2019/01/19

Personnel reform

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There are traditionally three categories of active military personnel in (almost?) all armed services; enlisted personnel, non-commissioned officers and officers.*

The officers have their roots in the noble class that traditionally led troops into war from pre-historic times** to 19th century, continued in a watered-down way till about WW2.

The enlisted personnel has its roots in levied, poorly-equipped and poorly trained soldiers. 
The NCOs in between have their roots in professional men-at-arms training and overseeing levied troops, but in some modern armed forces the junior NCOs are merely a bunch of chosen, higher quality enlisted personnel who get entrusted with additional tasks and responsibilities.

The current division of personnel into enlisted, NCOs and officers is clearly a product of path dependency. This begs the questions: Is it appropriate, is it optimal?

The current recruiting has difficulties presenting enlisted service as attractive (especially in regard to personnel retention), as the enlisted personnel exists in an organisation where there are very many superiors way beyond the actual needs of a functioning hierarchy (chain of command) and enlisted personnel is officially bottom of the barrel.

There may be promise in a more fluid rank system, and both the civilian sector and the integration of civilians in many processes of the army (such as with mechanics) shows that this is feasible. Some glass ceilings exist that separate the least-educated workers of a large corporation from the top management, but no such three defined groups, and some manager from a faraway location doesn't have the authority to order a worker to do something only because he's within an enclosed corporate area.

A clean sheet of paper design for a new personnel system could address the many lessons learned and scientific findings that do not square with the traditional hierarchical system.

It would give us an option to introduce downwards mobility that appears unthinkable in the traditional system. We could have promotions on a trial basis and/or temporary promotions, so we can test whether an individual is not just promising, but actually capable of a different task. This would help get around the Peter Principle.

We could also offer room for self-organisation and groups revealing natural leader talents. Natural leaders become visible if you don't force a leader onto a group by artificial authority.

We might find ways to make improvisations official that have existed for generations; things such as competence before rank. This improvisation was (is) practiced among pilots and between trainers and students, for example.

We could also make full use of authority by qualification, such as already practiced with trainer certifications. Those are so far awkward deviations from the standard system.


I suppose the best way to test a different personnel system would be to have some small and not terribly important armed service test it in the alliance. Slovenia's military, for example.

S O

*: Officers have quite sweeping authority of command over NCOs and enlisted personnel beyond the chain of command (exact regulations are detailed and vary between countries), and NCOs have such sweeping beyond-chain-of-command authority over enlisted personnel.
**: This is poorly documented in many areas and eras, and nobility may have been acquired by gaining respect of fellow men in some areas and eras.
 
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16 comments:

  1. "It would give us an option to introduce downwards mobility that appears unthinkable in the traditional system. We could have promotions on a trial basis and/or temporary promotions, so we can test whether an individual is not just promising, but actually capable of a different task. This would help get around the Peter Principle."

    My beef with this approach:

    1) Donward mobility does not really exists in civilian structures, no experience for moral effcet available. I would forget it in the first round of changes.

    2) Temporary promotions are possible in the current system. You only have to go from the US system back to the UK/Prussian system, i.e. officers get jobs above their pay grade and are only promoted if they peove to be competent or are replaced. That is much better than temporaray promotions.

    Ulenspiegel

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    1. The civilian world deals with lack of downward mobility by firing. The employee can re-start at a more appropriate level in another company. This is unsatisfactory for the military, which is a monopoly company.

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    2. "The civilian world deals with lack of downward mobility by firing. The employee can re-start at a more appropriate level in another company. This is unsatisfactory for the military, which is a monopoly company."

      If this were really true for leadership positions, then we would not have the issue of Peter principle in larger companies.

      I admit that smaller companies are much more willing to fire underperformer for very basic reasons of survival, however, larger companies have sometime "interesting" solutions. :-)

      Ulenspiegel

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  2. Is there a place in this system for a parallel "specialist" grade system, where you can move up or down based on skillset without gaining or losing formal rank? I know the U.S. fiddled with something like this in the mid-20th Century, but my impression is that it was quickly co-opted into a mirror of the formal rank structure.

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  3. The U.S. Army still has a "specialist" rank similar to corporal, but I know no details.

    I think we should generally reduce the importance of rank and increase the importance of qualification and demonstrated performance. There shall be some rank structure to maintain discipline, but whoever maintains discipline and ensures that orders be followed doesn't need to be the subject matter expert. The subject matter expert who can teach and lead others doesn't need to be of higher rank. You can be authorised to lead without being higher in rank, and a small rank seniority (between two different NCO ranks, for example) doesn't currently mean command authority anyway.

    I've encountered enough experts who shouldn't have gotten into management superior role and many management superiors who shouldn't have had authority to direct better experts.
    The hierarchy systems in use in many government organisations are dysfunctional leftovers IMO.

    We also need to ward against rank inflation as a workaround to too slow pay rises.

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    1. >>There shall be some rank structure to maintain discipline, but whoever maintains discipline and ensures that orders be followed doesn't need to be the subject matter expert.

      It has to be the one who gives the order, or at least subordinate to the one who gives the order. Else, you're violating the unity of command, which is never a good thing.

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    2. Unity of command is an illusion if there are thousands of officers who can give orders to any of the ten thousands of NCOs.

      We really have lots of command authority exceptions to command authority derived from mere rank group.
      An NCO often times has command authority by position over other NCOs even though his rank would not offer this.
      The general command authority derived from rank groups alone is what I think is demotivating.
      It woudln't be demotivating to live in a garrison fo 1,000 people with only ten or so people being in chain of command above you - but it's terrible for enlisted people to serve in a garrison where 700 people can give them orders merely becuase they are NCOs or officers. This makes enlisted service unattractive, leads to rank inflation and generally corrupts the whole rank system in the long run anyway.

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    3. In my experience, the general command authority derived from rank groups is rather theoretical. Grabbing people off the street just wasn't done.

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    4. There are rarely orders issued based on rank group superiority alone, but there's a permanent intimidation factor in garrison life.

      Moreover, it's important for morale to not think of yourself at being at the bottom of the barrel. I saw many enlisted men, and they usually didn't display much self-confidence in service. The ones that did either thought of themselves as protected by some superior or were hammered back into line (well, back in the 90's). I'd very much prefer to see the self-confidence of a junior NCO as the least confidence to be encountered in the armed services.

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  4. "I think we should generally reduce the importance of rank and increase the importance of qualification and demonstrated performance."

    Here you would have my full support. The current system originated from the time after the TYW and was quite useful under certain social conditions, to day we could work at least without different rank groups for NCO/officers.

    Ulenspiegel

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  5. IIRC, self organization has been tried before. The US militia elected their own officers at some point and I'm pretty sure the Red Army in transition from the Russian Army to RKKA also fiddled with something like this.
    I'm not sure on the immediate outcome of both experiments, but, as we know, it hasn't caught on.

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  6. In my opinion, there are three more or less independent skillsets which need to be recognized.
    -Specialists - the actual job, be it infantry, tank crewman, technician or something else.
    -Leaders - people managers, "a man in a khaki kit, who could manage men a bit".
    -System specialists (or system managers) - basically the staff specialists, those that see interconnections between narrow fields.
    Currently, the officers are required to be leaders and system specialists, NCOs are required to be specialist and leaders. However, good leaders are rare - much rarer in my opinion than good system specialists, so I agree that reorganizing the hierarchy can be beneficial, in that that it frees up good leaders.

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  7. Its going to be interesting to watch what happens after 'AI' admin gets properly rolled out in militaries. An awful lot of pigs hours are allocated to paper pushing.

    "Its part of the military culture." "Its always been this way"

    Chinese might do it as they start to believe more in modelled optimisation than tradition copied from the west.

    If that happens then 'your' system is going to be branded communist or a harbinger of chaos.

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  8. Long time ago i spoke to german officers about such ideas and their last, only and finishing argument (presented with an arrogant smile and tone) was: But this is against the civil service law and therefore impossible because all rank and career have to be in line with the civil service law. And therefore only to suggest such changes is absurd and shows only that the person (i) have no military knowledge at all and should therefore be quiet about any military questions .... etc pp

    I think in such a military any reform in this kind will be realy impossible because of the culture of that "military".

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    1. Bureaucrats have a tendency to think of laws as exogenous. They tend to think of proposals for reform only on their level, not on the legislative or top executive level.

      I heard such points a couple times in other contexts already. Sometimes the conservatism is even more extreme.
      The worst so far was when a general told me the change would be against what's being taught at the Führungsakademie, and one should do what the Führungsakademie teaches.
      My proposal was kinda about changing what to teach, so his (il)logic was 100% circular.

      Sometimes progress has to wait for the retirement of people to resume.

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  9. The problem is here imo that the same people that are the core of the problem also decide who will succeed them, who will be succesful in his military career and who will be the next generation of military leaders. This is also imo the origin of this "military" culture, of all this attitudes, arrogance and incompetence of a high percentage of the todays german officer corps. The Bundeswehr is rotten to the core especially of this mechanism: for a to long time (the last 3 decades) the wrong (=incompetent, cowardly, bureaucratic, intellectual paralyzed, etc.) "military" leaders selected their own successors, mainly as images of themselves.

    So retirement will not solve this problem (in the case of the bundeswehr). What follows is not better, but identical or worse.

    This structure must be broken from the outside, imo from the civilian leadership. But in germany today i think this will not be possible because of the overall culture and attitude of the todays german society in which the majority of the people see no problem in military weakness at all. To the opposite to many germans today are against any kind of serious military and this overall cultural tendency slowly also infiltrates the german armed forces. Many officers today are not soliders in the sense as i understand it and are in reality incapable to lead in a war, to fight in a true war and to think what is necessary to win a war. The think only about their own career, about civil law, about their own echo-chamber of bureaucracy, military instructions and edicts which they follow blindly, absolut and strictly without any thinking outside of them. Mostly because any kind of other thinking would harm their precious career.

    I once asked several officers of different branches why they became soliders in the german army: answers were: to get a free medicin study and then become a civil doctor. To get a study and then much moeny and other aids for the add-on study at a civilian uni (the bundeswehr gives extreme ammounts of money for soliders who end their military service and change in the civilian sector). And my most "liked" answers: to get a good job in the industry and to become a politican.

    No one said: to fight in a war for the fatherland. Not only one.

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