In “Bleeding Talent” (Palgrave Macmillan, $30), Mr. Kane gives us a veteran’s proud, though acutely critical, perspective on the American military. He offers an illuminating view of the other “1 percent” — not the privileged upper crust, but the sliver of Americans who have accepted the burden of waging two of the longest wars in our history.
The military is perhaps as selfless an institution as our society has produced. But in its current form, Mr. Kane says, it stifles the aspirations of the best who seek to serve it and pushes them out. “In terms of attracting and training innovative leaders, the U.S. military is unparalleled,” he writes. “In terms of managing talent, the U.S. military is doing everything wrong.”
The core problem, he argues, is that while the military may be “all volunteer” on the first day, it is thoroughly coercive every day thereafter. In particular, it dictates the jobs, promotions and careers of the millions in its ranks through a centralized, top-down, one-size-fits-almost-all system that drives many talented officers to resign in frustration. They leave, he says, because they believe that “the military personnel system — every aspect of it — is nearly blind to merit.”
Mr. Kane knows whereof he speaks. An Air Force Academy graduate, he worked in military intelligence for five years before resigning, in the mid-1990s, after the Air Force declined to send him for graduate studies in economics. He is now chief economist at the Hudson Institute, a conservative research group. In the years between, he helped start a couple of small companies and picked up a taste for entrepreneurship.
He finds a natural hero in Milton Friedman, the libertarian economist and intellectual father of the all-voluntary military. And Mr. Kane suggests that today’s Pentagon is ignorant of Adam Smith, whose “Wealth of Nations” taught that society’s interests might best be served by every individual’s seeking his or her own self-interest.
In 2005, Mr. Kane made a mark with empirical studies demonstrating that the “myth of the stupid soldier” is indeed a myth. His data showed that the enlisted ranks were brighter and better educated than their civilian counterparts.
He looks at today’s military and sees suppressed entrepreneurs among officers and enlisted ranks alike. “America’s armed forces are a leadership factory,” he writes, saying that former military officers are three times as likely to become corporate C.E.O.’s as their raw numbers would suggest.
In surveying recent West Point graduates, he found that only 7 percent believed that most of the best officers remained in the military. It is not the combat, the low pay or the pull of family life that is the top reason they quit in surprising numbers, Mr. Kane writes, but rather the “frustration with military bureaucracy.” One study found that young officers left because they wanted a sense of control over their careers. In short, they wanted what the rest of us want.
The exodus of young officers means that promotion to lieutenant colonel is taken for granted in a career trajectory. Yet the step beyond colonel, to general, is subject to a rigid and stultifying screen. A thousand colonels a year are considered; only 35 or 40 make the cut, he says. The mavericks, the innovators who rock the boat, usually do not.
ACCORDING to Mr. Kane, “the root of all evil in this ecosystem” is the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act, enacted by Congress in 1980 to standardize military personnel policies. But the system has defied efforts by successive defense secretaries to bring about change.
That act binds the military into a system that honors seniority over individual merit. It judges officers, hundreds at a time, in an up-or-out promotion process that relies on evaluations that have been almost laughably eroded by grade inflation. A zero-defect mentality punishes errors severely. The system discourages specialization — you can’t expect to stay a fighter jock or a cybersecurity expert — and pushes the career-minded up a tried-and-true ladder that, not surprisingly, produces lookalikes.
In the subtitle of his book, Mr. Kane declares a radical intent: “How the U.S. Military Mismanages Great Leaders and Why It’s Time for a Revolution.” The revolution he has in mind would turn the military inside out by creating an internal labor market for job assignments and promotions.
Need an assistant commander of an airborne regiment? If an officer has the training and the credentials, why shouldn’t he or she be allowed to apply for the job? Let the commander, not the Pentagon, choose a sidekick from a stack of résumés, Mr. Kane says. Sounds a lot like civilian life, doesn’t it?
By the same token, a talented 33-year-old colonel could command a 40-year-old major, an age reversal that is commonplace in the civilian economy. The ranks would also be open to lateral entry. Why not readmit a former officer who wants to re-enlist after a stint in logistics for Walmart?
Mr. Kane is taking on an institution whose sheer size boggles the mind. There are 1.1 million men and women in the United States Army, including the National Guard and Army Reserve. The regular Army alone has some 82,000 officers, 15,000 above the rank of major (but only 300 generals). Can it rely on a military Monster.com of the kind the author is proposing to put all those people in the right jobs?
There are skeptics, even among Mr. Kane’s supporters in the military, who say his quest is quixotic, an attempt to dent a stone wall that has defied all efforts to change it. But it might not be hopeless. Our military is part of our society. It has bent before to provide greater opportunities, first for blacks, then for women, and most recently for gays and lesbians. If the demand now is for greater personal autonomy, how long can the military resist?
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/business/bleeding-talent-sees-a-military-management-mess.html?partner=rss&emc=rss