In 1954, General Anthony McAuliffe wrote a letter to General Henry Hodes describing “an urgent and vexing problem” within the Army:
“It is my understanding that assignment to command of a company or a battery is not a popular one, a pronounced contrast to the attitude existing prior to World War II…We must give emphasis to the decentralization of command…We must not preach decentralization and at the same time punish the commander for practicing it.”
The plethora of articles from dissatisfied captains published in recent months indicates that this problem remains current in the 21st century. The various works garnered enough publicity to attract the attention of Lt. Gen Milford Beagle, Jr. at the Combined Arms Center, who published a passionate response. He and his team concluded with the “hope that over time, commanders truly get to appreciate the tremendous impact they had.” This is a laudable sentiment, but hope is not a course of action. This article seeks to instead examine some of the root causes and identify real solutions.
The adage that people quit bosses rather than jobs remains as true in the Army as in any other organization. Excessive requirements and micromanagement would be bad enough, but poor organizational leadership has evolved to the point that senior leaders are dodging risks by delegating the accountability for their decisions down onto company commanders.
So Much to Do, So Little Time
Today’s senior leaders tell new company commanders that they have more on their shoulders than their predecessors at any point in history. Compounding tasks from higher echelons have resulted in impossible tasking requirements– there simply are not enough days in a year. This problem has been known for years, with little change. Army Regulation 350-1 specifies tasking windows at each echelon (orders must be published no later than six weeks from execution by battalions, two months from execution by brigades, etc.) but this may be one of the most frequently ignored regulatory provisions in the Army. My own division commander has stated that our division headquarters can only plan four weeks in advance, far short of the three months specified by regulation. Meanwhile, the FORSCOM Inspector General lambasted company commanders for failing to post approved training calendars six weeks in advance. Evidently captains are expected to outperform major generals in the realm of long-range planning.
Exacerbating this problem is a deluge of reporting requirements. The disparity is easily apparent when comparing to historical norms. Like many other organizations, my battalion keeps historical memorabilia on the walls in our headquarters. Among them is a SITREP from the Korean War. It was just over three pages long, covering a month of combat operations. Current SITREP requirements in peacetime result in a report eight to ten pages long submitted every two weeks. This is a sixfold increase in information required, with corresponding demands on time for preparation.
The cumulative result is a massive time management problem for junior officers. When presented with this challenge, senior leaders will often declare that the solution is for subordinate leaders to simply push back against overly burdensome requirements. When this problem was posed to the Chief of Staff last September, he seemed surprised to learn that soldiers were attempting to complete mandatory tasks, and his SMA responded “don’t do it.” Another popular solution is that commanders and leaders need to prioritize. Both solutions present challenges, in theory and in practice.
Problems with Pushback and Priorities
Pushing back is an unrealistic proposal. Firstly, it is an odd recommendation in an organizational culture that emphasizes obedience. It is also highly inconsistent, ultimately depending more on the personalities of the individuals involved than any sort of systematic change, which makes it far from a true solution. But above all, it is an abdication of responsibility by senior leaders.
While ground truths are useful, senior leaders already have access to plenty of information – we certainly spend enough time in training briefs. Higher headquarters have well-manned staffs that are capable of totaling up the resources required when they assign tasks. When it comes to dollars and end items, this is done and done well. But the time a unit has available, even when documented and available in systems of record, is ignored during higher headquarters planning.
Army Chief of Staff General McConville (and recently his successor General George) recognized the problem. His comments continued: “you don’t have time…and frankly, this is where senior leaders need to come in.” But this begs the question: why are these mandatory trainings still mandatory to begin with? If he believes that existing mandatory training is unnecessary, the Chief of Staff, being the senior leader in the Army, can modify regulations and policy accordingly. He could remove or change mandatory training requirements with the stroke of a pen. For a more moderate measure, there is currently no regulatory requirement to track the total time requirements of common mandatory training at the HQDA level. Changing that would at least help understand the scope of the issue.
The core of the issue is that the Chief of Staff is not modifying policy for the same reasons that division commanders are not exercising their authorities to grant waivers: mandatory training exists to provide cover for senior leaders when things go wrong rather than to train soldiers to help things go right. Rather than acknowledge and take ownership of the challenges imposed by themselves and their headquarters, senior leaders can simply point to an individual or subordinate commander who failed to complete the task or training that would have prevented an incident. There is no real expectation that these tasks are accomplished, indeed, as Captain Theo Lipsky pointed out late last year, senior leaders depend on captains ignoring requirements and regulations to train for wartime missions. No surprise, then, that junior officers have started to think they can pick and choose the orders that they follow. That is the apparent expectation.
Left unstated is that the responsibility for any incidents resulting from failures to complete these tasks is now down at the company level. Captains do not want this responsibility any more than our superiors, but it remains legal to order us to do more than is possible and illegal for us to not execute those orders.
Conceptually, prioritization is on firmer ground. Determine what takes precedent, and allocate time and resources accordingly. Leaders at each echelon nest within their superiors’ priorities, then publish their own priorities down to their subordinates. Prioritization could help. Doctrinally, it requires at the outset a recognition by superiors that not everything can be done, and that they, not their subordinates, are responsible for determining where effort belongs.
In practice, prioritization has different results. In 2015, the newly-appointed Chief of Staff of the Army, General Mark Milley, told the force that “readiness for ground combat is- and will remain- the U.S. Army’s #1 priority.” In 2020, the Fort Hood Independent Review Committee’s report criticized leaders for making readiness “the primary focus of all activities.” In the aftermath of the report’s conclusions, the Army fired more than a dozen leaders who had acted in line with their superior’s priorities. Meanwhile, General Milley has continued to state that readiness is the top priority as recently as May 2023.
On a smaller level, we can examine the 2019 Bradley rollover in Korea that resulted in the unfortunate and unnecessary death of a soldier. Subsequent investigation revealed that the driver was inadequately trained and, by regulation, should not have been licensed to drive the vehicle. The company commander had signed the license regardless. For this lapse, the commander was relieved, and separated from the Army. But this behavior does not happen in isolation. The OPTEMPO in ABCTs has been high for most of the past decade. The pressure on commanders to man their crews is significant, and there are no opportunities for error. Even if a company tries to execute necessary retraining in line with the eight-step training model, there is no time available in the collective training progression dictated from on high. No captain today has the authority to derail a deployment timeline. The brigade commander in this instance, responsible for the training management across his formation, did not even pay attention to the corrective actions after the incident – he delegated that down to his battalion commanders. Four years later, he remains on active duty.
Consequences
This is not a defense of the relieved leaders, many of whom doubtless needed to go. But there is a discrepancy to note. The subordinate leaders who executed a priority were punished, but the senior leaders who set that priority remain in service. This is not the outcome of tasks and authorities delegated under a mission command philosophy. It is not even leadership. It is simply punting – shifting responsibilities and consequences away from senior leaders and down onto their subordinates.
To a junior officer, the message is clear: do what you have to do to get results, but do not get caught. In practical terms, if you are the source of a bad news story we will hang you out to dry. Small wonder, then, that company command it not an opportunity viewed with enthusiasm. Even less surprising that once company command is complete, successful captains are looking for other career paths. The persistent need to lie to ourselves forces junior officers to experience uncomfortable cognitive dissonances early in our careers. Trust is eroding across the force, to our detriment.
However we might have envisioned our service, we cannot even be the officers that you trained us to be. By the time we assume command of a company we have spent a decade preparing to take charge of a formation and lead it to the best of our abilities. Instead, we find ourselves pigeonholed in a narrow window of competing (if not mutually exclusive) requirements, with little ability to create meaningful change, yet somehow accountable for it all. Carrying the 21st-century Message to Garcia would require a confirmation brief, a risk assessment, a rehearsal, at least three separate SITREPs, and would most likely culminate in a disputed DTS voucher.
When general officers say that company commanders have more responsibilities than ever before, that should not be a new reality. That should be a problem statement, treated as an issue needing a solution which only senior leaders can provide. There are real options available for those who wish to make positive changes. Hold the staff officers accountablw who do not meet AR 350-1’s standards – the number of late orders is an excellent metric to start tracking and reducing. Solve problems and implement programs at your level rather than delegating down to companies by default. Cut reporting requirements to the information necessary for decision making, not just to ease the reporting burden but also to practice working in a low-information environment. Develop a tolerance for ambiguity. Set real priorities and enforce them – which means determining and owning the tasks to ignore as well as determining those that are most critical.
There are risks to all of these options. Nevertheless, our doctrine tells us that risk acceptance is essential. Indeed, ADP 6-0 states that “an expectation of avoiding all risk is detrimental to mission accomplishment.” In the few instances when risk aversion is truly necessary, be transparent about the decision and take responsibility for the tradeoffs to mission effectiveness. In either case, the intolerable practice of delegating risk must end.
This is not the Army that any of us signed up for. Wary of confronting risks, our senior leaders instead systematically refuse to run our Army the way that will make it most effective in combat. Reversing this practice will allow senior leaders to build and maintain a more satisfied officer corps, as well as combat formations that are better prepared to fight and win.
The author is a captain on active duty in the United States Army.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or any other entity of the United States Government.
The Angry Staff Officer 