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All of the above – all fixable – can be blamed on bad
leadership. There are just too many Perfumed Princes sporting
stars who are politicians, lobbyists and salesmen rather than
soldiers. Abe Lincoln went through a squad of such spoilers
before he found a U.S. Grant. Today, he’d probably have to
sort through at least a battalion of the top brass to find one
Ulysses.
Another leadership problem – particularly pressing during a
war – is the poor quality of the average Army lieutenant (LT).
The LT has the most dangerous and demanding leadership job in
the Army and is presently the least prepared. That’s because
the commissioning sources – West Point, ROTC and Officer
Candidate School – have seldom been
demanding enough, and that’s especially true today. There’s
too much touchy-feely classroom stuff and nowhere near enough
practical, down-in-the-dirt training so critical to developing
combat leadership skills.
Then, too, most freshly-minted second lieutenants aren’t made
of the same true grit as their World War II grandfathers - who
had their faces rubbed in the Depression and came from a
harsher, far less urbanized, less politically-sensitive place.
But even way back then, only about 50 percent of the
mass-produced LTs could make it on the battlefield.
By the Korean War, only about four out of 10 “90-day wonders”
were up to the job.
And during the Vietnam War, my biggest problem while
commanding three infantry battalions, two in combat and one
stateside, was – no big surprise – the LTs. Or, as I
not-so-fondly called them, the “weakest link.” In 1969, while
skippering the 4/39th Infantry Battalion, I fired 59 of these
losers - which drove our general and Col. Lee Dyment, the guy
responsible for LT assignments, absolutely nuts. Not that I
cared. No weak-linker was going to kill my guys.
I remember feeling that same determination during the first
year of the Korean War when I repeatedly refused a battlefield
commission. My top kick finally said: “Hack, if you don’t take
the commission, one day some second balloon might come in and
take over your platoon. He might also get a lot of people
killed. Then how would you feel? You’ve got to take the
promotion and look after your troops.”
So I did. And during the next 20 years of service, I
discovered over and over that the majority of new LTs were
seriously lacking. But by the time I was commanding my ninth
company-sized unit in Germany in the early ‘60s, I’d developed
a magic formula: An eager-beaver LT would report in fresh out
of Fort Benning, ready to command the world but incapable of
leading a thirsty drunk to happy hour. “LT, meet your platoon
sergeant,” I’d tell him. “Don’t give any orders or make any
decisions without his approval. Walk hand-in-hand with him and
learn. He was running a platoon when you were learning how to
ride a tricycle, and that's probably where he'll be when
you’re a colonel at the Pentagon.”
This system worked so well that more than 20 of the hundreds
of LTs I trained became general officers. Some commanded
divisions and one an Army. None were Perfumed Princes.
Here’s the extrapolation:
Make Basic Officer Entry Training run at least a year. It
should be 1960s Ranger-type training designed to forge warrior
leaders and weed out the talentless and the weak.
Those who manage to survive should then be assigned to regular
platoons as observers under a master sergeant platoon
sergeant. As soon as the platoon sergeant recommends a
promotion, the new first lieutenant should be given the
command of a platoon for a year. And throughout this entire
learning-to-lead process, the supervising platoon sergeant
would submit evaluations.
A radical departure? Absolutely. But far better than the
radical departure of our grunts from Planet Earth.
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