WASHINGTON, January 22, 2010 – The Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) Maren Leed, a senior fellow in the CSIS International Security Program, has written a new report, “The Ingenuity Gap: Officer Management in the 21st Century.”
Please find a link to the full report below and to the right:
http://csis.org/files/publication/100111_Leed_IngenuityGap_Web.pdf
Please find brief summary of the report prepared by Dr. Leed below:
Given that US forces are in the midst of two wars, some may wonder whether a reconsideration of officer management should be a priority. There are at least two motivations that underlie CSIS’s reexamination. The first is that there may never be a return to “the old normal.” Deferring consideration of serious change in the hopes of a slower pace that may never come takes precious time while the strains on the officer corps continue to rise. The second and perhaps more compelling reason is that an era of increasing change, unpredictability, and growing complexity is already upon us. The officer corps of tomorrow will be confronted with these realities. We should not merely hope that the necessary change will occur through deployments. Instead, the Department of Defense (DOD) must make a deliberate shift in how it seeks to shape future officers. The primary challenge is to change the current trend toward a growing gap in ingenuity, a trend in which the need for creative approaches grows and the systems we expect to foster and encourage those approaches become increasingly outdated and insufficient. This gap will only increase if our current practices persist.
The officer management system comprises the laws, policies, procedures, and practices that guide how officers enter service and are subsequently developed, promoted, and separated. The purpose of this study is to examine whether that system aligns with the demands officers are likely to face in the years ahead. The basic question is whether we can continue to count on success. The fundamental nature of war remains unchanged, and there is much that the U.S. military confronts that is not unique in its history. Our country has seen, however, a definite shift in the challenges it faces on the battlefield. The diversity of missions over the last two decades, while not unprecedented, has been relatively sudden in its onset and has taken place within a compressed time period. As such, it has proven challenging culturally, materially, organizationally, and doctrinally.
Concurrently, the officers leading the contemporary force have bridged the gap from an era of temporary volunteers to one of career professionals, and from service dominance to jointness. In the process they have devised and ushered in new concepts, structures, and processes aimed at better preparing the force for the operational diversity they continue to face in the field. The significance of these steps is even more profound given that the systems governing how the U.S. military acquires and develops officers are rooted in centuries-old traditions and have changed little despite major shifts in the external environment. If the United States expects its military officers to continue to excel, the future demands new approaches. The uncertainty, asymmetry, and complexity of military operations are not new, but the degree to which each of these features will dominate the future strategic, operational, and tactical environments is.
This study identifies two specific implications of the future operating environment for the demands on U.S. officers. First, the responsibilities of junior officers will continue to expand beyond the bounds of their traditional foundational skill sets. Second, officers at all ranks will increasingly confront wicked or ill-structured problems,[1] confounded by incomplete information and with such a vast array of implications that traditional decisionmaking models will no longer apply. But beyond these particular concerns lies a more fundamental issue: the growing divergence between an increasingly dynamic future and an officer management system optimized for static conditions.
To preclude development of a resulting ingenuity gap, DoD and the military services must enlarge the aperture on what is considered relevant experience and expertise. They must fundamentally shift the basis for promotion eligibility from a system focused on time (in service or in grade) to one predicated on competencies, or broad sets of interrelated knowledge, skills, and abilities in a given area. Relaxing existing time constraints will allow for more varied experiences, resulting in a more a robust and flexible officer corps. Although this will certainly increase the challenge of managing the officer corps, the advances in computing power since the current system was originally designed mean multiple tools are available to help alleviate such strains.
There is no question that U.S. officers have proven remarkably adaptive. This is especially true in the face of surprisingly diverse challenges that are more representative of the future than was ever anticipated in the past. The capabilities of the individuals who lead our military forces will always be the most important element of successful campaigns. Ensuring the best possible preparation for their professional challenges is among DOD’s most fundamental responsibilities.
DOD can take a number of steps to better align officer competencies, and more fundamentally the officer management system, with the demands of the future. To protect our current advantages, DOD should:
A competency-based system would allow for more varied career paths, as officers would be relieved of the requirement to meet promotion “gates” within tightly constrained timelines. Acknowledging that time has become an increasingly unreliable indicator of experience and development, the services would specify broad sets of knowledge, skills, and abilities commensurate with the responsibilities of each rank in order to create the basic framework of a competency-based system. Officers would then indicate when they felt they had demonstrated the desired competencies and wished to be considered for promotion. Direct competency measures such as tests that indicate levels of creativity and communications skills ideally would contribute to judgments about assignments and development, but if and until adequate direct measures are implemented, output measures such as schools and assignments can be used as an imperfect proxy.
American officers are the bedrock of military success. They face a whirlwind of change that is picking up speed, yet their preparation is dictated by a system based on stability and predictability that, if they ever existed, certainly do not exist today. Others have identified many of the same problems and have offered some of the same solutions, explored in much greater depth than we were able to accomplish here. Yet strikingly few changes have been made. This reluctance—primarily cultural and institutional—cannot persist. Failing to adapt the officer management system to better align with the future will put U.S. officers at a growing disadvantage, placing more and more of a burden upon them as individuals to overcome a bureaucracy that ideally would be dedicated to supporting their success. The ingenuity gap is real and growing, and our officers are caught in it. DOD should immediately implement changes to officer management to close this gap.
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The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) is a private, tax-exempt institution focusing on international public policy issues. Its research is nonpartisan and nonproprietary. CSIS does not take specific policy positions; accordingly, all views, positions, and conclusions expressed in these publications should be understood to be solely those of the authors.
[1] The term “wicked” was coined by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, and it refers to those problems characterized by, among other things, boundlessness and uniqueness and that have no right or wrong answer.
H. Andrew Schwartz
CSIS
www.csis.org