officer corps

Photo of US military officer's ribbons from Government Executive.

The moral courage of our senior generals, or their lack of it

This week sees yet another article questioning the moral courage of our most senior generals, the ones at the top.  If correct, this suggests a serious structural flaw in our military institutions.  How can we could fix this? “It only takes the right leader”, the late Colonel David H. Hackworth (US Army (1 July 2001) “Lessons Learned …

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The Army is losing good people. That is only a symptom of a more serious problem.

Yet again the public has discovered that our Army has difficulty retaining good people.  A big story, but only in the sense that Columbus discovering America was a big story.  In both cases, the thing discovered was already there for a long time, had been repeatedly “discovered” — and the discovery was only one incident in an important …

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Recommended reading: transforming the Army, the hard way

ARMY magazine has posted part two of Donald Vandergriff’s (Major, US Army, retired) article about the Adaptive Leaders Course.  This describes one path to organizational transformation.  The difficult way, building from the foundation up — building something that outlasts all the hot intellectual fads, and can evolve over generations.  The senior Army leadership’s attention to Vandergriff is important good …

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A crisis at the beginning of the American experiment

Looking at the problems looming before us, it is easy to forget those of equal or greater danger that we have surmounted in the past.   My previous post, Washington’s Gift, described one such.  Here is another… As America’s revolutionary war drew to a successful close, many critical problems remained unsolved.  Among them was the pay and pensions due the Army.  Congress seemed unwilling to pass …

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The Essential 4GW reading list: Donald Vandergriff

Background In the world of military theory today there are many people on the cutting edge.  Historians like Martin van Creveld, analysts like John Robb and Chet Richards, visionaries like Thomas Barnett, even some crossing across these categories like William Lind.  But there are few developing solutions that can be implemented today.  By solutions, I mean large-scale …

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