Gates: Army must change or lose officers - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

Gates: Army must change or lose officers

Defense Secretary Robert Gates told a West Point crowd Friday he wants to blow up the Army’s “institutional concrete” and restructure its rigid assignment and promotion system to encourage more mid-level officers to stay in the Army.

Gates said he’s terrified what will happen when Army captains charged with “reconciling warring tribes” and directing millions of dollar in reconstruction projects in Iraq and Afghanistan return to garrison life where “they may find themselves in a cube all day re-formatting PowerPoint slides, preparing quarterly training briefs, or assigned an ever expanding array of clerical duties.”

Although “resilient,” Gates recognized the force is “stressed and tired” after a decade at war that has required its officers fill multiple 12- and 15-month deployments. However, keeping those officers in the Army must stand as one of the service’s highest priorities as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wind down, the defense secretary said.

“[The Army] must use the eventual slackening of overseas deployments as an opportunity to attack the institutional and bureaucratic constipation of Big Army, and rethink the way it deals with the outstanding young leaders in its lower- and middle-ranks,” Gates said.

The nature of war is changing. Gates said he didn’t want to succumb to “next-war-itis,” but he can’t help but think of what the Army will look like after deployments start to end in Afghanistan in 2014. He said the Army must “confront the reality that the most plausible, high-end scenarios for the U.S. military are primarily naval and air engagements” and structure itself in “swift-moving expeditionary forces.”

Army leaders must build on the experience of its low- and mid-level officers earned in what Gates called the “captains wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan. The service can’t afford to allow its officer corps to leave the Army like it did after Vietnam.

To keep them in the service, Army officials must re-evaluate how it promotes and selects assignments for the officer corps’ top 20 percent, Gates said. He cited Army Vice Chief Gen. Peter Chiarelli’s essay in a military journal that suggested officer evaluations “include input from peers and, yes, subordinates.”

It sounded as if Gates supported giving officers “greater voice” in picking their assignments. He suggested officers could apply for “job openings in a competitive system more akin to what happens in large organizations in the private sector.”

Gates supported Lt. Gen. David Barno’s claim the Army must “reform the system” if it plans on competing with the “Googles of the world” in keeping its best officers. However, he qualified the statement telling the West Point cadets that “taking that oath and accepting that commission means doing what you are told and going where you are needed.”

Army leaders must encourage its young officers to take risks and not be afraid of exercising “respectful, principled dissent,” Gates said. The Army can’t go back to a risk-averse culture that “incentivizes officers to keep their head down.”

Gates exemplified how the Army should embrace criticism from its lower ranks, and not shun it, when he quoted from an essay written by Lt. Cols. John Nagl and Paul Yingling that ripped the Army’s generals handling of the Iraq war.

“The Army will become more adaptive only when being adaptive offers the surest path to promotion,” Gates quoted from Nagl and Yingling’s essay.

He commended the officers for suggesting that officers must see nonconventional career paths embraced by the Army’s promotion process. Too often, assignments to seek graduate degrees, teach or sit on think tanks are seen as career killers. Gates said those assignments should instead be embraced and urged the crowd of young officers to learn foreign languages.

Gates recognized the “voracious demand for mid-level staff officers” brought on by the increased number of Brigade Combat Teams and “support bureaucracies” that has led to “essentially automatic promotion for elevation to major and lieutenant colonel.” The Defense Department has worked to strip the military of some of these staff officer positions when it pared down nearly 100 general and admiral positions, Gates said.

The Army must ensure officers who excel get singled out for top positions. Gates said he’s heard concerns from officers that the personnel system is “numb” to individual performance.

Similarly, though, the Army can’t be afraid of handing its officer corps’ bottom 20 percent separation papers “albeit with consideration and respect for the service they have rendered,” the defense secretary said.

“Failure to do this risks frustrating, demoralizing and ultimately losing the leaders we will most need for the future,” Gates said.