“You’re killing me, Lieutenant.”
That’s what Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told Lt. Joseph Riley, his fellow panelist last month at the Reagan National Defense Forum. Riley, a Rhodes Scholar and the top nationally ranked ROTC cadet of 2013, had just shared that he had recently been told that he would not be promoted and was at risk of being forced out of the Army. Why? Because after being commissioned, he had spent two years studying at Oxford instead of holding the standard military jobs expected of junior officers during that period of their careers. The military personnel system saw him as lagging far behind his peers. So even though around 90 percent of his fellow lieutenants would be promoted, Riley was told that he would not be one of them and that he would face a separation board.
At that moment, the military personnel system stood as a massive barrier between the young lieutenant on the left of the stage and the Army’s most senior general on the right. Milley immediately tried to reach across that barrier, telling Riley “I’ll be your personal assignments officer — I just adopted you,” and ending their exchange with a hearty “Welcome back to the United States infantry, young man!” But this story reveals the depths of the problems within the military personnel system — that even promoting a Rhodes Scholar to a relatively junior rank requires active intervention by senior officers, up to and including the Chief of Staff of the Army.
Last month, we published an article in The Atlantic called “Can the U.S. Military Halt Its Brain Drain?” In it, we argued that the military personnel system is driving too many talented and innovative officers out of the military because it remains stuck in the industrial era, where individuals are treated as interchangeable parts. We contended that the current decades-old system is simply not up to the challenge of finding and keeping the best military talent required to fight and win the nation’s wars, or to help prevent those wars from occurring in the first place. As soon as the article was posted, we started hearing from many current and former junior officers who shared their own stories about why they had left the military or were considering doing so. The details varied, but the basic storyline was essentially the same. The inflexible personnel system would either prevent them from veering even slightly from the most standard career path, or would punish them if they managed to do so. And in order to help these officers, many of their leaders were jousting with a rigid system that was seemingly impervious to logic.
In effect, today’s system often requires senior military leaders — up to and including the service chiefs — to intervene personally in order to keep top talent within the force. That certainly has helped Lt. Riley and other junior officers fortunate enough to receive such assistance and attention from the top of the pyramid, but does nothing to solve the systemic problems that affect the entire force.
But on November 18, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter announced the first set of reforms to emerge from the Force of the Future initiative (and recorded a podcast on the subject with Ryan Evans, WOTR’s editor-in-chief). The Force of the Future is a wide-ranging personnel reform effort focused on recruiting and retaining top talent for the Department of Defense. Carter announced it during his first weeks in office, and it remains one of his highest priorities. The first tranche of reforms generally falls into four categories. First are what Carter called “on-ramps,” which will enable more Americans to serve in the Department of Defense (DOD) either temporarily or for a full career. These include expanding internship programs, creating a Defense Digital Service to bring technology experts into DOD on a temporary basis, and hiring a chief recruiting officer to help private sector executives serve in DOD’s senior civilian leadership.
Second are what Carter called “short-term off-ramps.” These will enable more military personnel to gain new experiences outside the military and then bring new, creative, and innovative ideas back into the force. This includes expanding fellowship programs with industry, local and state governments, and universities. DOD will also work with Congress to make the Career Intermission Program permanent, which offers military personnel a sabbatical period to learn a skill, earn a degree, or start a family.
Third, DOD will harness the power of big data to analyze trends within the force and to inform better personnel policies. The services will also create talent management platforms to better match military personnel with available positions, similar to LinkedIn and the Army’s Green Pages experiment. Collectively, these programs will allow DOD personnel managers to better “see” their populations. They will also allow local commanders to have far more say in who gets assigned to key jobs in their commands, and will better align service members with billets that fit their capabilities and desires.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, DOD will conduct exit surveys to find out who is leaving the force and why. This may seem mundane, but it may prove revolutionary. Today, the U.S. military does not gather any systematic information on who is leaving the force, let alone their reasons. Senior service leaders, personnel managers, or even those like us, who are concerned that the best talent is leaving the force, have no choice but to rely on anecdotes to sniff out trends. Data simply does not exist — and as Tim Kane recently noted, to entrenched bureaucracies, “No data means no problem.” Lt. Riley’s experience is echoed in hundreds if not thousands of individual stories across the force. But today these stories and the diverse reasons behind them are not collected or analyzed in order to determine whether these steady departures add up to a potentially dangerous talent drain. Exit surveys mean that we will soon have that data — and to the extent that they reveal any problems, DOD and the services will face far more pressure to address them.
These first initiatives are all good, though as always implementation will be key. But they are only the tip of the iceberg. In many ways, these first reforms are the “low-hanging fruit” — those that could be pushed through the byzantine wickets of service concurrence and buy-in with the least resistance. The hard ones are yet to come, but are absolutely critical to the future. Far more remains to be done.
At the end of his speech, Carter mentioned perhaps the single most important reform still left unaddressed: reforming the up-or-out promotion system, so that promotions are based on performance criteria over flexible timelines rather than rigidly determined by service entry year group. This should be accompanied by establishing an enterprise career track for officers that allows them to develop expertise in one of the many important institutional management functions (such as personnel, finance, or installation management). Officers on that track would not regularly command troops, but instead develop an unparalleled depth of experience through their careers and have viable promotion paths to the most senior positions in their functional area. Other desperately needed reforms include adopting more family friendly policies (particularly for parental leave), and expanding lateral entry programs to more specialties to allow more back-and-forth movement between uniformed and civilian jobs.
The U.S. military cannot afford for this bold initiative to simply gather dust on bookshelves in the Pentagon. Secretary Carter will have to build consensus among the secretaries and chiefs, and have them take ownership in the results. Clearly, not all of them buy into some of the bolder ideas that have yet to be publicly announced. Carter’s next big job will be to slowly win them over. To do so, he will have to convince them that adopting these reforms may be one of the biggest contributions they will make during their tenure. For the Force of the Future is about far more than matching talent with jobs inside DOD and producing a more satisfied workforce. It is fundamentally about building the right force of the right people to win the nation’s future wars. Even more than picking the right new ships, planes, or tanks, the service chiefs must see this initiative as their legacy, their gift to their successors over the coming dangerous decades. Today’s decisions are all about investing in the best people who will shape and lead that force. We simply cannot afford to get that wrong.
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. Both also serve as Nonresident Senior Fellows at the Atlantic Council. Their column appears in War on the Rocks every other Tuesday.
Photo credit: Sgt. David Marquis, 362nd Mobile Public Affairs Detachment
Rme71 
And don’t ignore the potential talent pool in the reserve component (RC).
Lots of officers and NCOs in the RC with valuable experience who would love to jump into active duty for tours beyond just the typical one year or less tours.
Although they may lack the same amount of military experience as their active peers, reservists/guardsmen often have highly valuable skills in combat support roles gained through civilian work and educational experiences.
Conversely, allow for active soldiers to jump into the reserve component to get time to work on schooling, family issues, etc. And don’t punish them for doing it by stalling their careers. Time in the reserve component will also produce a new crop of active duty officers who understand the strengths and limits of guardsmen and reservists and will be better able to integrate them into future plans and operations.
Fortunately, I think the National Commission on the Future of the Army (NCFA) will make similar recommendations in February (http://www.ncfa.ncr.gov/). The question is whether the Army will listen.
My first inclination upon reading this was that it was just another case of irresponsible leadership. 12 hours later and 600 miles of solitude driving have made me realize the ways of my errors. This is more than irresponsible leadership. Truth is we just don’t know the facts and therefore it is easy to jump to conclusions and place fault somewhere. Since the facts aren’t properly displayed in the article I will make some assumptions. The good lieutenant was commissioned in May 2013. He now is in Infantry IBOLC or has just finished and is in his first unit of assignment. I assume that the someone who informed the lieutenant that he was a “promotion risk” is someone reputable, like battalion commander, HRC assignment officer or mentor. Truth is any one of us could probably have told him the same thing because missing formative lieutenant time is significant and not having efficiency reports to be judged on promotion potential is enormous. So, my jump to conclusion tells me this potentially is irresponsible leadership and irresponsible journalism. There are enough of us who jumped to conclusions (myself included) and enough blame for shabby analysis to go around. All that said, there are enough teaching points in this article to provide several blocks of instruction in leadership and personnel management. Here are some who should be taken to task.
First and foremost, all of us who weren’t armed with the facts and jumped to conclusions, knowing that “first report is normally wrong:” I for one, received at least a score of emails condemning the Army, the leadership, the lieutenant and anyone who could be blamed for letting this happen. Nothing seems to have happened yet. Eventually it might, but nothing yet.
The authors: They don’t have all the facts or they chose not to present them. It is highly doubtful the lieutenant has been passed over yet, as his YG isn’t even in the zone. So the authors are reporting based on the comment made by the lieutenant to CSA that he was a promotion risk. He probably is. Having read numerous previous articles from the authors I also surmise they are using this circumstance to further their own agendas. They have sensationalized accordingly and maybe didn’t pursue the facts because of that. I defy anyone to come up with an example of a Rhodes, Truman or Marshall Scholar who has been passed over to promotion to CPT. There may be one but it is highly, highly unlikely and if there is, he/she probably did something morally or ethically nefarious and they should join the civilian world.
The Chief (CSA): Oh, Chief, oh Chief, what fore hath thou done? First and foremost you have possibly made the lieutenant a marked man. He may from now on be known as “oh, that Riley.” Surely you remember that JMOs are normally “ready, shoot, aim” guys who deal with no experience and youthful emotion. Many should be ignored. Your comment that you were now his assignment officer just exacerbates the belief by many that 3 star and 4 star generals think only they can solve problems in our Army. No wonder we criticize our junior leaders for not being “problem solvers.” Chief, let the chain of command handle this. I bet there will not be a problem with that. This is the kind of notoriety no junior officer needs. Too much Chief involvement will make this a point of discussion of many a peer. No junior officer needs to start out that way. Oh, but he is now, “that Riley!”
The chain of command: Why is this lieutenant who needs as much troop time as he can get before being considered for promotion to CPT attending a high level conference at the table with the CSA? He should be leading a platoon somewhere in the woods or the desert. My assumption is someone in the chain of command singled out this Rhodes Scholar to attend. Probably wrong answer I would think. Hopefully you have his assignments picked in mind with the knowledge that he has less time than others.
The ROTC command and HR Command: Hopefully his ROTC mentors told him before he chose this route that he was going to have a timeline issue getting evaluations before the CPTs’ board. If not that was irresponsible. More importantly he should have been informed that he was going to be limited in his foundational troop leading experience because he wasn’t going to get much time as a platoon leader. Surely the branch representatives at HRC informed him it was important for him to not dilly dally around and to best utilize all his time.
The lieutenant: Hopefully he made an effort to go to Ranger School right after graduation from UVa. The timelines would be tight, and he could not recyle. It has been done before. I personally arranged it for Rhodes scholars. Hopefully, he made an informed decision and spent his time between graduation and reporting to Oxford doing something worthwhile. He should have tried to do partial course work at IBOLC and finish up the other part after Oxford. That would be hard but if no one tried we will never know. If he decided to go to Europe early and travel, spending his new-found 2LT pay, then he wasted time and has contributed to his problem. It would greatly benefit his efforts if he attempted to condense his time at Oxford, if possible, by eliminating breaks and studying through the year. Hopefully if he did not go to Ranger School before Oxford, he decided to defer until return to Benning for the Captain’s Course. If he is/was unlucky and going to one of those divisions that won’t put him in as a platoon leader unless Ranger qualified, HRC should move him to another first assignment.
Note to the lieutenant. It is highly unlikely that you will not be selected for promotion. If you do not get selected it will not be because you are a Rhodes Scholar. It will be because you have done something in your short time as an officer in a unit to deserve non-selection. Hopefully that will not happen. If it does there really will only be one person, not a system to blame.
Good luck and hope you contribute for a long time in our Army. Hope the Chief just lets you become “just another lieutenant” rather than “that Riley.”