Quantity is No Substitute for Quality

Airborne Hog Society ^ | 19 April 2005 | AHS MilBlogger

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Colonel David H. Hackworth (USA, Ret.) recently published a very timely column titled "A Tale of Three Sergeants" at SFTT.org. It raises important questions regarding recruiting and promotions. He asks a particularly frightening question, rhetorical to those of us who are in the Army, that should cause alarm among those who do not understand the damage that was done to the Army when it was so dramatically downsized in the 1990s and the continuing damage being done to the Army by our lackluster recruiting standards and promotion standards - or lack thereof. Hackworth writes:

"But as this is being written, another sergeant, Hasan Akbar, faces court-martial, charged with the murder of fellow members of an American brigade on the eve of the Iraq invasion. His lawyers say he’s nuts, the same thing a shrink said when Akbar was 14. The rub is how this guy – whose Army evaluation reports also say he’s nuts – got in the Army in the first place and then went on to make sergeant in a peculiarly short period of time."

This is a symptom of a promotion system that is devoid of merit and structured in typical bureaucratic fashion. Promotions are based largely upon time in service and evaluation reports. The evaluation reports are arbitrary because they are subjectively written by chains of command with vastly different standards, but then viewed and compared to one another at a centralized location. Standards for an "excellence" rating by one unit may only merit a "success" rating at another unit. This is partially due to a disparity of standards in various units and partially due to evaluators who understand the disparity and subjective nature of the evaluation system and then "fluff" their evaluations, to make their soldiers more competitive. Additionally, substandard performers are usually given evaluations that report "success" because of the difficultly in giving a poor evaluation report. Soldiers who are poor performers and "need improvement" cannot be evaluated as such without a substantial trail of paperwork to justify the evaluation. Otherwise the rated soldier will have lawyers removing the evaluation from his record.

I discussed the accelerated promotions that the Army has reduced itself to in my entry on April 2nd. I will not reprint the entire diatribe, but I will reprint two relevant passages below.

"However, promotion standards have been lowered to a dramatic degree, to a level that it is unreasonable for our enlisted soldiers to acquire adequate knowledge or experience. The assumption that combat experience can substitute for a far greater amount of training and time in service is wrong, in my opinion. Combat experience should be referred to as 'theatre experience'. By that, I mean that it only corresponds to the situation in the theatre that a soldier operates in. Iraq and Afghanistan are two totally different theatres of operation, not just due to the enemy or the geography, but by the most fundamental nature of wars being fought in those theatres."

"The most recent lowering of standards is the new automatic promotion for Sergeants. Due to a perceived shortage of junior NCOs, the Army has decided to lower the standards for promotion, by allowing soldiers with a certain amount of time in grade and a certain amount of promotion points to be promoted automatically - no promotion board necessary. Sergeant, while arguably the most critical rank in the Army is now within the reach of anyone. No experience or merit necessary. How such a shortage of Sergeants could occur or be an issue is beyond me. The Army still has Corporal rank. A Corporal is on par with a Specialist, on the pay scale, but is awarded Corporal stripes by the Company Commander, when it is deemed that he is doing the job of an NCO and is performing with sufficient professionalism to wear stripes. That seems to me to be a much more logical solution to any shortage of Sergeants, rather than lowering standards. Making Sergeant an automatic rank further accelerates the rate of promotion for our enlisted soldiers and drains the NCO corps of training and experience."

My primary concern was that we are producing leaders who do not have sufficient professional knowledge - soldiers who are not technically and tactically competent in their field. However, this recent article by Colonel Hackworth also raises important issues about general soldier quality. The Army does not transform misguided youths into first-class citizens. Sometimes it is a good catalyst for good people who need some mentoring, but neither the bark of a drill sergeant nor the personal attention of a team leader magically transforms a lowlife into a model citizen. I often need to explain this to people who think that military service should be compulsory, as a means of "straightening out" our youths.

Many people, usually politicians, must often relearn the lesson that air power is not the decisive component of military force; ground forces are. Likewise, the military often needs to relearn the lesson that large formations are meaningless if they are not populated by quality soldiers. The two notions actually go hand-in-hand. Ground forces are decisive because soldiers can think through a situation on the ground and interact with the civilian populace and inspect the micro-terrain of the battlefield. Air power can only pulverize and destroy. Ground forces are not decisive because of the weapons that they bring to bear - we can drop bombs from airplanes and spray machine gun fire from helicopters all day, everyday.

A well-known quote by John Boyd states that, "Machines don't fight wars. People do, and they use their minds." Ground forces are decisive because they put thinking people on the ground to deal with a host of problems and situations that machines cannot address. You need quality soldiers if you want this job done correctly. You also need quality leaders to give them purpose and direction. Quality comes from experience, training, mentoring, and hard work. It is not something that you get by just slapping rank on the collars of an unqualified individual.

When an unqualified individual is given responsibility commensurate with his rank, but beyond his capabilities, bad things occur. The mission goes awry, details are neglected, and people die. Hasan Akbar is an extreme example. Unfortunately, it will take this extreme example, and many more, before the Army realizes that quantity is no substitute for quality.