A View from the Generation at the Tip of the Spear
by Robert Goldich, Small Wars Journal
The Personnel System at War (Full PDF Article)
Five junior officers, all veterans of combat, recently came together for a day-long dialogue with current and former senior manpower and personnel officials from the Department of Defense. Their major assessment was that an "industrial age" personnel system is being used to fight an "information age" war.
This frank assessment was sponsored by Anita K. Blair, the acting Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Manpower and Reserve Affairs). Ms. Blair's purpose in bringing the two groups together was twofold. First, it provided an opportunity for senior manpower and personnel officials, both active duty and retired, from the military services and the Office of the Secretary of Defense, to hear, first-hand, the experiences of a group of five young officers who had served in Iraq, and their views of how personnel issues affected operations. Second, it also afforded the young officers, all of whom have published and commented on their wartime experiences in various electronic and print media, a chance to gain knowledge about current policies and practices from the perspectives of current senior defense leadership.
The five officers came from a variety of backgrounds. Four were Army, one Marine Corps; one was a woman; ages varied, approximately, from 27 to 39. One was an active Army major in the Aviation Branch, currently transitioning to a Strategist MOS; he commanded an aviation unit in Iraq as a captain. Another was an Army Reserve captain commissioned in Military Intelligence, who served as an operations planner and intelligence officer in an infantry brigade in Iraq. A third remains in the Army Reserve as a captain, also in Military Intelligence; she spent two tours in Iraq, one as a supply officer for an MI brigade and her second as commander of a tactical human intelligence team, and has also returned twice to Iraq for shorter tours as a contractor working on intelligence matters. A fourth has recently left the Army Reserve as a captain; a Military Police officer and a lawyer (although not a JAG officer), he spent a year in Iraq as an adviser to the Iraqi Police. The final officer, a Marine Corps Reserve infantry major, served in a Force Reconnaissance unit in the initial Iraq invasion in 2003 and as an adviser to the Iraqi Army in 2006-2007.
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I'll re-read more carefully over the weekend and provide follow on comments. However, I do have one hasty observation re: the EO and sexual harassment training comment. Many years ago I too, thought that EO and sexual harassment training were unnecessary burdens on Army OPTEMPO. Then, before the ink was dry on the training mandate our SMA found himself in trouble. Such incidents have not abated in spite of our continued "unnecessary"
training. I've not looked at the numbers recently, but I think such incidents are on the upswing. There are certainly more in the public eye, many of them related to deployment and theater operations. Perhaps the training is not the perfect solution. In fact, I don't think it ever could be. However, I do think that training now does prevent some problems later. Punishment later for those that don't get the message not only rids the Army of evil doers, but serves as a reinforcing example or drives the training message home for others. I agree that such training robs valuable operational training time, but it is necessary.