The U.S. military hasn’t won a war since 1945

Current U.S. military personnel are very proud. Their leaders’ uniforms are covered with medals. They talk a great game. They have all sorts of “elite” units. But what does it all mean? Not much. They haven’t won a war since 1945.

Desert Storm?

Some would say they won Desert Storm, the war to evict Iraq from Kuwait. True, we won, but it hardly seems like a war. It lasted 100 hours. The enemy apparently spent most of their time in the war trying to surrender. They surrendered to U.S. troops, members of the media who were wandering in the desert looking for stories because they were not allowed to be with the troops, and they tried to surrender to unmanned U.S. aerial reconnaissance aircraft about the size of model airplanes. They probably tried to surrender to our B-52s and tanks, too, but those weapons kill from farther away than they can see white flags.

The “war” ended like a prize fight that gets stopped because one fighter can no longer defend himself.

One British general, Rupert Smith, who fought in the Gulf War dismissed the Iraqis as a “poor lot.”

The post-Vietnam U.S. military is quite adept at vaporizing any enemy fighters who reveal themselves to us and who are not near civilians. The Iraqi military foolishly did that in Desert Storm and were killed or wounded at a rate of about 1,000 an hour. The Taliban did it briefly at the beginning of the Afghanistan war, until they, too, were vaporized.

Generally, however, our enemies have not exposed themselves to our military since the Korean War. It is the wars against enemies who pretend to be civilians or hide in thick jungle and engage in hit-and-run tactics that we appear not to know how to win. Since that’s about the only kind of wars we are likely to have from now on, we’d better learn how to win them.

Other wars since 1945

In the other wars since 1945, we have had unsatisfactory results including Korea, Vietnam, Somalia, Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Some would say Iraq and Afghanistan are not over yeat. Yeah. That’s the probem. Not only does our military have to win our wars, but they have to do it in three years or less. Look at all our wars and you will find that we either did that or the public started getting antsy about the war. For example, the Vietnam war started in August of 1964. The anti-war movement did not start unilt the end of 1967. Before that, the public supported the war wholeheartedly. World War II in Europe ended 3 1/2 half years after it was declared.

Given that we have reportedly the most powerful, best military in the world, how come we keep failing to win?

One reason is that our military is a government bureaucracy. Bureaucrats are process oriented. That’s as opposed to other groups like entrepreneurs, commissioned salesmen, trial lawyers, and coaches who are results oriented.

Big difference.

Jack Welch

Jack Welch is the highly respected former CEO of GE. In his weekely column on the last page of BusinessWeek, he and his latest wife often skewer bureacracy. In the 12/24/07 column, for example, they said this:

Question from a reader: “How do you take on the bureaucracy that damages so many organizations?”

Damages? How about deadens?

That’s a better word to describe what bureaucracy does; it sucks the life out of a business…Kafkaesque…kick bureaucracy: At every chance, poke fun at anyone who tries to install process for process’s sake; rib people who get all puffy about their positions or titles.What you want is…A business where an idea’s value has nohing to do with the stripes on the shoulder of the person behind it…

I’m doing my best, Jack.

Process-oriented

A process-oriented person focuses on the literal instructions they have been given. For example, if you chew out a motor sergeant because 85% of his unit’s vehicles are dead lined, and he is process-oriented, he will likely point out that he filled out and turned in his replacement parts requisitions. He will further point out that it is not his job to fill those requisitions, just to submit them, and that anyone who is not happy about the state of the motor vehicles should complain elsewhere.

Will such a person be punished for taking such a narrow view of his responsibilities? Generally, no, if the organization in question is governmental. Indeed, he is likely to be unaffected or even promoted in spite of his behavior.

Here’s a quote from Michael J. Maubussin’s book More Than You Know about business bureaucrats that applies as well to military officers in the last 50 years:

While well-intentioned and hard-working, corporate executives and money managers too frequently prioritize growing the business over delivering superior results for shareholders. Increasingly, managers get paid to play, not to win.

I disagree with the “well-intentioned” phrase. Military and civilian bureaucrats may have been well-intentioned when they began their careers, but they became cynical sell-outs when they realized how the bureaucracy really worked. These people are not stupid. In fact, in the Army, I was constantly admonished for refusing to “play the game,” that is, refusing to go along to get along.

Results-oriented

How would a results-oriented person deal with the same situation? Let’s say he’s Joe, owner of Joe’s Plumbing, which has six trucks. If one of his trucks breaks down and needs a part, he will take it to his usual mechanic. His usual mechanic will fix it within a couple of hours. If he ever fails to do so, Joe will raise hell and if that doesn’t get it taken care of pronto, Joe will find another mechanic who will fix such things promptly. “Time is money,” Joe might explain.

Paradoxically, the motor sergeant described above as process-oriented is no doubt quite results-oriented when it comes to getting his own POV (privately-owned vehicle) repaired. Why does he go back and forth from results- to process-oriented? The late CBS newscaster Eric Sevareid once said, “When it’s everybody’s property, people treat it as if it were nobody’s property.” The military trucks are everybody’s property. Joe’s truck, on the other hand, is Joe’s property so Joe will be results-oriented with regard to it. As will the motor sergeant with regard to the vehicle he personally owns.

In other words, the sergeant and everyone else in the military know better. They behave better in their other life as a civilian. But when they put on that uniform and enter the base, they change from the competent civilian Mr. Jekyll to the incompetent, uncaring Sergeant or Lieutenant Colonel Hyde.

My exposure to both types

I spent four years as a cadet at West Point and four more years as an Army officer. For details, see my military home page: www.johntreed.com/military.html.

Being an Army officer gave me exposure to process-oriented military people. West Point is a college so we were focused on studies and sports and such. Those were results orientations and the officers there generally shared that orientation.

I also worked briefly for a big corporation in the banking business, Crocker National Bank, which was process-oriented. It later got taken over by Wells Fargo Bank.

On the other side, I bought my first rental property when I was a second lieutenant in the Army, less than a year after I graduated from West Point. I continued to buy and sell rental properties for 23 years thereafter. That is an entrepreneurial, results-oriented activity.

When I got out of the Army, I became a real estate agent which was a full-commissioned position where I only got paid for results. Virtually everyone else I worked with there was also on full commission.

I spent two years at Harvard Business School getting an MBA. Most Harvard Business School graduates, including myself, are founders and owners of their own businesses. I am in regular contact with my fellow Harvard MBAs.

I have made my living from a number of different businesses including real estate ownership, real estate sales, seminars, writing and publishing newsletter articles, writing and publishing books, freelance writing, creating and selling cassettes. These are all entrepreneurial activities where I get paid nothing unless I succeed and can even lose money if I do not. I did lose $750,000 on two apartment complexes I bought in Texas.

I also worked about a year as a real estate property manager. That was a salaried position, but it was in a small company that was owned by an entrepreneur. Also, we continuously had to fill vacant apartments and commercial space and make the buildings run at a profit so the position was generally results-oriented.

I also coached 35 athletic teams, seven of which were high-school teams where I was paid for my coaching. At the high schools, I was in a result-oriented, no-job-security, coaching position. But my superiors included many non-coach, full-time, school-district administrators who were generally process oriented.

As a writer of how-to books and articles for my fellow entrepreneurs and coaches, I am in daily contact with results-oriented people and make my living teaching them how to get better results.

In short, I have about five years experience with process-oriented workers and about 38 years experience as, and with, results-oriented workers. The typical career officer or NCO who will be outraged by this article spent his entire adult life in the belly of the bureaucratic, process-oriented, military beast. Many, maybe most, take a similar civilian job with the government or a utility when they retire from the military.

Notwithstanding their advanced age, such people are babes in the woods in any discussion of results-oriented people. Ironically, military people generally consider themselves superior to civilians. Ha! Ignorance is bliss.

External validation versus objective criteria

Another way to slice this point is dividing the world into those who need external validation and those who measure themselves by objective criteria. External validation is some person or committee saying you are a good person. We all need external validation when we are young. Going to a selective college like West Point is a way of obtaining that. In high school, my identity was moderately smart, quiet, slightly athletic guy. Replacing that with West Point cadet seemed like a big step up at the time.

I got a little more of that by getting a Harvard MBA, but my reason for that was more the experience and education than the external validation because I was 29 when I started there.

Now, my identity is author of over 70 books and over 5,000 articles; husband in one 33-year marriage; father of Dan, Steve, and Mike; long-time successful entrepreneur. At age 61, the fact that I went to West Point and was an Army officer for four years seems ancient history and anomalous.

Career military people, including those who are the entire management of West Point, are, by definition, people who spend their entire lives seeking external validation. That is, they want committees on promotion boards and such to anoint them with higher rank, especially early promotion to higher rank as well as plum assignments. They encourage cadets to be like them. Like hell! Instead, you should adopt objective criteria by which you set goals and measure your life. Net worth. Marriage and family goals. Recognition (broad-based objective recognition like reputation or product sales, not recognition by a subjective committee). Contribution. Spiritual rewards from a sense of accomplishment. Making an honest living. Living up to the ideals of West Point—which—ironically—requires getting away from its parent organization after graduation.

You can spot external validation addicts by the way they describe themselves in their resume or bio. If it is a list of appointments they have received from various committees, like military rank or plum positions like battalion commander in an airborne division, they are external validation addicts. Those of us who think you can shove your external validation have different self-descriptions. Ours involve straight-commission jobs and marks like top producer; successful entrepreneurial activities; successful coaching in sports; books and articles written (“Getting published” is external validation. I published almost all my books and articles myself.); marks set in athletic competition; net worth; income; discoveries made; inventions patented; and so forth.

‘Self-proclaimed’

I sometimes get a telling accusation hurled at me. “Who put you in charge of _________?” or “You’re just a self appointed _________.” These are the mating calls of the external-validation addict. When you spend a lifetime seeking external validation of your worth as a person, you lose the ability, if you ever had it, of recognizing that operating independently of the various anointing committees and bosses is possible, even preferable. Those people think you can only exert authority or even autonomy, if you are anointed by higher committees or bosses.

The profoundly disturbing thing to me about the external validation crowd is their cynical willingness to live a sleazy life in order to attain a position or rank that impresses those who are ignorant of the sleaziness that was required to attain the rank or position. In other words, they much prefer being anointed as a good person by some external committee—even when they have to be a bad person to win the committee’s approval—than to be an actual good person, but not get their good “personness” validated by an incompetent or dishonest external committee. The Army claims the motto “Be. Know. Do.” I wrote a very critical review of an article with that title by a West Point graduate. (http://www.johntreed.com/beknowdo.html) In fact, they have zero interest in any of that. They are only interested in, “Seeming to be, know, and do.”

‘Somebody would have to make a decision’

At Harvard Business School, all the the instruction is case method. The cases are actual, recent cases from real businesses. The Harvard MBA student is always put in the position of a decision maker and the professor always listens to the student lay out the various options and considerations for the particular case then the professor ends by asking, “So what’re you going to do?”

When asked what Harvard Business School was like, one of my classmates there gave a summary of a case he had had that day in class to some grad students from “across the river.” At Harvard, the Business School is on the Boston side of the Charles River and the other schools are on the Cambridge side. The Cambridge side is Communist, essentially. The Commies were quite good at pointing out the options and considerations of the business school case. But when my classmates asked, “So what’re you gonna do?” They were stunned and looked at each other blankly before one finally said, “Well, somebody would have to make a decision on that.” My classmate said exactly what the professor at Harvard Business would. “Yeah, you! What’s your decision?”

The mindset of the Commies on the Cambridge side of the river was that they were peons and that some higher authority—external validation—ran the world and delegated authority without which one did not have authority. The mindset of the Harvard MBAs, after the first few weeks of being there, was that we were in charge. Most Harvard MBAs are founders and CEOs of their own companies. The irony of West Point is that it turns out external-validation addicts while claiming to be a leadership academy.

Time and materials

One of the first things I learned when I went into real estate investment is that you never agree to “time and materials” contracts with a contractor. Always get a fixed bid. Time and materials means the contractor just does the work and bills you for how much time it takes and for the materials he has to buy. The probem with agreeing to this is contractors, being human, then take forever and the job costs far more than normal.

Our first Commander in Chief, George Washington, magnanimously told the Continental Congress that he would work without a salary. He asked the Congress to just reimburse his out-of-pocket expenses. They agreed. He then submitted expense vouchers that stunned the Congress. When he became president, he again offered to work without salary. Having been burned once by that arrangement, Congress said words to the effect of “Hell no!” paid him a salary, and and made him pay his own darned personal expenses.

However, the U.S. military as a whole has always been on time and materials and when you take away “for the duration,” the U.S. military is far worse than any contractor about taking forever.

In March of 2008, I heard former CentCom commander John Abizaid speak. He spoke with pride and satisfaction of the languid progress that has been made in Iraq. In fact, theAmerican people are unhappy about the cost of the Iraq war in lives and money and with how long it is taking—far longer than the U.S. Civil War or World Wars I or II.

That’s because the U.S. military is a bunch of process-oriented bureaucrats working on time and materials. Adopt a draft and tell the military it will go “over there” and “won’t come back til it’s over over there” and they damned well will wrap it up in a couple of years.

Still be in Vietnam

French prime minister Georges Clemenceau famously said, “War is too important to be left to the generals.” I agree, but maybe for a different reason.

Most generals are process-oriented bureaucrats. That is to be expected given that they have spent their entire adult lives working for the government—more than thirty years.

If the Vietnam war had been left to the career generals, we would still be there. The number of dead would be 450,000 instead of 58,000, and the situation there would be the same as it was in 1970 when I was there.

What is the evidence of that? There was essentially no net progress in the first twelve years and the two four-star generals in charge—Westmoreland and Abrams—were both promoted to Chief of Staff—the top officer in the U.S. Army—as their next assignment!

They were members of a process-oriented organization and they complied with process requirements. End of evaluation.

Victory or defeat was literally irrelevant to the U.S. military leaders during Vietnam. Civilian leaders got fired for losing that war. No military leader did.

Some results-oriented generals

Are all career generals process-oriented? No. Here are some U.S. generals who famously were results-oriented:

• Ulysses S. Grant (West Point Class of 1843)
• George H. Thomas (Subject of an article in the 3/07 Smithsonian magazine, West Point Class of 1840)
• Robert E. Lee (West Point Class of 1829)
• Stonewall Jackson (West Point Class of 1846)
• George S. Patton (West Point Class of 1909)
• Matthew B. Ridgeway (West Point Class of 1917)

Why were these guys not bureaucratized? Grant got out of the Army after West Point then came back in for the Civil War. He was in business in between stints in the Army.

The other generals apparently had such a strong results orientation that spending a career in the Army did not eliminate it.

It should also be noted that the Union Civil War Commander in Chief, Abraham Lincoln, himself briefly a lower level military commander, but never a bureaucrat, was quick to fire generals who did not get results. Initially, he had a lot of those.

Lincoln had long been a trial lawyer, one of the professions I noted above that produces results-oriented people. Robert E. Lee played the same role in the Confederate Army which had effective generals throughout the war.

George Patton was chosen by Dwight Eisenhower (West Point ’15) because of his results-orientation. Patton’s immediate commander Omar Bradley (West Point ’15) did not want Patton.

Matthew Ridgeway got to be top commander in Korea because of the combat-zone, vehicle-accident death of Walton Walker. Walker reportedly needed to be replaced for lack of effectiveness, but may not have been had he not been killed. Prior to that point in the Korean War, Walker had apparently been an effective, results-oriented commander. He was one of Patton’s top commanders in World War II and operated, by definition, like Patton. Patton would have fired him otherwise.

How do we get results-oriented generals?

Fire the ones who aren’t. Promote results-oriented generals. Demote or fire those who do not get results.

At present, there appears to be a civil-service mentality in the U.S. military. President Ronald Reagan’s Budget Director David Stockman was so incensed by the military’s single-minded devotion to preserving every penny of retirement benefits, even at the expense of the national defense, that he took the unusual step of denouncing them publicly for it. They still have them. He’s out of government.

Bureaucrats can become quite results oriented when the issue pertains to something they personally own, like retirement benefits.

20-year retirement is bad policy

At present, military personnel can retire with inflation-adjusted half pay and unlimited, no co-pay, free spouse and dependents medical care for the rest of their lives at the twenty-year point. If the retire a day before the twenty-year point, they get nothing.

Bad idea.

The idea is that military people have risked their lives and lived away from loved ones and in miserable conditions for years so they need to be rewarded for that. Fine. But military personnel who were in for three years or seven or twelve or 18 have done the same thing. Actually, they typically spend a far higher percentage of their military time in harm’s way than career people. The notion that 19 years 11 months is nothing and 20 years is to be lavishly rewarded is obvious nonsense.

Unfortunately, it’s been the rule for so long career military people think it’s in the Constitution.

Virtually no NCO or officer will ever resign or even risk his retirement benefits once he passes about the 12-year point in his career. Why not? At that point, the present value of the 20-year retirement benefits is quite high.

But this means that just when they are moving into responsible positions like battalion commander and master sergeant or sergeant major, they become infinitely more timid about saying or doing anything that might prevent them from being promoted. Each promotion permanently increases the amount of that person’s retirement pay.

Actually, when I was in they played games like spending months trying to persuade military medical authorities that they had some physical disability to increase their retirement pay for that reason as well. These games are well known in civilian government and union employment as well.

They also become extremely timid about anything that might cause them to be forced out of the military before they are eligible for retirement benefits.

Incentives matter

The problem is incentives matter. The compensation scheme of any organization attracts and repels various kinds of people and motivates those who stay to behave in certain ways.

The military retirement benefits, which are the most generous I know of, attract people who are willing to endure military hardships and chicken manure for twenty years in order to get those retirement benefits. These are not the reasons the above-named results-oriented generals joined or remained in the military. Gold watch seekers are not likely to be the hard-charging commanders America needs. War is risky. It requires risk-takers as leaders. By emphasizing pension benefits to attract war leaders, we attract the opposite of risk takers.

At the beginning of this article, I noted four occupations whose members are generally results-oriented. How are they compensated?

• entrepreneurs—profits, if any, commensurate with business profits or losses
• trial lawyers—profits, if any, commensurate with achieving successful settlements or verdicts
• coaches—promotions, compensation, and job retention commensurate with winning percentage
• salesmen—commissions from successful sales

Also, each of these occupations has a high failure and high wash-out rate. The wash-out rate in the federal bureaucracy, including the military, is almost zero absent the occasional RIF (reduction in force for budget reasons). And then they often wash out the rompin’ stompin’ mover and shakers instead of the deadwood because their superiors feel threatened by the best subordinates.

‘...to win our wars’

Douglas MacArthur made a farewell speech the West Point Corps of Cadets (student body) in which he said,

And through all this welter of change and development your mission remains fixed, determined, inviolable. It is to win our wars.

Who is more likely to win our wars? Commanders who have spent a lifetime in situations where they were promptly and severely punished for failure and richly rewarded for success? Or commanders who have spent their lives in an organization where “keeping your nose clean,” avoiding angering any of your superiors, “getting your ticket punched,” and trudging through the military’s red tape and chicken manure for decades were all that mattered?

Paid for breathing

When I was an Army officer, I was bemused by the fact that I was paid for keeping my heart beating. Another government employee, President and military Commander in Chief John F. Kennedy, had the same deal. And after he was assassinated at 2PM on November 22, 1963, the media reported that his widow received a paycheck for 21/30 of a month’s pay plus 14/24 of a day’s pay. That’s 21 days pay for the first 21 days of a 30-day month plus 14 hours of a 24-hour day for the 22nd of the month.

The same rules apply to active duty military personnel as far as I know. Presidents sort of are active-duty military personnel.

Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “time is money,” doesn’t it?

When you pay people for breathing, they breathe.

When you pay people for winning, they win.

When you send people to Vietnam for a one-year tour, which was the standard policy during that war, they do a year. We lost that war.

When you send men to war “for the duration,” that is, until the war is won, as was done in both World Wars, they win.

Incentives matter. See my article on the leadership and results orientation evident in the TV series Deadliest Catch.

Winning wars is important. In fact, it is crucial. We must get rid of the process-orientated military personnel and replace them with results-oriented personnel. To do that, the incentives must become results oriented.

Private equity

In the U.S. Army, the hots shots are airborne rangers, of which I am one. When was the airborne ranger invented? Around 1943. I became one in 1968. So you can see what a leading-edge, state-of-the-art, “rolling stones who gather no moss” bunch Army officers are.

In medicine, the hottest hot shots are the surgeons. In business, which, for better or worse, attracts many of the best young people nowadays, the hot shots are in “private equity.” Those are companies that invest in companies that are not, or not yet, publicly traded on the stock market. Here is how Wikipedia summarizes what private equity guys do:

Investments typically involve a transformational, value-added, active management strategy. Private equity firms generally receive a return on their investments through one of three ways: an Initial Public Offering [converting a private company to one whose stock is sold to the public], a sale or merger of the company they control, or a recapitalization [signifciantly increasing the amount of capital—debt and equity—of a company].

On the spectrum of management that has rompin’ stompin’ movers and shakers at one end and hidebound bureaucrats at the other, private equity guys are at the mover-and-shaker end and military officers are at the other end. Private equity guys may be the ultimate results-oriented guys and uniformed military bureaucrats the ultimate proces-oriented guys.

My Harvard classmate Orit Gadiesh is the head (actually, “the chair”) of Bain & Co., Mitt Romney’s employer before he became governor of Massachusetts. She is most famous for once commenting, to dismiss another person’s comment that average people should be considered in some discussion, “The average person has one tit and one ball.”

She and a Bain partner have recently produced a book titled Lessons from Private Equity Any Company Can Use. If there is anyone in the U.S. military or in the civilian control of the military, who cares about the effectiveness of military leaders, they ought to read it. According to a review in the 3/08 HBS Alumni Bulletin magazine, the book says that one of the differences between private equity managers and ordinary public companies is that both use strategic due diligence, blueprints for action, and tying compensation to performance—but that private equity managers do it with far more consistency, rigor, and thoroughness and a relentless focus on results.

Don’t you love that phrase? “relentless focus on results”

Who among military officers is known for such a focus? George Patton, Ulysses S. Grant, Hyman Rickover

Can I think of any career military officer born after 1900 who had a relentless focus on results? No. Sorry.

Can I think of any civilian leader who has a relentless focus on results? Sure. Jack Welch, Steve Jobs, C.C. Myers, Henry Kaiser, Andrew Higgins, Rudy Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Belichick, Walt Disney, Bill Walsh, Sam Walton, John Wooden, Bobby Knight, Ronald Reagan, Peter Uberroth, Burt Rutan, Craig Venter

I could go on, but you get the point. How many of these great leaders with a relentless focus on results were former military generals? Zero. How many are graduates of my “leaders-of-character”-producing alma mater, West Point? Zero—although Bobby Knight was our basketball coach when I was a cadet.

Gadiesh’s book also says leaders of organizations need to ask,

Which handful of key initiatives, either undertaken from scratch or reinvigorated, will have enormous impact three to five years down the road?

How many guys in the current U.S. military or its civilian leadership—who actually have the power to make such initiatives happen—are asking such questions? I’ll bet zero. Also, no one has the power to do anything in the U.S. military anyway. It’s a bureacracy which means all power to do anything rises to the top, that is, the President and the Congress. Generals and admirals rarely initiate anything. Rather, they are initiated upon by the civilians above them and those civilians are vote-oriented if not process-oriented. Basically, no one’s in charge in the military. So the entire military is process, not results, oriented.

Promote based on success

If I were king of the country, I would promote successful commanders in combat, and demote unsuccessful ones. When there were no wars, I would keep tabs on those who were successful civilian entrepreneurs and keep on the lookout for other successful results-oriented people. If and when another war came about, I would draft or activate the successful results-oriented civilians.

What about the career NCOs and officers? I would have them get out of the military and go do something where they maintain their results-orientation and edge in the civilian world rather than that they sit around filling out forms in quintuplicate waiting for the next war or retirement, whichever came first.

Don’t they need to maintain their military knowledge and skills between wars? That could be done with a yearly continuing-education program and/or a quick refresher during mobilization.

We would probably need some size force continuously for quick response. That force should engage in continuous realistic war games in which success and failure in the games determined who got promoted and who got demoted.

Civilians probably think the military is already doing that. Maybe. But I doubt it. They sure as heck were not when I was in.

I am not addressing compensation and post-active-duty benefits in this article except to say that they should be designed to:

• care appropriately for the wounded and the families of those killed in the line of duty
• compensate time on active duty fairly and well enough to attract the quality personnel we need
• avoid rewarding or even retaining military leaders, namely NCOs and officers, merely for hanging around regardless of effectiveness

Email from a young (I assume) reader—and my answer

Dear John T Reed,
 
I recently read your military articles, in which you explored the difference in culture between the private and public sector. My questions are the following:
 
 
1. What are the advantages of the private sector career-wise compared to the public sector.
 
2. What is the best way to decide whether to enter the private or public sector in terms of a career?
 
I would greatly appreciate any thoughts or advice.
 

I am stunned by the profound ignorance in the questions.
You assume there are advantages to each—probably because you use bureaucratic spin and terminology in the way you phrase the questions—“private sector and public sector.” Gee. They’re both “sectors.” They even both start with the letter “p” and have two syllables. How different can they be?
The question falls on my ears like, “What are the advantages of having versus not having cancer?” Well, one advantage of having cancer is you don’t have to make long-term plans. Of course, an advantage of not having cancer is that you can make such plans. If you have cancer, you can get others to feel sorry for you. Cancer may get you access to some painkillers with recreational benefits like “medicinal” marijuana. (I put medicinal in quotes because there is no such thing as a medicine that is delivered by smoking. Smoke of various types generally delivers about 250 chemicals to the lungs—almost all of them damaging.)
But seriously, folks.

“Public sector” is a euphemism. The correct word is “bureaucracy.”
If you research the words “bureaucracy” and “bureaucrat” in the largest dictionaries, you will always find at least one or two definitions that are disparaging.
The “private sector” is more accurately and neutrally known as business. Even the biggest dictionaries do not offer negative definitions of the word “business,” although some leftist political dictionaries might.
Are there some bad business people? Yes. But most are good. You see them every day all around you.
Are there any good bureaucracies? No. Zero.
How can that be? Human nature and economic laws. Incentives matter.
If UPS gives better value for their shipping charges than FedEx, they will prosper and FedEx allows that to continue at their peril. Those incentives filter down through the organizations to the lowest employees. They must be efficient and all the other things customers want. Go to a FedEx office and do some business and you will see.
In bureaucracy, rank and tenure matter. So bureaucrats seek rank and tenure, period. Now go to your local Department of Motor Vehicles and do some business with them. Roughly speaking, the DMV is what all government or non-profit organizations are like. Again, I say “roughly.”
When you’re in FedEx and the DMV, notice not only the service you get, but also the dress, posture, demeanor, and attitude of the employees. You will see that the DMV people are sort of downtrodden, frumpy, sullen, numb to the inefficiency all around them, and unhappy. The FedEx people will be normal.
The best way to pick between them is to work for a combination of such organizations, although I warn you that after bureaucratic employment, business will be less interested in you.
If you find that you prefer bureaucracy, choose that career path—and shame on you.
John T. Reed

I appreciate informed, well-thought-out constructive criticism and suggestions.

John T. Reed

Link to information about John T. Reed’s Succeeding book which, in part, relates lessons learned about succeeding in life from being in the military

John T. Reed Publishing home page - John T. Reed military home page