call Basic Officer Leaders Course III,
or BOLC III), which focuses on small unit leadership, decision-making and
tactics. They may rotate from positions within one of the tactical levels to
instructor positions and back. This track includes all units from both
combined arms and logistical units involved at the tactical level. Officers
may remain in this track, with the option of being promoted to the level of
colonel with a possibility of commanding a brigade.
Those officers who score in the top 15-20 percent of the entrance examination
to the professional force, and who rate an outstanding performance by the
board, will be admitted to the operational track. Additional requirements to
the operational level will include an understanding of the art of war
demonstrated on their entrance exam, and proficiency in a foreign language.
The operational track will consist of officers who become the operational
experts of the Army and will rotate between command and staff assignments at
the divisional or higher levels and back to the Army or Joint Staff. These
officers will attend a combined version of Command and General Staff College
and the School of Advance Military Science (SAMS) – a two-year version of
graduate school in the art and science of war. These officers will become the
institutional cradle for proficiency of the art of war at the operational and
strategic levels.
The technical track relates to the specific inherent technical abilities
associated with the more technologically advanced Army and the management of
the tables of distribution and allowances or TDA Army (the part of the service
which provides the support structure for the combat units i.e., Training and
Doctrine Command, Recruiting and ROTC commands, which need to be drastically
consolidated or reduced).
The technical track involves far more than the medical and law professions,
but positions, which require graduate-level, civilian-related education or
technical training such as the acquisition corps, academic instructors,
operations research system analysis, comptrollers, computer programmers,
communications specialists and facilities managers.
Officers in this category could remain captains, with pro-rated pay, but would
have to continually demonstrate their proficiency with periodic examinations
combined with reviews of their evaluation reports. Officers could opt for
promotion as the technical experts at division or higher levels, while the
appropriate higher-level ranks would correspond with assignments at higher
headquarters.
The Army’s education system will dramatically change as well. A true
education is much more than learning of skills or the acquisition of facts.
Rather, it means acquiring a broad understanding of the art of war, its ideas,
principles and history. This true education must also give a thorough
grounding in the warrior/leader culture, with heavy emphasis on making
decisions and embracing responsibility.
Since the officer corps will be relatively small and there will be fewer in
the operational track, C&GSC should come after the officer is selected for the
operational track. Assignment to the U.S. Army War College should also come
sooner, maybe at the 10-12 year milestone of service with selected officers
from both the tactical and operational field attending. There, the curriculum
would be dramatically refocused. All officers would be encouraged to get an
education from new universities like American Military University that provide
unique educational opportunities from “cradle to grave” in the military
art and sciences.
Force-on-force war-gaming provides the best available training for leaders and
decision-makers. “Free-play” exercises should be taken to their natural
conclusion, allowing for a clear winner and loser. This provides leaders with
invaluable learning and the context-based experience necessary for the
development of cognitive and intuitive skills.
Additionally, such training is a vehicle to identify those who fully
understand the intricacies of command and who possess the intuition and
innovativeness for success.
Admission to a command track for combined arms commanders at battalion and
brigade level – one that requires officers to compete and actually
demonstrate their mastery of the art and science of warfare at the tactical
and operational level – will come through a very tough selection process
including oral and written examinations much like the old Master Tactician
program at CGSC, as well as the results of being on the winning side in
force-on-force exercises.
Our current egalitarian approach to command selection condemns us to
mediocrity – far less than we could be. Fortunately, we can compensate this
approach with a high training tempo and technical, expensive weapons systems
that allows us to continue the tradition of overwhelming opponents with
resources, be it numbers or larger budgets.
Service in combat will alleviate some of today’s “best performance file”
method of selection, but as the Army continues to evolve under unit manning,
it requires a new method of selecting commanders. Our officer culture could
tolerate a competitive system – where everyone knows the standard - much
like the way the Air Force trains and selects its fighter pilots. Selection to
that club will not be guaranteed by a set of glowing OERs on the service or
joint staff or service as an aide to a general officer.
And with the three-track system, there are many other satisfying ways that an
officer who does not make the cut can still serve his country. A tough,
competitive system would eliminate the current cultural expectation that you
have no value to the Army if you are not selected for combined arms command.
(This proposal would only involve the selection of combined arms commanders
and would not apply to specialty areas such as the signal or medical commands
in the technical branch).
A final innovation would be what I term the “360-degree assessment,” where
subordinates get to submit inputs on an officer’s ability to command and
lead effectively. If subordinates are allowed to discretely provide input to
an officer's OER, the entire composition of our general officer corps would be
different and so would the wider Army culture.
Changing the OER system in this fashion will constitute a huge step towards
reaching our full warfighting potential in the 21st century. Who better to
tell us who the best leaders are than those who follow them?
Next: More on “360-degree evaluations.”
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
