When we believe that we can pick general level talent when someone is a Lt, and then ignore all the red flags in subsequent years, we have a problem. Too many senior leaders decide who is going to be their guy/gal, and because of their ego, allow bad behavior to go unchallenged. I came in, in 1994, and retired in 2014. I saw it for the entirety of those 20 years. And nothing I have seen since I retired has dissuaded me that it has changed.
I served in the U.S. Air Force from 1968 to 1975 and the U.S. Air Force Reserve from 1975 to 1978. One of the many things I look back on was that I was privileged to have served with several (actually quite a few) WWII vets who were at the end of their careers. I got the good out of them before they walked out the door. They were a different breed of men. They were a different breed of leader.
After the Air Force I worked for a Fortune 10 corporation. One of the most admired companies in the world. Admired for products, financial management, operations, technology and... Leadership. We had excellent leadership and Management. Our senior leaders were like the WWII era leaders I knew in the Air Force. They were a different breed of people. A different breed of leader and manager.
After retiring from that company I worked (Sr. VP) for a small defense contractor advising senior Air Force leaders both military and civilians. After a 33 years absence I was back in the Air Force! Working with 'Stars' and SESs and GS15s. For nearly five years. For five days a week and sometimes weekends. And everyday when I left to go home (or my hotel), as I drove off base... my thought was that all of these people need to be fired!
It's interesting to re-immerse after being away. I'm feeling a little of that myself. I spent 8 years up to my neck in a private sector leadership role. When I turned my attention back to the USAF, the realities stuck out ever more starkly than before.
Much to agree with in this. Much to disagree with as well, mostly because it’s written by someone who is ill versed in the subject he is opining about.
We all must choose whether we'd prefer the right ideas from someone we consider unqualified or the wrong ideas advanced by someone using their qualification to give those ideas undeserved oxygen.
It's a logical fallacy to attack the credibility of the messenger vs considering the message.
But it's a practical fallacy for me to believe I can convince someone who has already made a judgement to change that judgement.
Thanks for reading and commenting. Genuinely, I appreciate it even if we vaguely disagree.
I just retired after 28 years. It's so monstrously bad right now. I largely blame bruised AF egos during Iraq and Afghanistan, when guys with rifles become cool again. USAF culture just couldn't properly digest this and we are still dealing with the fallout. CSAFs Moseley and Jumper were horrendous. Schwartz was a bit of a reprieve, at least not as(!) bad. Then Welsh pretty much sunk the ship by normalizing the CSAF as nothing but an effete motivational speaker, obsessed with nothing but phony flexing for the E9 cabal, Hill staffers, and media. Truly embarrassing. Meanwhile: the USAF's true cancer is the ruined relationship between rated leaders and enlisted leaders. One group is highly technically skilled with limited time leading enlisted in close quarters. The other group (in the absence of leadership and articulated mission) is caught in a death spiral of making up mission for itself outside of technical warfighting competencies. In one sense, the relationship is completely backwards. Which is to say, if you reversed the roles at least you'd be a bit closer to normal. Bottom line these two groups are completed isolated from one another, intellectually speaking. They exist in different worlds moving in different directions. I have huge respect for the rated community, but I'd say it's time they found their cojones again. If I was CSAF and my local E9 told me I had to tackle gig lines and beard regs I'd throw him out of a window. What are we doing!? More money? More airmen. Absolutely not. Staffs are incredibly bloated. True influence and authority are jealously guarded by the elite few because it's a rare commodity relative to the size of the bureaucracy. Anyone below the age of 40 sits in the cheap seats hoping some power broker takes a liking to them and provides them a little bit of purpose. Will there ever be a mature effort in the USAF to articulate what we do that really matters, day to day? No not really, because that doesn't involve spending a trillion bucks on future war. We need a highly trained and drilled USAF focused on moving and flying bunches of things, in a variety of scenarios. China is BS. Russia is BS. Stop talking about wars we ain't in. Just prepare to go (somewhere) and battle the pants of whoever it is. By the way, blow up the current 'grooming' process for CSAF that leaves us with like 2 dudes to choose from. CSAF should be open to any 2 star or above. A larger talent pool will yield a better leader.
The comments illustrate perfectly the reason why the good ole boy network we call military senior leaders today is on it’s ass. For the record I completely agree with the author. I retired as a chief warrant officer. I got to observe many junior officers and NCOs go from newbies to CSMs and GOs. Many of the leaders I served with who had conviction, character and focus on the men and mission over career advancement were either ushered out for the more compliant, or they were put somewhere where they could do no harm and then retired. I remembered the senior leaders, officers or NCOs who never forgot where they came from or who they were actually working for. All these current ass clowns think they’re Taylor Swift. Who believe its ok to tell their subordinates to ignore orders from the president or to call the Chinese to bad mouth the commander in chief. Or to use their senior officer capital to put their name and reputation on a fabricated letter designed to protect a corrupt politician. Not only have the Senior leaders become killers of mission effectiveness, but they are also destroying the relationship between commander in chief and his generals. That is exactly why Pete Hegseth is the SECDEF. First of all he is not beholden to the good ole boy network known as the general officer corps. Second despite the whiny bitchy comments by some here he will ensure there is leadership focused on the warfighter not their next promotion. These leaders have a responsibility to protect the warfighter from the politics and social experimentation not telling them to shut the fuck and do as you’re told all at the warfighters expense. I promise the standards for Ranger school have not been changed to accommodate women!
Back to the comments, an aspect not mentioned in the article are the “keepers of the kingdom”, the protectors of “this is how we’ve always done it”. The risk adverse, next promotion crowd. Many are bootlickers who saw it their job to get the “ole man” promoted so he’ll take me with him. All at the expense of the men. They’re here, commenting and restacking Jasmine Crockett content. Bad mouthing Hegseth as a choice is ok. Predicting what will happen during his watch is what we call in the business an indicator. An indicator of TDS. Seek treatment perhaps you haven’t had enough covid vaccinations. Sometimes to bring about a major corse corrections it takes an outside of the box approach. I love believing that these GOs are answering to someone outside of their zone of influence. Worried that they might have to get back to actually leading warfighters to win a war, not their next promotion, position or an election.
Steven Kwast and Craig Wills single-handedly destroyed our UPT program and set us up to become a 3rd rate Air Force for decades to come. I’d love to see you do a deep dive on that story. (I was a UPT IP at Columbus at the height of their bullshit).
“What we should notice is a pile of generals, stacked like cord wood, laying in the ditch, their careers ended after their vehement, vocal, public, persistent protest against a funding level leaving the nation’s defense compromised. We don’t notice that.”
I crave leadership like this. But our senior officer development pipeline intentionally culls the herd from this kind of backbone…which is why it’s 20 years for me and no more.
All four branches need a major house cleaning at the Flag officer level, (fire them all) then head into the 05/06 level and clean out the snivelers and acolytes of the current Flag Officers. Goldwater Nichols has to be put back on the table it has led to “joint” hand holding, milk and cookies, and nap time for officers. We have a Navy that doesn’t float, a Marine Corps that says what it won’t do and an Army that who knows what it does. Fulda Gap? Hell this current bunch of Flag misfits can’t find their backsides in a dark closet with a high powered flashlight. Great post! PS you no doubt will hear Mr. Hegseth is not qualified, no gravitas, let’s look at some guys that supposedly had gravitas, Robert “we’re winning” McNamara (forget he was boss at Ford when they rolled out the Edsel) Dr. Harold Brown, a genius, one of the Kennedy whiz kids, good ole Donald “knowns and unknowns Don” Rumsfeld, if at first you don’t succeed come back for seconds. How about Les Aspin? Dick Cheney anyone? Bill Cohen! Robert Gates! “We’re winning in Afghanistan!”. If we look at the political hacks and whiz kids that have tried to run the puzzle palace for the last 70 years one thing stands out. They can’t. The inmates run the asylum and until the culture is turned on its head or we get soundly beaten in a clear peer foe fight it is unlikely to change. So let’s give the “kid” with no experience and no gravitas a try, we have nothing to lose at this stage, well except a bunch four stars that can’t carry their own coffee cup.
1- General Staff, not improved Joint Chiefs of Staff. A General Staff subordinates Space Force, Air Force, Fires Force, Sea Force, and Land Force to unified command under a Chief of Staff of The General Staff under SecDef and POTUS.
2- US is a Tier II military and political power at best, steadily trending towards Tier III, where UK and EU already are. Russia is generations ahead of US in both dimensions, China in one and soon in both.
3- What's missing is a rational, realistic US Grand National Strategic Objective and US Armed Force TOEs consistent with it.
Well that may be, though Rex Tillerson damn near ran XOM into the ground, and headed to the State Department, and he was supposedly “qualified” to run Exxon; the active duty military now have a new boss in their chain of command on the way to POTUS. Last time this old Marine checked it was now a time for coming to a very complete position of attention, acknowledging understanding and compliance, taking one step the rear, executing an about face and then willingly, cheerfully and obediently carrying out the orders of the day, whilst marching smartly out the hatch into the new day. Marines don’t salute indoors unless under arms, thus no rendering of the hand salute. The time for opinions has ended. There is a new Boss in charge of the puzzle palace. Everyone better get in line behind the new boss and do so smartly.
XOM and Big Oil in the 2000s epitomized lazy groupthink along with self-serving conventional wisdom. Fortunately in America we still had people with entrepreneurial spirit and strong work ethic focused on fracking which by 2010 had solved our energy crisis. By appointing Miller and Hegseth at DOD Trump is attempting to do something similar to how frackers upended Big Oil in the 2000s.
So after going with the flow for 3 years in his first term Trump wisely surrendered to the Taliban and then installed Miller and Patel at DOD to make it impossible for the next administration to reverse course in Afghanistan. This time there will be no McMasters and Mattises and Kellys and Pompeos and Haleys and Espers and Cheneys!
Absolutely not how a marine (or any service ever) should respond. We do not sign over our morals, core principles, or oath of office to new leadership - that’s CCP/Wehmracht thinking. “The time for opinions has ended” - that’s is the most amoral and dumb thing I’ve heard in a long while.
Alignment of the foreign and domestic policies with military structure, a novel concept…you’re on point with 1,2 and 3. Never thought of the General Staff organization, Bruce Gudmundsson has several perhaps many posts on the various general staff organizations in other countries over time. They can be effective.
Agree. Served in the Air Force for four years and then interservice transferred to the USN. Flag leadership is weak all across the services. Agree with you on Goldwater-Nichols. Needs reform as with Flag promotion boards. I do miss the days of Fogleman and Cunningham (12th Air Force).
These people think themselves Kings, and the Kings' courts they build for themselves have no jesters in them. Nobody tells them "no, this is a bad idea." They're surrounded entirely by yes-men that know if they just keep saying yes, they might have a chance of being a King themselves one day.
And you can see it on them, the way they love how they're treated like celebrities everywhere they go. They have Colonels building them schedules and taking their calls and Majors and Master Sergeants fetching their coffee and cars. They love the reserved parking spots at the Commissary with a star on the sign. The only GOs I know that I trust are the ones that hate the spotlights, the dog-and-pony shows, the attendants. And unfortunately it feels like the good ones rarely make it past one or two stars because they don't like the game.
I only worked on the Air Staff for three years but this was my sense of the top level as well. Unfortunately, the next admin is already centralizing decision making even more than it was before. The budget/uniform focused GOFOs are going to absolutely thrive for the next four years.
When we believe that we can pick general level talent when someone is a Lt, and then ignore all the red flags in subsequent years, we have a problem. Too many senior leaders decide who is going to be their guy/gal, and because of their ego, allow bad behavior to go unchallenged. I came in, in 1994, and retired in 2014. I saw it for the entirety of those 20 years. And nothing I have seen since I retired has dissuaded me that it has changed.
Agree!
I served in the U.S. Air Force from 1968 to 1975 and the U.S. Air Force Reserve from 1975 to 1978. One of the many things I look back on was that I was privileged to have served with several (actually quite a few) WWII vets who were at the end of their careers. I got the good out of them before they walked out the door. They were a different breed of men. They were a different breed of leader.
After the Air Force I worked for a Fortune 10 corporation. One of the most admired companies in the world. Admired for products, financial management, operations, technology and... Leadership. We had excellent leadership and Management. Our senior leaders were like the WWII era leaders I knew in the Air Force. They were a different breed of people. A different breed of leader and manager.
After retiring from that company I worked (Sr. VP) for a small defense contractor advising senior Air Force leaders both military and civilians. After a 33 years absence I was back in the Air Force! Working with 'Stars' and SESs and GS15s. For nearly five years. For five days a week and sometimes weekends. And everyday when I left to go home (or my hotel), as I drove off base... my thought was that all of these people need to be fired!
It's interesting to re-immerse after being away. I'm feeling a little of that myself. I spent 8 years up to my neck in a private sector leadership role. When I turned my attention back to the USAF, the realities stuck out ever more starkly than before.
Thanks for engaging Ron.
Robin Olds.
Miss that guy-
Much to agree with in this. Much to disagree with as well, mostly because it’s written by someone who is ill versed in the subject he is opining about.
We all must choose whether we'd prefer the right ideas from someone we consider unqualified or the wrong ideas advanced by someone using their qualification to give those ideas undeserved oxygen.
It's a logical fallacy to attack the credibility of the messenger vs considering the message.
But it's a practical fallacy for me to believe I can convince someone who has already made a judgement to change that judgement.
Thanks for reading and commenting. Genuinely, I appreciate it even if we vaguely disagree.
Admirable response.
I just retired after 28 years. It's so monstrously bad right now. I largely blame bruised AF egos during Iraq and Afghanistan, when guys with rifles become cool again. USAF culture just couldn't properly digest this and we are still dealing with the fallout. CSAFs Moseley and Jumper were horrendous. Schwartz was a bit of a reprieve, at least not as(!) bad. Then Welsh pretty much sunk the ship by normalizing the CSAF as nothing but an effete motivational speaker, obsessed with nothing but phony flexing for the E9 cabal, Hill staffers, and media. Truly embarrassing. Meanwhile: the USAF's true cancer is the ruined relationship between rated leaders and enlisted leaders. One group is highly technically skilled with limited time leading enlisted in close quarters. The other group (in the absence of leadership and articulated mission) is caught in a death spiral of making up mission for itself outside of technical warfighting competencies. In one sense, the relationship is completely backwards. Which is to say, if you reversed the roles at least you'd be a bit closer to normal. Bottom line these two groups are completed isolated from one another, intellectually speaking. They exist in different worlds moving in different directions. I have huge respect for the rated community, but I'd say it's time they found their cojones again. If I was CSAF and my local E9 told me I had to tackle gig lines and beard regs I'd throw him out of a window. What are we doing!? More money? More airmen. Absolutely not. Staffs are incredibly bloated. True influence and authority are jealously guarded by the elite few because it's a rare commodity relative to the size of the bureaucracy. Anyone below the age of 40 sits in the cheap seats hoping some power broker takes a liking to them and provides them a little bit of purpose. Will there ever be a mature effort in the USAF to articulate what we do that really matters, day to day? No not really, because that doesn't involve spending a trillion bucks on future war. We need a highly trained and drilled USAF focused on moving and flying bunches of things, in a variety of scenarios. China is BS. Russia is BS. Stop talking about wars we ain't in. Just prepare to go (somewhere) and battle the pants of whoever it is. By the way, blow up the current 'grooming' process for CSAF that leaves us with like 2 dudes to choose from. CSAF should be open to any 2 star or above. A larger talent pool will yield a better leader.
The comments illustrate perfectly the reason why the good ole boy network we call military senior leaders today is on it’s ass. For the record I completely agree with the author. I retired as a chief warrant officer. I got to observe many junior officers and NCOs go from newbies to CSMs and GOs. Many of the leaders I served with who had conviction, character and focus on the men and mission over career advancement were either ushered out for the more compliant, or they were put somewhere where they could do no harm and then retired. I remembered the senior leaders, officers or NCOs who never forgot where they came from or who they were actually working for. All these current ass clowns think they’re Taylor Swift. Who believe its ok to tell their subordinates to ignore orders from the president or to call the Chinese to bad mouth the commander in chief. Or to use their senior officer capital to put their name and reputation on a fabricated letter designed to protect a corrupt politician. Not only have the Senior leaders become killers of mission effectiveness, but they are also destroying the relationship between commander in chief and his generals. That is exactly why Pete Hegseth is the SECDEF. First of all he is not beholden to the good ole boy network known as the general officer corps. Second despite the whiny bitchy comments by some here he will ensure there is leadership focused on the warfighter not their next promotion. These leaders have a responsibility to protect the warfighter from the politics and social experimentation not telling them to shut the fuck and do as you’re told all at the warfighters expense. I promise the standards for Ranger school have not been changed to accommodate women!
Back to the comments, an aspect not mentioned in the article are the “keepers of the kingdom”, the protectors of “this is how we’ve always done it”. The risk adverse, next promotion crowd. Many are bootlickers who saw it their job to get the “ole man” promoted so he’ll take me with him. All at the expense of the men. They’re here, commenting and restacking Jasmine Crockett content. Bad mouthing Hegseth as a choice is ok. Predicting what will happen during his watch is what we call in the business an indicator. An indicator of TDS. Seek treatment perhaps you haven’t had enough covid vaccinations. Sometimes to bring about a major corse corrections it takes an outside of the box approach. I love believing that these GOs are answering to someone outside of their zone of influence. Worried that they might have to get back to actually leading warfighters to win a war, not their next promotion, position or an election.
Steven Kwast and Craig Wills single-handedly destroyed our UPT program and set us up to become a 3rd rate Air Force for decades to come. I’d love to see you do a deep dive on that story. (I was a UPT IP at Columbus at the height of their bullshit).
“What we should notice is a pile of generals, stacked like cord wood, laying in the ditch, their careers ended after their vehement, vocal, public, persistent protest against a funding level leaving the nation’s defense compromised. We don’t notice that.”
I crave leadership like this. But our senior officer development pipeline intentionally culls the herd from this kind of backbone…which is why it’s 20 years for me and no more.
All four branches need a major house cleaning at the Flag officer level, (fire them all) then head into the 05/06 level and clean out the snivelers and acolytes of the current Flag Officers. Goldwater Nichols has to be put back on the table it has led to “joint” hand holding, milk and cookies, and nap time for officers. We have a Navy that doesn’t float, a Marine Corps that says what it won’t do and an Army that who knows what it does. Fulda Gap? Hell this current bunch of Flag misfits can’t find their backsides in a dark closet with a high powered flashlight. Great post! PS you no doubt will hear Mr. Hegseth is not qualified, no gravitas, let’s look at some guys that supposedly had gravitas, Robert “we’re winning” McNamara (forget he was boss at Ford when they rolled out the Edsel) Dr. Harold Brown, a genius, one of the Kennedy whiz kids, good ole Donald “knowns and unknowns Don” Rumsfeld, if at first you don’t succeed come back for seconds. How about Les Aspin? Dick Cheney anyone? Bill Cohen! Robert Gates! “We’re winning in Afghanistan!”. If we look at the political hacks and whiz kids that have tried to run the puzzle palace for the last 70 years one thing stands out. They can’t. The inmates run the asylum and until the culture is turned on its head or we get soundly beaten in a clear peer foe fight it is unlikely to change. So let’s give the “kid” with no experience and no gravitas a try, we have nothing to lose at this stage, well except a bunch four stars that can’t carry their own coffee cup.
1- General Staff, not improved Joint Chiefs of Staff. A General Staff subordinates Space Force, Air Force, Fires Force, Sea Force, and Land Force to unified command under a Chief of Staff of The General Staff under SecDef and POTUS.
2- US is a Tier II military and political power at best, steadily trending towards Tier III, where UK and EU already are. Russia is generations ahead of US in both dimensions, China in one and soon in both.
3- What's missing is a rational, realistic US Grand National Strategic Objective and US Armed Force TOEs consistent with it.
There are tens of thousand of CGO/FGOs in AD all more qualified than Hegseth. He’s less qualified mentally or professionally than any O in my unit.
You’re talking about putting a gas station attendant in charge of Exxon-Mobil …if they also had nukes.
Well that may be, though Rex Tillerson damn near ran XOM into the ground, and headed to the State Department, and he was supposedly “qualified” to run Exxon; the active duty military now have a new boss in their chain of command on the way to POTUS. Last time this old Marine checked it was now a time for coming to a very complete position of attention, acknowledging understanding and compliance, taking one step the rear, executing an about face and then willingly, cheerfully and obediently carrying out the orders of the day, whilst marching smartly out the hatch into the new day. Marines don’t salute indoors unless under arms, thus no rendering of the hand salute. The time for opinions has ended. There is a new Boss in charge of the puzzle palace. Everyone better get in line behind the new boss and do so smartly.
XOM and Big Oil in the 2000s epitomized lazy groupthink along with self-serving conventional wisdom. Fortunately in America we still had people with entrepreneurial spirit and strong work ethic focused on fracking which by 2010 had solved our energy crisis. By appointing Miller and Hegseth at DOD Trump is attempting to do something similar to how frackers upended Big Oil in the 2000s.
So after going with the flow for 3 years in his first term Trump wisely surrendered to the Taliban and then installed Miller and Patel at DOD to make it impossible for the next administration to reverse course in Afghanistan. This time there will be no McMasters and Mattises and Kellys and Pompeos and Haleys and Espers and Cheneys!
Absolutely not how a marine (or any service ever) should respond. We do not sign over our morals, core principles, or oath of office to new leadership - that’s CCP/Wehmracht thinking. “The time for opinions has ended” - that’s is the most amoral and dumb thing I’ve heard in a long while.
Alignment of the foreign and domestic policies with military structure, a novel concept…you’re on point with 1,2 and 3. Never thought of the General Staff organization, Bruce Gudmundsson has several perhaps many posts on the various general staff organizations in other countries over time. They can be effective.
Agree. Served in the Air Force for four years and then interservice transferred to the USN. Flag leadership is weak all across the services. Agree with you on Goldwater-Nichols. Needs reform as with Flag promotion boards. I do miss the days of Fogleman and Cunningham (12th Air Force).
These people think themselves Kings, and the Kings' courts they build for themselves have no jesters in them. Nobody tells them "no, this is a bad idea." They're surrounded entirely by yes-men that know if they just keep saying yes, they might have a chance of being a King themselves one day.
And you can see it on them, the way they love how they're treated like celebrities everywhere they go. They have Colonels building them schedules and taking their calls and Majors and Master Sergeants fetching their coffee and cars. They love the reserved parking spots at the Commissary with a star on the sign. The only GOs I know that I trust are the ones that hate the spotlights, the dog-and-pony shows, the attendants. And unfortunately it feels like the good ones rarely make it past one or two stars because they don't like the game.
“Our generals are doing the same thing. They are military version of Nickelback.”
vicious
I only worked on the Air Staff for three years but this was my sense of the top level as well. Unfortunately, the next admin is already centralizing decision making even more than it was before. The budget/uniform focused GOFOs are going to absolutely thrive for the next four years.
The military did fine b4 trump.
Wokeness and DEI don’t belong in the military
Awesome 👏 These political generals are of the mold of crap Thomas Ricks wrote about in his book, The Generals
And the old AF saying: Making general is like smoking weed. The more you suck, the higher you get