-Caveat Lector- WJPBR Email News List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War! ARTICLE 5 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Why Our Young Lions are Leaving Early ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SFTT will feature a multi-part analysis by a junior Army officer, who explains in simple language, why he and his peers are leaving and don’t want to become battalion commanders. He served on active duty for three years and separated from the service last year at the end of his initial obligation. >From personal knowledge, I know that he was a highly enthusiastic and competent young leader. He is now in the National Guard and attends graduate school. The analysis addresses the following areas: I. Peer incompetence; II Senior officer incompetence; III. Enlisted incompetence; IV. Distrust of Army leadership; V. Job Dissatisfaction and General Disillusion with the Army. In this week’s issue: Parts I and II. *********************************************************** By a young Combat Arms Officer who never found the Army he was looking for… Ultimately, seventy-five to eighty percent of the captains/ “captain-promotables” in my unit of my commissioning class and the year prior have left, are leaving, or intend to leave the Army at the end of their service obligation. I realize that this percentage is probably higher than the Army average, but in talking with peers in other units on post and across the world, I saw similar trends happening there as well. And (not speaking of myself) I feel that the majority of those leaving are the kinds of officers the Army desperately needs to keep. There are several reasons why I left the active Army, and I believe strongly that these reasons are universal to a great extent as to why my peers were leaving as well. As a disclaimer, I realize that my few years in the Army do not provide me with the experience and perspective that an officer with much more time in service has-I am simply calling it how I see it. I. Peer incompetence The caliber of second lieutenants being produced by ROTC (my commissioning source) and to a much lesser extent West Point and OCS is reason in itself for a junior officer to question being in the Army. There are lieutenants who come into the Army with less clue of being a competent leader than a patrol leader in a scout troop. I was well aware of the declining allowable standard ROTC cadets were subject to when I attended Advanced Camp at Fort Lewis. I assumed naively that most of these boneheads I met and had to work with there, would be eventually weeded out by the commissioning process. Not so. I met many of them after commissioning at OBC, warfighter exercises, and coming into units on post. It has become very apparent that numbers are more important than quality to the Army when it comes to lieutenants. What is discouraging is that we have to work with these officers and help them along each step of the way when they should be able to lead on their own. We have to hold their hands and show them how to do Operations Orders, fire plans, how to put their uniforms together properly, and how to carry out their additional duties. In my unit, there was one second lieutenant (ROTC product) who was literally and figuratively without a clue. He was constantly the butt of practical jokes (his chief reported pulling him off the top of his track after he was found jumping up and down on it in the motor pool “testing the shocks”). He refused to exit a Bradley during NTC live fire because he was afraid he would get shot. He was an embarrassment to the lieutenants and other officers in the battalion, and he eventually ended up being transferred from the unit after being caught sleeping with the wife of a private from another unit. He claimed he didn’t know. He also made the captain’s list this past March. Quantity over quality lives! II. Senior Officer Incompetence This is probably the biggest sore spot with junior officers leaving the Army. It is at many times intolerable. It involves officers in all battalion and brigade ranks, but it particularly entails company-level commanders. Lieutenants coming into the Army receive little guidance, sparse and often hollow mentorship, and examples of leadership that are negative and discouraging. A new lieutenant’s first sustained impression of Army leadership comes from his first commander, and that is more often than not an example of “successful command ahead of the soldier, successful command ahead of developing new officers, successful command ahead of everything.” These commanding captains have a single vision for their command and that is a simple 4-word phrase: Above Center of Mass (ACOM). ACOM = you didn’t screw up during your command. ACOM = everything “appeared” to go well. ACOM = towing the line without question. ACOM = your future in the Army. ACOM = everything! Captains who have completed four or five years of active duty often expect to be treated as masters of their trade when in reality their competence and knowledge have waned to less than that of an fresh OBC graduate. They have converted their Army skills into bluffing skills. They no longer know what it takes to complete a mission to standard, they only know what it takes to make the battalion commander think they do. They don’t try to command missions as much as they try to command perceptions and Officer Efficiency Reports. They feel that by nature of their rank and command they not only deserve their subordinates’ respect, they also deserve their admiration, awe, and homage. They are never wrong. They are particularly sore to criticism by lieutenants. They turn their commands into an entrenched bunker from which their orders and commands go forth but nothing is allowed in. It almost seems like they are running a marathon from which they only want to survive with their precious ACOM. Commanding captains are increasingly resentful of the soldier as if they were an obstacle that needed to be overcome to win the race. Many commanders I dealt with just did not like soldiers. They threw up shallow fakery with clichés about the soldier being the most important thing, how soldiers came first, how they loved their soldiers, but in reality they hated them. They seemed to wish that they could command their company but not have soldiers in it. They resented dealing with soldiers’ personal problems. They distrusted soldiers with any responsibility. They blamed soldiers for anything that went wrong. One commander in my unit made a statement after one of his soldiers attempted suicide that I think embodies a very common commander mentality. His first reaction to the incident was to criticize the soldier for “trying to [screw] me over!” These officers often exercise the epitome of “do as I say, not as I do.” They seem to live in a world where everybody should do things the right way except them. When I was a platoon leader my commander was particularly notorious for this. When one of my peers was late to PT because of a snowstorm, my commander counseled him and said that we were all responsible for foreseeing anything that might make us late and taking actions to prevent being late. He made this as a set-in-stone rule. No excuse for being late. A month later when another snowstorm hit the area, PT found all of the lieutenants and soldiers on time, many of whom live as far as twenty miles away from post. We were notified that our commander had earlier called the CQ and said that he would be in later because of the snowstorm. During my last rotation to NTC, vehicle turn-in was becoming as slow and painful as ITT could possibly make it. When the commanders in the unit began to realize that we wouldn’t be completely turned in within the week originally planned on, they simply just left their troops there and went home. They took bus seats from soldiers who had worked around the clock to get their vehicles done and they just left. My commander told us that he had to get back to sign the papers on his new car. I probably overstepped my bounds as a subordinate and told him during a private meeting that I though he was contradicting his own “leadership philosophy” of putting the soldiers first and the leaders last, and that soldiers were going to seriously question his credibility if he left. He responded that I shouldn’t worry about what the soldiers think. These commanders left their soldiers to clean up at NTC because they had the power to yank their own men off the bus manifest and put themselves on. Every commander but one who fled NTC that rotation got an Army Commendation Medal. During my final months on active duty I acted as XO for a headquarters company commander. His day consisted of blowing off PT due to his “health problems” or paperwork, taking long breakfasts and lunches, and spending his day closed behind the door in his office reading paperback novels. He was greatly inconvenienced by “soldier problems,” pawned off operational planning on his lieutenants and NCOs, had nothing to do with training issues, “delegated” his other responsibilities to anyone but himself, and lived under the motto “if you fail, it’s OK if you can cover your tail.” He also got an above center of mass OER (ACOM). When I left the unit I left a new second lieutenant behind, fresh from OBC, who in the space of three months in the unit already had that forlorn look in his eye of one who seriously questioned why he was in the Army. The factor that most makes lieutenants want to leave the Army considering all of the above is that these captains are not just a one-time event. They will become majors and we will have to serve under them when they are S-3s and XOs. Because they get ACOMs they will become battalion commanders and we will have to serve under them in their commands. Because the Army is so short-handed and quantity matters much more than quality, these kinds of captains will always have an incentive to stay in the Army because the Army tells them they are great officers and commanders, and if we were to stay in, we would always be serving under them in one form or another. No amount of pay increase, benefits increase, and especially job security is worth that. Officers aren’t leaving the Army to make more money or have better jobs. They’re leaving the Army because they can’t stand to be a part of this anymore. =========================================================== ARTICLE 6 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ What needs to be Fixed? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Ed.: What do you think needs to be fixed at the small unit level, was one of our questions. Many sent us similar responses. T.P.’s is representative for most. *********************************************************** By T.P., a serving Captain 1. Funding for equipment and training. I'm a Captain (O-3), and for two years, I've provided food, fuel and ammo for my unit out of my pocket. 2. Reasonable standards for soldiers to meet. We have soldiers with HIV and other actions pending and can't get rid of them. We have new soldiers returning from Basic Training who've never dug a fighting position, etc. 3. Reduction in political / non-military obligations. Almost half our time is spent doing non-military things, like briefings on environmental issues and such. ============================================================= *COPYRIGHT NOTICE** In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for nonprofit research and educational purposes only.[Ref. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ] Want to be on our lists? Write at [EMAIL PROTECTED] for a menu of our lists! <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html <A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html">Archives of [EMAIL PROTECTED]</A> http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ <A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/">ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
