The Peter Principle
Jan 30th, 2006 at 12:31 pm by Susie
Now, this is reassuring, isn’t it?
WASHINGTON — Struggling to retain enough officers to lead its forces, the Army has begun to dramatically increase the number of soldiers it promotes, raising fears within the service that wartime strains are diluting the quality of the officer corps. [...]
The higher rates of promotion are part of efforts to fill new slots created by an Army reorganization and to compensate for officers who are resigning from the service, many after multiple rotations to Iraq.
The promotion rates “are much higher than they have been in the past because we need more officers than we did before,” said Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, an Army spokesman.
….
But the recent trends in promotions have stirred concerns that the Army is being forced to lower its standards to provide leaders for combat units that will be deployed overseas.“The problem here is that you’re not knocking off the bottom 20%,” said a high-ranking Army officer at the Pentagon. “Basically, if you haven’t been court-martialed, you’re going to be promoted to major.”
And soon, even a couple of court-martials and AWOL incidents and slugging the Colonel and sleeping with the General’s teenage son won’t keep you from rising through the ranks.
What will matter is that you behaved yourself while in that cell. That kind of good behavior is good enough.
One of problems with the army already it that it’s way too top heavy. I saw one study about 10 years ago and the ratio of officers to enlisted was triple or more than what it had been in WW2. If this was a well run business it would fail because of too many middle and upper management, and that’s what Majors and above are, and too few workers.