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The U.S, Army officer corps’ chronic trouble retaining good junior officers

Posted by John T. Reed on

When I was a student at West Point and since, I periodically heard about the Army or the military lamenting that too many junior officers were getting out rather than staying in long enough to become captains or majors. That, in turn, meant that the pool from which they could promote officers to colonels and generals was unhappily less numerous and less qualified.
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The Army appoints committees to produce reports and recommendations about how to fix this. They created the Junior Officers Council. The officer students at Fort Monmouth Signal school, mostly captains, were about to unanimously elect second lieutenant me the Officer Student Detachment Junior Officer Council representative of the JOC. My West Point classmates there instantly recognized that the job was meant for me and started passing my name around the auditorium. There was a great desire to get out of the room and the non-student junior officers were taking too long to choose their rep.
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But I told my classmates “Thanks, but no thanks.” I thought it was an eye-wash only supplicant position and the post commander went way out of his way to make sure everyone knew he hated the idea and that the JOC would have no power whatsoever.
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Later, in the hearing when they threw me out fo the Army,the President of the board a brigadier general indicated that he would have been okay with me if I had taken my complaints about the Army to the Junior Officer Council instead of not making any effort to change the Army. I resisted the temptation to tell him I almost WAS the JOC for the OSD at Monmouth.
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Anyway, nothing came of the JOC. Other efforts have included “re-up” bonuses for officers approaching the end of their inititial commitment and other typical ham-fisted bureaucrat dopey incentives.
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The reports generated by these various commissions sound like me. Junior officers are unhappy about having to sign false reports, attend “command performance” parties, force their troops to give their “fair share” to United Fund or buy savings bonds through the payroll deduction plan, yadda yadda.
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Junior officers get out because the Army officer corps sucks. The fix is to make it stop sucking. The Army officer corps brass go to be the brass in the current system therefore they think the basic system is quite okay. It made them colonels and generals. What’s not to like.
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So they have been willing to fix everything BUT the things that the junior officers want fixed. Actually, a more precisely accurate way to put it is no officer with any rank to peak of was willing to pedne any of his political capital to fix the actual problems. How do you fix the false documents problem without publicly revealing that the current brass signed false documents and suborned such perjury by their subordinates?
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The feedback from the junior officers that sounded like me was apparently obtained from asking JOs to fill out anonymous questionnaires. Good way to get it. But doing this over and over every three to five years and refusing to address the concerns in the questionnaires proves that what the Army is willing to do to get fix the too many good officers leaving problem falls far short of what it needed.
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I noted the Borman Report which was about cheating at West Point not retention of JOs, but it made a subtle reference to the fact that cadets can’t lie but JOs must. Only a West Pointer reading it would recognize that was what he was saying in his report. I referenced that report in my article is military integrity a contradiction in terms. (https://www.johntreed.com/blogs/john-t-reed-s-blog-about-military-matters/61085187-is-military-integrity-a-contradiction-in-terms-part-1)
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And the result of the Borman Report—or more accurately, non-result—was to allow the Cadet honor code to essentially disappear to the point where graduates from my era are disgusted with the way West Point is run today.
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One of my classmates who is involved with seeking contributions from our classmates said he got lots of feedback along the lines that they will not contribute to West Point because they are extremely unhappy with the way the place is being run today and the honor code is probably complaint #1.
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They need to do another committee, this one to study why all the prior committees on JO retention failed.
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My Unelected President “Mike Medlock” would tell the brass, you will give me a ranked list of all the JOs now in along with their cumulative ranking in terms of performance. Then you will retain X% of all the good ones over the next five years or I will fire all the top brass in the chain of command that failed to do that if you fail. And maybe you need another anonymous questionnaire to go out—to retired generals and colonels. Under Medlock, he would say this unacceptable loss of good JOs will stop.
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He would also try to end the military’s policy of promoting only from within. He would draft successful executives and others from civilian life. We sort of did that in WW II, which we won. And he would conduct exit interviews with a large sample of recently departed JOs, especially any who were getting suspicious bad ratings. I thought my superiors would not dare jerk me around because the Pentagon would be suspicious and call them. That was a joke. No one did any such thing. “Medlock” would do it.

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