-- the military has a shortage of quality personnel

-- incentive structures within the military reward bureaucratic sycophancy in company, battalion, and brigade commanders, at the expense of real training or readiness.

The personnel problem can be solved by raising pay, which will allow you to raise standards. If e-1 pay starts at $40k and SSG pay is $100k, you can attract much more qualified and capable men. You can kick out the underperforming trash. You can nearly eliminate ASVAB waivers. You can make the PT standards what they actually ought to be (very demanding). You can largely fix the enlisted ranks this way. Officers, too, should have pay increased so that we can attract smarter. 80-90% of officers in conventional land are stupid. The concentration of retards increases at each level from field grade to general officer. Better pay = better personnel, and that honestly fixes at least half of the Army's problems; all the needlessly stupid stuff can be significantly mitigated if there's nobody under 120IQ in E7+ positions.

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The other major problem is that the incentive structures for officers reward dishonesty and obsequiousness at the expense of readiness. Officers are evaluated by their superiors, and their entire career rests on each evaluation in which they are rated against their peers. This necessarily means that there's a lot of political jockeying among captains and lieutenants, (as well as majors and LTCs at the BDE and BN levels) and a heavy disincentive for those officers to provide any pushback against unrealistic expectations or demands. What might those demands be?

-- Basic training company commanders are pressured to pass as many trainees through as possible, meaning that the failures who should be recycled for failing training events or fitness tests or rifle qualifications are instead marked down as passing, and the quality of new soldiers steadily deteriorates. (NB: I've seen this just in the short time I've been in. The new soldiers we receive right now are horrifically worse than my class, and my peers are of measurably lower quality (in intelligence, discipline, aggression, and fitness) than the classes before us who are now our leaders. This isn't "back in my day"ism -- it is measurable and drastic, and exponentially worsening.)

-- Battalion and brigade training schedules are increasingly unreasonable, and often far divorced from actual skill development. Going to the range once a week and shooting drills with 250 rounds per soldier, and doing battle drills and patrol base ops will do more to develop and maintain capability than nearly any other training the infantry does. These are not complex training events -- each post has a designated training area of thousands or millions of acres, as well as ranges. Instead, brigade and battalion level field events comprise the majority of a normal conventional training cycle, in which a tremendous amount of time is wasted in the field. This isn't to say that large scale field events have no value, but the foundational skills they're meant to showcase and refine just aren't there in a lot of cases. Furthermore, the amount of training that commanders are expected to include in a training cycle requires more than the actual number of days allotted to train. A good example of this is that the regular Army M4 qualification is supposed to have six different iterations of train up before the qualification table; I don't know anyone in the Army who has done them all outside of basic, because no unit ever has time -- M4 qual is supposed to take over a month, all told, but it's instead just the final qual (and everyone in conventional land sucks because they never shoot other than the qual twice a year). But no company commander ever tells his battalion commander that they need training time for all 6 M4 tables, nor does any battalion commander tell that to his brigade commander, lest it mean career death.

Why, then, are these demands placed on lower level commanders at the expense of more individual skill development? It largely comes down to career progression: the higher echelon officers can't easily list individual skill development on their evaluations as an achievement, so they really only get credit for large scale training events. They therefore try to cram as many of those into a training cycle as possible. This is also why they are so risk averse in what kind of training they allow -- realistic training carries intrinsic risk, and it can be a career ender for a soldier to get injured while training, depending on the severity and the activity. The impulse is therefore to neuter training as much as possible in execution, while retaining the nominal "value". This could look like having soldiers train for air assaults from helicopter by doing "hot load/cold load" training, in which they literally get in and out of helicopters that aren't even running. The much better alternative to that is to have the guys load on with the bird running, have it take off and land, and have them disembark into an assault position from there. That, however, carries risk and requires coordination with the flight teams, and hl/cl training is nominally "training for air assaults, so some battalion commander can just authorize that and then put on his OER "Trained entire battalion to air assault proficiency." -- and there's no qualitative assessment to give any lie to that.

The evaluation structure has very little place for bottom-up feedback; the closest it gets is that when a major is being considered for promotion to LTC (and every promotion thereafter), a small survey on him is emailed to a few of his subordinates over the years. How the results of that are considered is a black box, and it's far too limited to have any real effect anyway.

Consequent to all of these issues, a culture of administrative and individual dishonesty is all-pervasive. Can't get guys to qual with their weapons? Well, they can't do the platoon livefire if they can't qual -- enter them as a pass anyway. Guys can't pass their PT test? well, we should kick them out but instead someone will pencil in that they just barely scraped by. There's a well known article called "Lying to ourselves: dishonesty in the army profession" that explores this well. One of many problems this creates is that standards are much harder to enforce well, because it's not as easy to identify those who aren't meeting them -- on paper, many are.

As a result of all of these things, junior officer retention rate is very poor, and those who choose to stay are those who don't mind the careerism and dishonesty, which is obviously self-perpetuating an reinforcing.

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if you fixed all of that, the Army wouldn't be half bad.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5607355&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310690",#48176615)

No one comes anywhere close in terms of experience, and the more time I have in, the more I realize the value of senior leaders with actual combat time.

I also suspect that the second issue I mentioned is pervasive in the Chinese military as well -- no way that's not happening in an honor culture with an autocratic uniparty state.

I think most other countries are, somehow, much worse. It's galling, though, to see ways in which this could be made far better and simply isn't.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5607355&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310690",#48177158)