A different kind of late-entry officer
In 2006 retired US Army officer Dr Leonard Wong wrote a short article called “Fashion Tips for the Field Grade” (LINK), in which he noted that when officers reach major their sartorial progress stalls — they no longer keep up with fashion, and don’t even seem to be aware of this. By analogy, Wong argues that field-grade officers have stopped developing. He cites statistics indicating that the number of generals who have had genuinely broadening experiences — graduate school for instance — has fallen precipitously.
Wong expanded his argument in a longer essay entitled, “Changing minds in the army: why it is so difficult and what to do about it” (LINK). He cited the adoption of the black beret in the US Army and the exchange of Humvees for mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles (MRAPs) as examples of this.
The anecdotal evidence glosses over a few important things. Implementing new solutions requires not just a change of opinion, but prodigious amounts of the right kind of leadership to force change through large bureaucratic organisations. In other words, having open-minded officers is necessary but not sufficient for institutional agility, and so absence of agility in the military does not necessarily prove that its officers are inflexible.
Military officers are by nature professionally conservative. This means they require a higher level of certainty before making decisions that conflict with their experience and TTPs. It is easy to point out examples of officers being slow to adapt, like the MRAP fiasco (which has the Snatch Land Rover as its British equivalent). But for a complete analysis you would also have to prove officers had an exceedingly low level of proactive decisions that turned out to be wrong (false positives). If officers are coming unstuck due to the iconoclastic decisions they do make as well as the iconoclastic decisions they don’t make, then it’s probable the context is simply too complex for their intellectual capabilities — and their conservative decision-making style might therefore be quite well calibrated.
But Wong goes beyond citing anecdotes. He points out that the US Army War College personality data shows that average “openness” scores are lower among more senior officers. He also explains the concept of imprinting, whereby professionals tend to persevere with whatever has made them successful early in their careers. Wong makes the case that intuition is increasingly deleterious as officers get promoted (see our take on the perils of intuition HERE). These negative dynamics can of course be exacerbated by organisational culture.
What is to be done?
Wong argues the army should continue developing self-awareness and open-mindedness through personality assessments, 360-degree feedback, and the use of structured decision-making (e.g. hypothesis testing and red-teaming) to counter-balance an overreliance on intuition. Broadening experiences is also critical (as noted above, the number of US officers going to high-quality civilian graduate schools is actually falling, and I would hazard a guess the number in the UK is pitifully small).
Retired general Stanley McChrystal has another idea: recruiting very senior civilian leaders into the military, and putting them straight in as generals.
In a recent Washington Post interview (LINK), McChrystal says: “I’ve dealt with a lot of chief executive officers who could walk in and be general officers in the military tomorrow. All we’d have to do is get them a uniform and a rank. They’d step in and it would be seamless — because they solve problems and they lead people. Take Brad Smith from Intuit. He could be brought in as a three- or four-star general in the military, and he’d be value-added at the end of the first week.”
That is a big call.
A couple of thoughts.
McChrystal, as we know, is four years into a journey from army super-star to civilian consultant. He is one of the most impressive military leaders the United States has produced in a generation, but his naiveté is perhaps revealed a bit when he goes on to say, “I think military leaders could walk out and be effective in business tomorrow.” That’s not true, or at least it’s true in only a very limited sense. A leadership consultancy is perhaps the easiest company for a good military leader to captain, because the staff is hyper-motivated and the business model is not that complicated. Things get harder from there. We are in an era of intense specialisation and outsourcing that has produced very complicated commercial ecosystems. Understanding how the pieces fit together, and how they are underpinned by competing technologies, is not easy. Understanding what customers want and will pay for is not easy; sometimes it’s even hard to tell if you’re winning or losing. Understanding employees in multiple countries with fundamentally un-martial values is not easy. Finally, understanding whether business failure is due to a manager or the conditions she is working in, one of the trickiest problems, takes a lot of very sound functional knowledge (Let it run? Intervene? Fire her?). These problems are not insurmountable, but they do make it virtually impossible for a military leader to walk into a modern business and be effective, at least as a general manager.
The flip-side of all of these points is that it’s going to be equally hard for a CEO to slot into the military. There is a real danger that weak understanding of military leadership and culture and of combat would turn these CEO transplants into helicopter generals who never get a grip of the situation and their command. Leading a team of experts with generic leadership skills will only get you so far — at a certain point you need a deep understanding of how operations work. Task & Purpose has a very well-constructed piece making a similar argument (LINK).
And that’s before we even address the question of whether filthy-rich business stars would want to put it all on the line for something a goodly number find completely alien. The military, it can be argued, has never been more distant from the civilian world than it is now.
But that does not mean it’s not worth a try. The military is under huge strain, from reduced recruiting and resources to a huge and expanding spectrum of threats. In the UK the British Army has just failed in two campaigns, and it shows little evidence of recognising this fact, let alone genuinely accepting responsibility and learning from it. The RAF is being slashed to irrelevance and the Royal Navy has bet the farm on two carriers. The defence industrial complex is pushing ever more expensive platforms and politicians — let’s face it — have become dangerous dilettantes. It is a critical and completely open question whether the military can think its way through these challenges.
The idea of getting some world-class leaders with a completely different set of experiences into the mix to start (metaphorically) blowing things up is extremely appealing. The opportunity to bring back into uniform some very talented military leaders who have been successful in business or elsewhere should also not be scoffed at.
But clearly they should not directly slot in as generals —this will need a different model. Perhaps they should be brought in as advisors, or board-members, or as reserve staff officers. But it is certainly worth a try.
