The Boston Globe ran a story yesterday on the Army’s rush “to fill a growing number of vacancies in the officer corps,” which has forced the Army to promote “captains, majors, and lieutenant colonels more quickly and at a higher percentage than before the Iraq war, a trend that some military specialists worry is lowering the overall quality of the officer corps.” It all sounds very damning, but my initial reaction to the story was that four years into the Iraq war, the Army’s officer corps was likely to be filled with battle-hardened veterans who would make far better military leaders than their counterparts from the 1990’s, when the Army could afford to be much more selective. But that may not be the case. According to Frederick Kagan, a frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD and an authority on such matters, the attrition of the Army’s officer corps is “unquestionably bad.” Kagan said that the military would certainly pay a price for “not being able to select for quality,” but he did concede that their were a number of mitigating factors, first among them the combat experience that will inform the leadership of those officers that remain. And Kagan added that “it’s not as though selection in the ’90s was a perfect process.” Still, he was dubious that combat experience could “offset the fact that you’re not cherry-picking” the best and the brightest, but rather promoting whoever is left standing. With officers facing more frequent overseas deployments due to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Kagan says that many just feel as though they’ve “made enough sacrifices.” Kagan also speculated that the apparent lack of progress in Iraq over the last few years has led many to officers to resign rather than continue serving in what looked to be a losing effort. As far as measures the military, or the Bush administration, might take in order to improve retention rates–there’s no substitute for victory. Kagan said that while retreating from Iraq would eliminate the need for frequent overseas deployments, it would also make every officer “part of a defeated Army,” which, as the post-Vietnam “hollow Army” demonstrated, is perhaps the greatest challenge to retaining bright and capable officers. Short of a quick victory in Iraq, Kagan says that the Army needs to “expand as much as possible and as rapidly as possible,” which will allow for less frequent deployments. Of course, as Kagan noted, having a bunch of “mediocre lieutenant colonels” was hardly unprecedented, and might not represent “a big problem.” But neither should the problem be taken lightly. Short of increasing the overall size of the force, and achieving victory, there are few options for meeting this challenge. What we do know is that a defeat in Iraq would almost certainly accelerate the process–losing teams have a lot of trouble keeping their best players in the off-season.
