To this end, Root took Progressive ideas in personnel management - ideas such as social Darwinism - and applied them to the Army's personnel management. This approach should not be surprising. Root was a product of the big corporations that dominated the Progressive era and would soon dominate the U.S. government.
Root was also a disciple of the management theories propounded by Frederick Taylor. He believed that Taylor's theories could used to make the military more efficient and therefore better.
Fredrick Taylor is one of the intellectual fathers of the modern industrial production system. Perhaps his greatest contribution to production efficiency was to break down complex production tasks into a sequence of simple, standardized steps. This permitted him to design a standardized mass production line around a management system that classified work into standard tasks and workers into standard specialties. This combination established work standards and the people who were trained to these standards became interchangeable cogs in the machine. This greatly simplified personnel management in a vast industrial enterprise.
To be sure, Taylorism transformed industrial production, but it also had a dark side: Taylorism treated people as unthinking cogs in a machine. By necessity, these people had to accept a social system based on a coercive pattern of dominance and subordinance and centralized control from the top. Every action and every decision made in the organization was spelled out in the name of efficiency. In theory, the entire regimen flowed from the brain of one individual at the top of the hierarchy.
A complimentary management dogma also emerged during the Progressive Era. This was the theory of "Ethical Egoism," which asserted that all people are motivated solely by self-interest. By extension, all people would respond predictably to a variety of positive incentives (money, pleasure, advancement, distinction, power, luxurious prestige goods, and amenities) or negative incentives (which took the primary form of a fear of losing the positive benefits, but also outright punishment and pain).
Easier accessions, faster promotions, no obligation to attend schools like Ranger and quicker pay raises are fully consistent with this theory of human behavior.
Taken together, the idea that people are interchangeable cogs in a machine and the idea that self-interest is the only significant motivator of behavior help explain why the Army thinks that increasing its "production" of lieutenants, cutting out necessary training for young leaders, and reducing the promotion time to major will solve its statistical readiness issues with deploying units, meet near-term requirements mandated by the Army and Congress for field grades, and solve potential retention problems.
The ideas of Taylor and Root dominated management science and war department circles a century ago, but their ghosts are haunting the Army's Human Resources command and the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel staff. Moreover, the ghosts of Taylor and Root will continue to haunt the Army's personnel managers as long as Congress shows no interest in rooting out causes of our personnel crisis.
But Congress and the press are blinded by the sterile promises of another techno-centric analogy - the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) - which is based on the idea that war is a mechanistic process and that machines are the true source of military prowess as U.S. opponents stand in the open and let us kill them all day. It was the RMA Army that we went to war with Iraq. The RMA is the specter of Root and Taylor that haunts the Pentagon.
I know there are dangers of reasoning by analogy. Used properly, analogies are powerful reasoning devices because they unleash the genius of imagination and creativity, Einstein's thought experiments being cases in point. But analogies are also very dangerous, because they simplify complex problems and capture our imaginations. Used improperly, they shackle the mind and take it off the cliff.
Believing that the Army is like a business or that good business practices will solve military problems are examples of misplaced analogies that take its leaders off the cliff. Effective business practices are often very different from effective military practices. This is particularly true in the area of personnel policies, where the idea of soldierly virtue embodies the ethos of self-sacrifice, and where, as Napoleon said, the moral is to the material as three to one.
I also trust and believe in the Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker. General Schoomaker boldly took on the personnel bureaucrats and stopped change of commands in combat theaters in November 2003. He also is bravely pushing forward trying to unit man and stabilize in time of war. I have confidence that he can solve this problem by exorcise the ghosts of Root and Taylor from Human Resources Command and the staffs of DCSPER, so the Army has good leaders to continue to lead it in the 21st century after Iraq.
Contributing Editor Maj. Donald Vandergriff is the author ofPath to Victory: America's Army and the Revolution in Human Affairs(Presidio Press). He is retiring next summer following a 23-year career in the Marines and the Army, including "out of the box" service as a personnel reform expert who has consulted with congressional, Army and DoD leaders, as well Army Task forces and think-tanks that dealt with Transformation issues on personnel reform. He is currently writing his next book, Raising the Bar: Evolving ROTC with the changing Face of War. He can be reached at vandergriffdonald@usa.net.
