Last Monday, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter announced a series of personnel initiatives focused on “recruiting and retaining the best and brightest” for the U.S. military. On Wednesday, Army Chief of Staff General Ray Odierno announced that the Army would repeal a deeply unpopular recent policy that barred recruits with many types and sizes of tattoos, a change from the previous decade-long practice where troops with lots of “ink” not only joined up but soon went to war.
What do these two seemingly unrelated news events have in common? They are both glimmers of hope that the U.S. military is, at long last, starting to adopt the more flexible personnel policies that it needs to succeed in the 21st century.
Carter and Odierno are on the cusp of a big idea. The next U.S. military – and particularly its senior leadership – must open its eyes to the fundamental change represented by young people of the Millennial generation and the characteristics that define them. Frequent job changes. Career flexibility. Intolerance for bureaucracy. Values beyond work. Adjustable work hours. Aversion to hierarchy. Tattoos. And yes, even body piercings.
The timeworn human capital policies and bureaucracy of today’s military remain nearly identical to those of the Cold War military of the 1980s, and not far distant from the Vietnam era of the 1960s and ‘70s when service members were generally treated as interchangeable parts regardless of individual interests. That 20th century personnel system, however, has little chance of delivering the lean, agile military that will be needed to prevail against the very different and adaptive adversaries that the United States is likely to face in the future. Thirteen years of recent war in Iraq and Afghanistan inspired many innovations, but new and innovative personnel policies were not among them.
Taken together, the Carter and Odierno announcements suggest that U.S. military leaders are reassessing existing policies. They both point toward a new talent management approach – acknowledging the changing goals, interests, and preferences of today’s individual service members from a new generation while simultaneously ensuring that the needs of military services are fully met. If carried out, this new direction will inevitably cause major changes to long-held cultures and traditions.
Odierno’s announcement reversed a much more restrictive tattoo policy that was finalized only a year ago and that was strongly opposed by soldiers. His reasons for the about-face are telling: “Society is changing its views of tattoos and we have to change along with it. It makes sense. Soldiers have grown up in an era when tattoos were much more acceptable and we have to change with that.” The Army recognizes it must now reverse course to catch up to a social phenomenon that its current soldiers – and future recruits – already embrace.
Carter’s message addresses the same challenge from a different angle. One of the key themes of his speech at Philadelphia’s Abington High School was the overarching importance of people over hardware in building the military of the future. He told the students in the audience that people “are the foundation of our future force. There are lots of other pieces, too, like having the best technology, the best planes, ships, and tanks. But it all starts and ends with our people. If we can’t continue to attract, inspire, and excite talented young Americans like you, then nothing else will matter.”
He reiterated this theme the next day, in a speech at Syracuse University:
…we need to change to remain attractive to people to our children and our children’s children, recognizing that all generations are different. They’re not like us. They have a different way of thinking about their careers, about choice, about what excites them about what they want to do in the way of friends and families and everything else. And we need to understand that and connect to that to continue to have the best people come in.
But the reality is that the U.S. military is and will likely largely remain a fundamentally hierarchical, bureaucratic, and conservative organization. There are some very good reasons for that; the U.S. military does not, and should not, become like Zappos and remove its entire hierarchy while driving out employees who crave structure. The U.S. military is unlikely to embrace sweeping change for the best of reasons: The chaotic nature of wars requires substantial individual and organizational discipline to fight and win them. For sizable parts of the force, that may be appropriate – for now.
But warfare itself is changing. The next major war involving U.S. military forces may well demand more skills related to executing cyber attacks on an adversary’s networks than to launching large-scale infantry assaults. The shifting nature of emerging future warfare will inevitably encompass and combine all manner of new technologies, threats, and organizational responses. Taking on those challenges with a military that still manages its people largely like the force that entered Iraq in 2003 or even Kuwait in 1991 seems profoundly shortsighted. The changing face of 21st century warfare requires new approaches and bold experimentation.
One warfighting realm in particular offers intriguing prospects for melding Carter and Odierno’s new ideas with the morphing shape of 21st century war. The emerging domain of cyber warfare clearly demands a new way of managing and utilizing talent. But more importantly for the military writ large, changing the way cyber-warriors are managed holds the potential to catalyze other ambitious innovations throughout the force. It may be the spark needed to accelerate change throughout the military in a host of other fields.
The domain of cyber warfare epitomizes the mismatch between the military’s legacy 20th century models of managing people and those needed today. For example, the traditional military model of recruiting young men and women just out of high school and sending them to rigorous basic combat training before specialty schooling may be a poor fit for the requirements for dominating cyberspace. Despite growing up as digital natives, these fresh-faced 19-year-olds just out of basic training simply do not have the skills or the experience that the United States needs to counter Russian or Chinese hackers. Experienced cyber professionals, by contrast, do have the needed skills to address this increasingly important threat – which is why Secretary Carter endorsed exploring ways to bring them into the military, even if that involved changing policies related to age restrictions and rank. This would be an enormous organizational and cultural change for the U.S. military – but its value is clear, and may hold promise for segments of the armed force well beyond the cyber domain.
Yet even waiving the military’s age and rank policies may not go far enough in addressing the pressing challenges of warfare today. Particularly in the fast-moving domain of cyberspace, the Department of Defense may need an entirely fresh approach – one that effectively breaks all the personnel rules and shreds all accepted norms of rank, seniority, and deference that currently characterize what it means to be in the military (while fully staying within the boundaries of law and ethics). This model of flat, non-hierarchical units that can leverage industry talent does not exist today, but its merits in a world where threats may soon exploit technology not yet invented seem obvious.
The new military organization chart for cyber warfare might look far more like Google, or even Zappos, than a Pentagon-designed cyber version of the 82nd Airborne Division. Twenty-two-year-old cyber privates might need to outrank 44-year-old cyber colonels. Current military ranks, haircuts, and rigid pay tables tied to years of military service all might need to disappear. Pyramidal military organizations might need to dissolve into ever-shifting groups of skilled peers who are geographically dispersed and meet online for hours every day or night. Reservists might replace nearly all active duty members owing to their daytime civilian skills. Recruiting the talent necessary to dominate this contested space will require almost all long-held military personnel policies to be reexamined, and perhaps many thrown overboard entirely.
Of potentially even more importance to DoD, a force of cyber-warriors designed around these new characteristics could serve as a test bed for far broader new talent management and organizational changes in the Department. A flexible military organization that leverages both the talents of individuals (many of whom may be part-time) and abandons traditional military ways of organizing and layering leadership and seniority would be something entirely new. It could readily become the benchmark for wholly new ways of thinking, organizing, and leading in a more agile 21st century U.S. military.
The seeds of winning the next war may be found in the speeches that Carter and Odierno gave last week. They are quietly sounding the call for change. There is an entire generation of young American men and women ready to answer that call, and tens of thousands already in uniform who will be heartened by Carter and Odierno’s distinct (and perhaps grudging) recognition that their generation is truly different. To win the fights of the 21st century, the nation’s military must inspire and motivate this generation both to serve, and to stay. To do so, it must be ready to experiment with new ideas, challenge long-held norms, and be prepared to divest those things not absolutely essential. Maintaining a military filled with people capable of out-thinking and out-fighting U.S. adversaries in the next decade may depend on many of these fresh ideas catching fire and spreading throughout the force.
Lt. General David W. Barno, USA (Ret.) is a Distinguished Practitioner in Residence, and Dr. Nora Bensahel is a Distinguished Scholar in Residence, at the School of International Service at American University. Their column appears in War on the Rocks every other Tuesday.
Photo credit: Juhan Sonin (adapted by WOTR)
Pat 
Greg Blom 
Tom 
Andrew Wood 
Ben Hoffer 
strategicservice 
Carter wants to turn the military into IBM. So ridiculous, essentially wanting to bring people in with no military experience and put them into leadership positions for which they are not qualified for. More McNamara-type think tank people that ran the Vietnam War. This is retrogression at best.
I think this is an interesting article but leaves me with a few deep concerns. I believe that lowering the standards will result in unintended second order effects. Specifically, I believe it will foster resentment in existing military professionals and also lead to lower standards across the board. Creation of double standards undermines the foundations upon which the US military is built.
While I applaud the ‘outside the box’ thinking I would urge leadership to explore alternatives. I have yet to hear discussions of forming a separate cyber force. The creation of such a force would reduce resentment from military professionals, allow existing services to maintain their identity and standards, and allow the new force to define their own norms and culture.
A couple of thoughts. First, as I mention below, the discussion seems to be erroneously framed as being about a “lowering of standards”, as opposed to what it actually is and should be: reevaluating standards to ensure that they’re commensurate with contemporary conditions. As the author rightly notes, the military’s personnel system has not changed appreciably since before Vietnam. Consider the legions of civil servants and contractors in CENTCOM who have been performing tasks that were once the purview of uniformed personnel, and without adhering to many of the arbitrary and restrictive standards required of active duty folks. There is a difference between reevaluating the relevance of long-standing standards and adjusting them to reflect current reality, and “lowering standards”. With respect to creating a “separate cyber force”, this is unlikely, and a bad idea for a variety of reasons. Recommend that you invest some time to listen to WOTR’s recent podcast on Cyber Security, as it’s a topic that’s discussed by the panelists.
I was pleased by aspects of this article, and bristled at others. That the military needs to update its personnel system, and that this will require a reevaluation of standards, should be obvious. It’s been disappointing to see some of the online commentary about “lowered standards” from currently active and prior service personnel who would appear to defend the arbitrary fitness standards in which they excel(led) with one breath, while praising the relaxation of the tattoo regs with the other.
I also question the wisdom of characterizing digital network security and exploitation in terms of “cyber war” or “cyber warfare”. Using the examples of Zappos or Google as examples of why and how the antiquated personnel system should be dragged kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century is one thing. Suggestions such as “twenty-two-year-old cyber privates might need to outrank 44-year-old cyber colonels” are quite another, and it’s rhetoric such as this that confuses the discussion of how digital networks fit into the military enterprise, rather than clarifying it. As some of those same commentators mentioned above note, the assumption that “cyber warriors” (and/or personnel tasked with securing or exploiting digital networks) must necessarily do so in uniform is up for debate. Finding the happy medium between overestimation and underestimation of the revolutionary character of digital networks is challenging.
That said, excellent food for thought.
Perhaps the most powerful expression of US military power I have seen was a documentary about US carrier aviation. What struck me was not the jets or bombs on board but a shot of a group of sailors and marines being briefed about something in the hanger deck, that group reflected American society as a whole in terms of their age, sex, ethnicity, height and appearance, they were all shapes, sizes and many of them did not look like your archetypal warrior. I wonder sometimes if Navy PR arranged the shot but I got the impression it was not.
Compare that to pictures we have seen of the new Chinese aircraft carrier crew, all male Han chinese, all about the same height and age. I suspect that the US group will consistently outperform their Chinese counterparts in terms of their ability to innovate and work effectively as a team in all kinds of situations.
I personally think Secretary Carter and General Odierno have the right views on striving to better align Army (military) personnel systems to match the culture from which those personnel originate. It’s a fine line between capitulating to the demands of recruits and holding that same audience accountable to the good order and discipline of the profession of arms. However, that line must constantly adjust left and right as requirements change. That’s just a fact of life and our military has done it since its inception.
Regarding cyber forces, the right conversation demands we look bigger and at our own history. Greg Blom was on to something when asking for “discussions of forming a separate cyber force.” There’s a reason we eventually formed a separate Air Force. To fully exploit the capability, the U.S. had to divorce the Army Air Corps from the Army culture and establish a new model. This included recruiting efforts, talent management, professional education, standards and discipline, performance expectations, etc. I think we can all agree that turned out pretty well as our Air Force is the most competent and powerful in the world; and that’s not just because it has the best hardware.
While I think Secretary Carter and General Odierno generally have the right view, I think it’s an interim solution. This is similar to the Army Air Corps being pulled from the Army Signal Corps well before it evolved into the Department of the Air Force. The article’s example of reevaluating standards and personnel systems is like trying to force a round peg into a square hole. There are merits to the effort, and we’ll see dividends throughout our formations, but we need to stop trying to pound a round cyber force into the square Army (military) bureaucracy.
We need to establish a Department of Cyberspace under the DOD and consolidate all like items under that department. For example, move U.S. Cyber Command, its service component commands, and the Defense Information Systems Agency under this new department. Then establish recruiting efforts, talent management systems, professional education, and so on to better develop this critical capability for the DOD. And if the legal restrictions on DOD prove too cumbersome, which they likely will, make the Department of Cyberspace a separate Cabinet-level department. (There are interesting parallels between this concept and the evolution of the Department of Energy from its origins in the Army Corps of Engineers and the Manhattan Project; but that’s beyond the scope of my argument.) This is an oversimplification of the process but it’s the right approach to building the next U.S. military. After all, the Air Force proves we got this right once before.
“After all, the Air Force proves we got this right once before.”
It does? Clearly Dr. Farley hasn’t been writing nearly enough articles for this site.