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Posted on 09/30/2026 9:02:23 AM PDT by rktman
A decision made inside the Pentagon can look very different to the soldier under fire who must carry it out. Sometimes the consequences are a matter of life and death.
Washington has no shortage of people who know how to make a decision. What every soldier needs to know is whether the person making it understands what happens after the order leaves the building. Anyone who has served, knows the feeling of wishing that someone several levels above understood what they were asking.
I learned that lesson in Ganjgal. My team was trapped under heavy fire, calling for support that was not reaching them. I was at the patrol rally point, listening to the fight unfold over the radio. I asked for permission to go in after them and was told no. I asked again and then again. Eventually, Staff Sgt. Juan Rodriguez-Chavez and I went anyway.
I still remember the anger and helplessness of knowing that men were fighting for their lives while decisions affecting them were being made far from the reality on the ground. I wished that somebody up the chain had been standing where I was. I wished they understood the responsibility for the people beside me and the fact that their call had become my problem to solve.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
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For the military, this is life and death.
But similar issues plague industry. Once upon a time, people would start at the bottom and work their way up. They would come to know the whole business, and the whole industry. With well-rounded experience, they were in a good position to make decisions at the top, because they understood what those decisions would ultimately mean.
But today, a lot of Ivy League MBAs slide into the top spot in industries they do not understand. You can run a Brewery, then transfer over and run an Airline, and then get a job as a CEO of a tech start-up. Just filling in little numbers in little boxes in little spreadsheets, and managing the funding and the shareholder value. The business? The customers? The employees? No need to care about any of that. Your next quarterly bonus is looking good, and that’s what counts.
America needs to re-think the concept of leadership.
Combat experience, the only real leadership teacher of officers, does not exist in the majority of the current military’s officer corp.
Is this the reason for the flag officer purge? Just a SWAG!
Very well said, and exactly true.
Fake it till you make it is all the rage now.
> America needs to re-think the concept of leadership. <
You’ve hit upon one reason why urban public education is in such trouble. Principals used to come up from the ranks. Most of them had decades of experience.
I’m a retired urban public school teacher. My last principal had a grand total of two years of teaching experience before she was promoted into administration. She was simply awful, a vindictive and pompous “equity” parrot.
The same goes for the administrators at the district level.
I did it the old fashioned way during my career. Started as a labor grade 7 mechanic and worked my way up to be test conductor and eventually a systems engineer on the shuttle program without a degree. Lucky for me someone saw something in me. (dumbasses! LOL!)😉🚀
There are times when you can disobey orders to do something you think needs to be done. The caveat is that you have to be right.
“Once upon a time, people would start at the bottom and work their way up. “
And it looks like the bottom rungs may be filled by AI now. There will be no adequately grounded people to fill the upper rungs.
Hah! The MBA program teaches students how to run a business.
That's so cute ...
There's no such thing as "a business".
There's only "THIS business". Someone who doesn't deeply understand "THIS business" has no clue how to run it.
In 2006, Dakota Meyer graduated from Green County High School. While at Green County High School he had walked up to a recruiting United States Marine Corps sergeant visiting from about an hour’s drive away. The sergeant was sitting in the school’s lunchroom and asked him what he planned to do after high school. Meyer told the recruiter, “I’m going to go to college and play college football.” The reply stung as the Marine sergeant said that he would do the same thing if he was Meyer because there was no way that he could become a Marine.
He is a Medal of Honor recipient. Many times, you don’t survive that.
I point that out a lot.
The simple little admin jobs are the easiest to automate with AI. Why bother to hire entry level workers who don't know what they're doing?
Also: Businesses figured out a long time ago that Middle Management added nothing to the business. Why hire some guy to manage 5 people? What's the point? So just hollow out Middle Management -- you'll never miss those guys.
We're heading toward a business model with no one at the bottom, no one in the middle, and everyone is at the top, and they are all 2 years away from retirement.
REMF’s come in all flavors and ranks.
His book “Into the Fire” was excellent...He’s been there and can speak from experience about the chain of command..
Mission.
Men.
Self.
Above all, the mission. If you can’t accept that, you need to find another line of work.
If commanders were limited to only ordering troops to do something they themselves had done, there wouldn’t be many orders given.
How many commanders at D-Day would you reckon had ever jumped off a boat into chest-deep water, waded ashore and slogged across the beach under withering fire, then climbed a cliff to get to their enemy?
Ain't that the truth. I was lucky, my 3 Platoon Sergeants all did at least a year in Vietnam. Their guidance was invaluable to my development.
My tenure as a Platoon Leader got off to a rocky start, flunked my first ARTEP. Learned from it, made me a better platoon leader. One of my Battery CO's was a great staff officer, should've stayed there. All he had to do was trust me and his XO, I compared him to Dick Winters of Easy Company.
Nope, he couldn't do that. Nearly cost us our ARTEP. For my efforts to right the ship, I received a lousy OER. I did great with bosses that demanded intelligence and imagination from their officers, not so much with those who micromanaged.
Not a purge IMO, but a rightsizing to a smaller military. As a former company grade officer, I welcome these changes. There are hundreds of LTC's and COL's that can assume roles currently filled by flag officers.
Too many flag officers have been in office jobs, away from the troops they should be leading. They also have their own "posses" of subordinate officers who gum up the works.
I never served beyond battalion level, except for a couple of years at a directorate at Fort Bliss. It was a great job, and I worked for my last battalion commander in Germany. He made me his Operations Officer, an O-5 slot, and I was but a Captain with a year time in grade. It was a challenge, but I don't recall any issues. I was the Old Man's "fair haired boy", but I knew what he expected of me, and I delivered the goods.
That's true even in small business too.
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