The Looming NCO Crisis: Introduction

This blog is about a looming crisis that could happen in the US military’s Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO) corps. But the same factors that affect the military can and probably will affect almost any organization. Today, there is a great deal of concern over recruiting. I am concerned about what happens to the NCO corps over the next ten years. Before we train and educate an NCO, we must first recruit him or her. If the recruiting today is problematic, then the military must take remedial action to train and educate the professional NCO corps we depend upon. But the emerging military culture worries me. Will it facilitate the combat readiness and professionalism and skills we need in our NCO corps?

When I retired 12 years ago, the consensus was that about a third of Americans were eligible for military service. The factors that eliminated people were no high school diploma, criminal records, low ASVAB scores, and physical conditioning and weight. Now some in the military state the eligible population is down to 17%. Suzanne Bowdey quotes GEN McConville (Army Chief of Staff) in her article where he states the percentage is down 7% to 23%. He also stated that 9% of them have any desire to join, “the lowest number since 2007.” That is a tremendous change. To make the situation even more dire is the Army is below 50% of its recruiting goal with less than 3 months left in the year. Finally, to compound the problem, the Army will discharge “13% of its National Guard, 10% of the Reserve, and 24,250 active-duty soldiers out of the service over the president’s ludicrous vaccine mandate.”

These increasing problems are compounding as the world is getting increasingly complex and dangerous. Francis Fukuyama was wrong: history has not ended*. The question is, is history still relevant? Can we still learn from history or has humanity and world conditions changed so much that history is no longer relevant? Many educators would have us believe history is both no longer relevant and is malleable to meet social engineering objectives.

Setting aside the relevancy of history for a moment, the world is increasingly complex and dangerous. The US Multi-Domain Operations (MDO) addresses this complexity and danger. It recognizes Clausewitz’s dictum that war is diplomacy by another means, but also adds new dimensions to it. Economics and intelligence operations are war by another means. MDO requires a strong cognitive domain and cognitive skills to understand and adapt to changing conditions and issues. The MDO literature explicitly recognizes the premium on cognitive skills. We may have trouble recruiting soldiers with the cognitive capability and capacity required to fight the doctrine.

Now some will say, privates do not need to be rocket scientists. Set that aside for a moment and remember that privates are the seed corn for a professional NCO corps. An NCO corps that will be even more important in complex operations than ever before.

This series will examine each component in the lead figure and explain the dynamics. Then, the series will look at some potential corrective actions. It builds upon several other blog entries, such as the recreating history series and social engineering.

Make no mistake, we are facing a crisis that could undermine our tactical and strategic doctrines and threaten US national security. We must take action now.

*The term “end of history” is a term of art in political science. It does not mean that history is over, rather it “supposes that a particular political, economic, or social system may develop that would constitute the end-point of humanity’s sociocultural evolution and the final form of human government. A variety of authors have argued that a particular system is the “end of history” including Thomas More in Utopia, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx,^[1] Vladimir Solovyov, Alexandre Kojève,^[2] and Francis Fukuyama in the 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man”

Follow AFNN

Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/afnnusa
Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/2_-GAz…
Twitter: @AFNNUSA
GETTR: @AFNN_USA
CloutHub: @AFNN_USA
Patriot.Online: @AFNN