The future of Army leadership and the soul of our culture will not be rooted in technology. As General Omar Bradley said, “Man is stumbling blindly through a spiritual darkness while toying with the precarious secrets of life and death. The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.”
We have all heard the ubiquitous saying that causes most of us to slap our foreheads in a mixture of shame, dread, and loathed acceptance: “I spend 90% of my time on the bottom 10% of my people.” Our admitted dilemma centers on the sense that there is a population that requires so much direction and maintenance that their presence is detrimental to the whole. With this acceptance is the underlying assumption that that top 90% can make up for the performance of the bottom 10%. In the current military paradigm, this assumption is not only not pragmatic, but it is also dangerous.
The purpose of this article is to provide an examination and evaluation of the Command and General Staff College (CGSC) 2020 academic year. Three officers, from three different sections, evaluated virtually all aspects of the academic year. We chose to use three perspectives to provide a more expansive insight into a year at CGSC. Often one person’s perspective can be dismissed as anecdotal and this was our attempt to offer legitimacy to the evaluation. This evaluation includes our assessment of the day-to-day classroom instruction, administrative elements of CGSC, and garrison activities of Fort Leavenworth. Our examination does not include an evaluation of all aspects of CGSC. For example, none of us participated in the Masters of Military Arts and Sciences (MMAS) degree program, and all three of us lived on Fort Leavenworth. Each section will show the average grade based on all three of our evaluations and then provide our assessments and comments. For our evaluation, we based the format on that of MAJ Jamie Schwandt, USAR, used for an article he wrote for the Task and Purpose in 2018.
As a young military prosecutor at Camp Lejeune in 2007, I was responsible for prosecuting some of the worst felony crimes from commands across one of the busiest military bases in the DOD. The cases included a steady stream of violent crimes, property crimes (like theft or vandalism), and various military offenses. My boss entrusted me with a big caseload, but I was confident in my ability to handle it.
Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., seen in Ste. Mere-Eglise on July 12, hours before he died of a coronary thrombosis. Arthritis caused him to walk with a stick. The 4th Infantry Division commander described him as “the most gallant soldier and finest gentleman I have ever known.”
I am expanding on the recent topic of building trust by being approachable. In his article, the author stated, “Be open and readable … What you see is what you get. No false pretenses or pretending to be something you’re not.” I submit that two key components of approachability are self-awareness and sincerity. Being self-aware and sincere helps leaders humanize themselves and become more relatable to the rest of their team. While some professional distance between leaders and subordinates is required for good order and discipline, most approachable leaders will see more buy-in and initiative from their team members. A close team, full of mutual trust, will be more successful in garrison or combat than a team that is distant and micromanaged.
“The formation is never as good as you think it is, but it also is not as screwed up as some may indicate it is to your successor.”
Headquarters Room, Southwick Park, Portsmouth, June 1944: A view of the interior of the busy Headquarters Room in Southwick Park, Portsmouth during preparations for the D-Day landings. There is a huge map of southern England, the English Channel and northern France mounted on the far wall, with various annotations being added by a man in naval uniform standing on a step ladder. Another man is busy doing the same thing on a map on the wall to the … Copyright: © IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/10043
While much has been written about the challenges of serving as a Field Grade (FG) officer at the Battalion and Brigade level, much less is available about the echelons at which you will spend most of the second half of your career. Put simply, there are more ways to fall short than there are to succeed, yet no one tells you the rules when you arrive. Consider a large Headquarters (HQ) to be at the Division level or above and a “boss” to be any of the large numbers of senior leaders, principal staff officers, advisors, and influencers in the HQ, whether in your chain of command or not. While not comprehensive, here are six big ideas.
Leaders who take a genuine interest in their subordinates will see their teams achieve amazing feats. This goes hand in hand with counseling. You must get to know your Soldiers and help them personally and professionally. Find out their goals and help develop a plan to achieve them. If you take care of your Soldiers, they will always take care of the mission.
Counseling is the most important tool that leaders have at their disposal. Clearly communicating expectations and standards provides a baseline for measuring performance and ensures that both the rater and rated officer understand expectations. This is especially important when managing your rater profile and justifying the contents of evaluation reports for both officers and NCOs.
Superior leaders are acutely aware of their strengths and weaknesses. They actively build on their strengths and improve upon their weaknesses. Complacency is a fatal leadership flaw and we should never find comfort in remaining stagnant. This goes for every aspect of the profession of arms. Make realistic and achievable goals and then work to achieve them.