How to Fix the Army: Sack All the Generals

Wired – by Allen Mcduffee

Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis doesn’t have faith in Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno.

Or the rest of the U.S. Army’s generals, for that matter.

Writing in the August issues of The Armed Forces Journal (“Purge the generals“), Davis argues that it’s high time to sack the Army’s senior leaders for what he sees as an institutionalized epidemic of astonishing failures that not only go unreported, but are typically rewarded. All of it, he says, is creating a self-perpetuating culture of abysmal performance that won’t go away until the generals do.   

“Over that past 20 years, our senior leaders have amassed a record of failure in major organizational, acquisition and strategic efforts,” Davis writes. “These failures have been accompanied by the hallmarks of an organization unable and unwilling to fix itself: aggressive resistance to the reporting of problems, suppression of failed test results, public declaration of success where none was justified, and the absence of accountability.”

Davis, a seasoned Army colonel who has already earned a reputation for being something of a whistleblower by tracking leadership failures from the field in Afghanistan, describes a system where underserving leaders “received prestigious medals, promotions to higher ranks, and plum follow-on jobs; others retired and went to work for defense contractors, often with companies that had profited from the failed acquisition effort.”

Just a few of those failed acquisition efforts total nearly $35 billion dollars.

Davis points to the RAH-66 Comanche armed reconnaissance helicopter (launched in 1991, canceled after $6.9 billion had been spent), the XM2001 Crusader mobile cannon (launched in 1995, canceled after $7 billion spent) and Future Combat Systems (launched in 2003, canceled after $20 billion spent).

But Davis isn’t alone in his criticism, and it’s not just the money. Others see a mediocre Army whose leaders seem insistent on creating a smaller combat force that is mismatched for the future of American operations.

In May 2007, Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, comparing the prospect of U.S. defeat in the cases of Vietnam and Iraq,  wrote that the debacles in the Iraq war “are not attributable to individual failures, but rather to a crisis in an entire institution: America’s general officer corps,” who have “failed to prepare our armed forces for war.”

Davis worries about the decade of the Army and Marine Corps obsessed with counterinsurgency and small-unit warfare while a “a new generation of Chinese military leaders has deepened its understanding and application of conventional warfare.”

And Thomas Ricks wrote in The Atlantic in November 2012 (“General Failure”) that, “To a shocking degree, the Army’s leadership ranks have become populated by mediocre officers, placed in positions where they are likely to fail. Success goes unrewarded, and everything but the most extreme failure goes unpunished, creating a perverse incentive system that drives leaders toward a risk-averse middle where they are more likely to find a stalemate than a victory.”

He added: “Ironically, our generals have grown worse as they have been lionized more and more by a society now reflexively deferential to the military… No one is pushing those leaders to step back and examine the shortcomings of their institution. These are dangerous developments. Unaddressed, they could lead to further failures in future wars.”

But how to fix such an ingrained, systemic problem?

Whereas Yingling wanted Congress to intervene, Davis is looking for top ranking Pentagon officials of the civilian class to make a number of changes, including shrinking the group of 900 generals and admirals to a more reasonable number and change the promotion system to be more aligned with performance and success that would encourage “prudent risk-taking and nonconformist thinking.”

But more than anything, Davis argues that it’s time to replace “a substantial chunk” of today’s generals, starting with the three- and four-star ranks. Without this move, today’s leaders, who are products and benefactors of the existing system, don’t have the motivation to invoke substantive change.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/08/overthrow-the-generals/