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How To Get Best Military Leaders

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10.25.2013 at 08:52pm

How To Get Best Military Leaders: CNAS Says Split Warriors From Managers by Sydney Freedberg, Breaking Defense.

The military’s personnel system does lots of stupid things, like sending Arabic speakers to Korea or forcing out skilled commanders at age 50. But of all our self-inflicted wounds, argues a forthcoming report from the Center for a New American Security, the stupidest is how we manage our generals and admirals.

“We do a lot of things that are probably illogical and pretty dysfunctional,” said the report’s lead author, retired Lt. Gen. David Barno – a former top commander in Afghanistan – “because of our interchangeable parts model.” Instead of treating generals and admirals as specialized professionals, he told me, we swap them around from job to job to job every year or two “with random abandon” and without proper training for the duties of each position.

“I went from theater commander [in Afghanistan] to the guy running [Army] installations around the world literally overnight,” Barno said in an interview with BreakingDefense. “I was a complete neophyte.”

Even worse is when a manager is put in charge of combat operations. “Hey,” said Barno, “the skills required to be a management or enterprise guy are dramatically different from the skills required to be a warfighter or an operator.”…

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