U.S. Army photo by Elizabeth Fraser“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.”
US Army photo by Spc. Ryan Lucas, 19 July 2019
Serving as a brigade, group, or regimental S4 is one of several possible key developmental (KD) assignments for Majors in the Army’s Logistics branch. There are nuances among brigades, groups, and regiments that have different force structures and different missions. Therefore, this article is meant to be universally applicable across diverse units.
In addition to serving as the brigade’s lead long-range logistics planner, the S4 has oversight for a variety of command discipline programs and policies that are key to enabling the brigade and its units to accomplish their mission-essential tasks. To oversee so many command discipline programs, the brigade S4 must be an effective manager of managers. His aperture is too wide to do anything else.
Mt. Fuji beyond attacking B-29s. Photos by the Army Air Forces
Haywood “Possom” Hansell raced through the tropical downpour and bounded up the stairs to the door of the makeshift control tower erected alongside the airfield. There the Brigadier General stopped. Rain water poured off him as he stood and listened helplessly to the radio crackling with distress calls from his pilots.
It was 2030 on 13 December 1944. Brigadier General Haywood S. Hansell was the commanding officer of the XXI Bomber Command. He had 84 B-29s returning from a 3,000-mile mission to Nagoya, Japan. The bombers were out of fuel, 31 of them damaged, their crews exhausted from over a dozen hours in the air, and Saipan was engulfed in a tropical storm so heavy that even he could not see the burning smudge pots out on the airfield in front of him.
U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Daniel Love
I read the article as I out-processed from Yongsan and prepared for a transpacific permanent change of station journey to Fort Leavenworth. A recent Command and General Staff College (CGSC) grad lambasted the school and faculty, declared the education was broken, and bemoaned everything wrong with the institution. That article, and others like it, formed a negative narrative before my arrival. I trust the authors intended to be advocates for improvement, but that intent was buried beneath their obvious cynicism. I can relate to frustration that arises from unmet expectations, and I experienced moments of disappointment and dissatisfaction during my year at CGSC. This essay intends to offer a more balanced narrative to the incoming class by building on a Twitter thread I recently created that gained more attention than expected. It expands on the most pertinent points, and hopes to form a more objective narrative for the incoming class and gives constructive feedback to the faculty and staff.
Evaluations are the only thing more contentious than deployment awards. Army evaluations remain the most important discriminatory tool for retention, promotion, and centralized selection for professional education and command, but too often rated Soldiers have no idea how their raters assessed performance and potential. Senior raters have a particularly difficult responsibility, since they must evaluate potential with less contact spread among a larger population. They must manage their evaluations profile while also leveraging evaluations as part of a complete talent development strategy. But these tasks are only half of a senior rater’s challenge. One of the simplest, and often overlooked, rater responsibilities is articulating to the rated officers what is the definition of success. Senior raters can achieve this goal by crafting an evaluation philosophy for the officers and noncommissioned officers they lead.
U.S. Army Photo by Paolo Bovo, May 9, 2019
An officer is worth their weight in gold to a staff if they can receive a task, gain an understanding of their supervisor’s intent, identify implied and essential tasks, and guide missions to completion with minimal guidance. Individuals are even more valuable if they can initiate their own tasks and lines of effort based on their commander’s or section chief’s vision and intent.
A leader participates in an interview with a news team in order to further the Army narrative. The photo was taken by Staff Sgt. Jesse Untalan
As Army leaders, there are three reasons why effective communication is important: we owe it to our subordinates so they know what’s going on, we owe it to our leaders so they understand what’s going on, and we owe it to the American citizens who provide us the precious resources of people and funding and hold us accountable for how we employ those resources. The Secretary of the Army uses a legislative liaison and a public affairs officer to help communicate Army priorities to key audiences to secure resources (budget, policies, support, etc.). As leaders, we all have a shared responsibility to tell our unit story; and as field grade leaders, we own that narrative.