Culture change needed to address military staffing shortage
There is a chronic shortage of military leadership and enlisted leadership in the United States Army.
The Army and Marine Corps are at capacity in both combat arms. This is especially true of the Army, which has been forced to rely on a cadre of commissioned officers to fill leadership positions throughout its various divisions and the service’s reserve and National Guard components.
It is this cadre of soldiers in the senior ranks, most recently the senior enlisted leaders who are responsible for developing and leading all the soldiers in that corps, that is causing the shortage in the service’s officer corps.
These senior enlisted leaders, who are now commanding large numbers of soldiers while the active duty army is being rebuilt and is being deployed to more than a dozen foreign countries, are often not in the best position to identify and overcome these problems. What’s more, they are seldom equipped to deal with the many challenges of leadership of a rapidly growing combat force.
Most senior enlisted soldiers lack sufficient proficiency with personal computers, satellite and Internet communications systems and the military’s extensive suite of information systems, including most especially the Army’s command and control systems.
Senior enlisted soldiers have more than their fair share of challenges in leading soldiers in the modern era of warfare, where tactics and communications have changed much more rapidly than had any wars in modern times.
While I am a retired Army officer with a great deal of experience in command and staff leadership and the development of junior and senior leaders throughout the Army, I believe that these senior enlisted leaders and their challenges are best met by other senior leaders in the Army as well as those with their own leadership training and experience.
The Army ranks senior enlisted soldiers with an emphasis on a career with a military, as well as an emphasis on education and the development of people who will lead soldiers in the future. This should be the standard by which all senior enlisted soldiers in the Army are measured.
One of the major drawbacks of leadership from the ranks in the Army is that many senior enlisted leaders lack the necessary skills, experience and training to understand the challenges of the modern Army.
While many in the Army have been trained since the early 1900s to understand the challenges of modern warfare, they often lack the experience and the ability to put these skills to use. And if they don’t have the requisite skills, they may be unable to do anything about the shortage
