Re: The Hollow Army

On Wednesday we discussed this story from the Boston Globe on concerns about the quality of the officers being promoted by the Army. Frederick Kagan told us that the attrition of the Army's officer corps is "unquestionably bad," but not everyone thought so.

Michael Tanji, a frequent contributor to THE DAILY STANDARD and a former senior intelligence officer, wrote in with this comment:

Far be it from me to argue military issues with a Kagan, but I don't see the high volume of resignations as a major problem.

First of all, the selection process for field-grade officers is dicey at best. I've seen a lot of highly qualified Captains get passed over and forced out while functional retards (and that's not hyperbole) got the call. The practical difference between someone at the top of the selection pyramid and someone who under normal circumstances wouldn't make the cut can be very nominal indeed. People who manage to punch all their tickets more rapidly than others are not necessarily better officers.

Second, "up and out" has long been noted as a flawed system. If someone is a good Captain or Major, why force the Peter Principle upon them? Some people don't aspire to command a brigade and some couldn't do it no matter how much training and time you gave them. In an Army where small-unit-tactics are becoming ascendant, "Best g-d company commander in the army" is a title a lot of guys who cherish more than "Colonel."

Third, I'd like to see a more in-depth analysis of this data. How do we know the best of the best are the ones getting out? That large portions of a year-group in a given battalion are leaving means little beyond the size of the gap. Most of a given year-group wouldn't make it to the top even under the best circumstances.

Here's Frederick Kagan's response:

I don't really disagree with any of the points that Mr. Tanji makes about the flaws and unreliability of the officer promotion system, which anyone who has been close to the Army for any period of time has observed. I can report anecdotally that some of my best former students are leaving the force, to the detriment of the Army, but that process has been going on for some time--going back into the 1990s, in fact, when we thought that repeated deployments to Bosnia and Kosovo were "stressing" the force unacceptably. The truth is that of the best officers in the Army at any moment, some want to stay in, some want to leave, and individuals make choices, as is right and proper. But I do think that the extremely high promotion rates at certain grades are an indicator of a problem, because they indicate a shortage of officers in the force, and that problem is very difficult to rectify. The strain on the ground forces is real and a matter of concern. But those who wish to argue that we should withdraw from Iraq in order to reduce that strain must consider in detail what effect defeat will have on retention, and what effect the spillover from an all-out Iraqi civil war will have on future American force requirements. Failure to maintain an appropriately-sized ground force after the Cold War has put us in a bad spot. Losing in Iraq will make it worse. The only real solution is to grow the ground forces to the level necessary to face the challenges the world of today poses with some equanimity--a level significantly higher, in my view, even than the increase the president has already proposed.

And finally, Stuart Koehl, senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University's Center for Transatlantic Relations, puts things in perspective: