The Looming NCO Crisis, Part 3: Military Culture

 

Part 1 of this series framed the problem of the looming NCO crisis. Part 2 examined why the recruiting base is so low and ended on the cautionary note that even if the military solved the recruiting crisis, if the culture does not support excellence and allow it to thrive, the crisis will still come knocking on our door.

I came into the Army at a time of cultural change in July 1977. My class at West Point was the second class with women. The Army was still working through changing from the draft to an All-Volunteer Army. Affirmative Action was the buzzword, and we all had to take Equal Opportunity (EO/EEO) and cultural awareness training. But the most significant change was a re-birth of an effective fighting force after the post-Vietnam malaise.

When I went to Infantry Officers’ Basic Course (IOBC), I still remember the battalion commander greeting us with the statement, “The mission of IOBC is to train the best infantry leaders in the world. Honestly, it doesn’t do that.” Yup, he said that, and he was right. We were still pulling our heads out of our collective fourth point of contact. Over the course of a career, I watched (and hopefully helped) the Army do just that. The Army leadership built the most trusted institution in America.

While the EO changes were significant, I do not think there was ever any doubt that excellence came first. The Army invested heavily in modernization and training. We saw the fielding of the “Big Five”, the founding of the National Training Center (NTC), the Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC), and the Warfighter programs (now Mission Command Training Center (MCTP)). The Army trained hard and set its standards on sustained excellence. NTC, JRTC, and MCTP were gut wrenching experiences where learning was job one. The Army developed the open After Action Review (AAR), where unit members discussed and assessed performance in an open and free manner. The AARs were candid and honest. Units, soldiers, and leaders learned, and the Army developed effective Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTP). Excellence was the coin of the realm.

That does not mean everything was perfect and poor leaders did not sometime slip through and all units met standards all the time. But the proof was in the pudding. The Army moved from the low performance in Operation Urgent Fury (Granada) to the success and powerful performance in Operation Desert Storm (Iraq 1). It continued this stellar performance in the opening year of Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (Iraq).

And then the wheels started to fall off…

The US government lost its focus. Taking out rogue leaders and governments became nation building. We stayed without a clearly articulated end state and purpose. It ended with the ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan. We violated our own doctrine.

That did two things.

First, it eroded the sense of excellence in the Army. The longer we stayed, the less our doctrine seemed to make sense, and I suspect our soldiers and leaders saw and felt that.

Second, the long wars changed American society and culture. The communism that was latent in American universities came to the fore with an energized and popular socialist movement. This movement turned on traditional American society as elements reacted to the deaths of several black males in police custody. The social engineers attacked American history as entirely racist, denigrated traditional America values, and changed American institutions and organizations. For example, see the Reconstructing History series, especially Part 3 and the Power Shift series, especially Part 7: The Great Society.

As these two series discuss, various social engineering movements such as Black Lives Matter (BLM), the 1619 Project (1619), and Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DIE), seek to remake society into a very different economic and social union than the Founders of the Republic intended. Without going into details here that are traced in the two referenced series, the key aspects are:

• The founding documents of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are inherently racist and not appropriate for a multi-ethnic society.
• The founders were racist and should be expunged from American history.
• Whites are the root of the problem and all whites are inherently racist and must be controlled.
• DIE and a surface diversified workforce is more important than the concept of excellence.

The military is not immune from these changes. The military managers embraced DIE and many of elements of BLM, 1619, and emerging social dynamics. While the EO changes of the 1980s continued to embrace excellence, I am not sure the current efforts do. For example, when I was building EUCOM J7 and had to hire civilians, I had to justify a white male hire three ways to China, but hiring a woman or minority required no justification. This problem was emphasized in my doctoral work where the curriculum was chockablock full of DIE, but had almost no references to excellence.

This situation could have dire consequences for the Army’s NCO corps. Without a drive for excellence and selecting the best leaders, the NCO corps could well suffer. Excessive attention to DIE and other aspects of social engineering could pull resources away from readiness and dilute our ability to implement doctrine and emerging technologies in an increasingly complex environment. This situation may be especially acute with the declining quality of enlistments.

Perhaps one key lesson we need to review and assess is whether or not Republics or Representative Democracies are engineered to fight a long war. We saw similar social upheavals and change during Vietnam after the initially popular war drug on with no real defined end state.

The difference between the 1980s and today is we still had a cohesive society in the 1980s. Today, that cohesion is weakened by DIE and social engineering initiatives. How will we get soldiers to fight if they do not believe in America and the Constitution. Remember, soldiers take an oath to support and defend the Constitution, not managers. And I am concerned that we are growing and promoting managers in a bureaucracy rather than warfighting leaders.

The military culture must promote virtue and excellence to grow the outstanding NCOs we need to implement our doctrines and succeed in a complex world with peer competitors.

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