I’m a little bit of a history nut. Well okay, a lot of a history nut, especially military history. I also have a keen interest in observing people and how they behave. Military leadership has been a subset of those two items that have caused considerable deliberation and consternation on my part. Add to that the fact that the military is always harping on it and touting it as an irreplaceable value to be cultivated with great zeal.
If that’s the case then why is the military so cram-packed with useless leaders? Given all the professional development schools and training that a career military person has to take, you would think we would be up to our necks in great leaders throughout all the ranks. Add in the officers who attend the service academies and ROTC and we should be swimming in great leaders. But we aren’t. Instead, it’s a veritable piranha tank of self-serving careerists looking for their next promotion.
As a comparison, one of the more recent generals that came to mind was Gen. Merrill McPeak. During his tenure as chief of staff, we referred to ourselves as being in the “McAir-Force.” Yep—McDonald’s reference. I will leave it to you to do some reading on those dark days in the Air Force and for those of us that lived it, we are just grateful it’s over.
“Tony” did lots of really cool stuff. He dumped stripes in favor of a leather crew type name patch. He created a new dress uniform that looked like a Navy one. He spent millions on that project and it only lasted a year. In fact, he modeled the new officer uniform before it was introduced and used the picture in the dress and appearance regulation. He introduced Total Quality Management (TQM) from the civilian world and rebranded it as Quality Air Force (QAF). He spent millions there too and the program was an abject failure. He was pretty much universally disliked, mainly because he ran the Air Force as a corporation. I kid you not, Curtis LeMay would have literally told the guy off and then fired him.
If you do anything, read Kozak’s book and compare LeMay to the military leaders you’ve known or work for now. It will be quite depressing and irritating and will probably result in you consuming mass quantities of alcohol.
In any case, I had been told early in my career that being in the peacetime military is horrible because the deadwood rises to the top. After all, wartime leaders don’t do politics well. Then when a war happens, the incapable show pony gets culled in favor of a warhorse. Back to peace and the warhorse goes to the glue factory because the show pony manipulates the outcome. You might challenge me and state that we’ve been at war since 1991 and my premise is faulty. Well, it needs to be a big war like WWII, Korea, or Vietnam where massive numbers of our guys are getting killed. If it’s not big, then the show ponies can cover for their lack of skill and leadership.
So my thoughts led me to question where all these bad leaders come from and whether or not this is something new or if it’s always been this way.
