Choke…coffee going down my trachea instead of the esophagus. “What did you say, Commander?” The student, a Navy lieutenant commander, had just informed me that the Bureau of Naval Personnel (BUPERS) was sending passed-over lieutenants to attend the Command and General Staff Officer Course (CGSOC) at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. “Not again,” I thought. “And it’s worse than before.”
It is worth rewinding the story several years to discover why this issue is of some importance to the Navy. In the beginning, 1986, there was the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act. This law aimed to force the services to work more effectively together. It mandated what has come to be known as “jointness.” Among its provisions was the requirement for all the services to implement professional military education (PME) by directing that field-grade officers and above complete intermediate-level service college (known as PME-1) on a path to a qualification known as the joint specialty officer (JSO). Further, the law specified that one could not become a flag officer in the uniformed services unless one attained that qualification. So selection and completion of PME constitutes the first essential step on this path.
Goldwater-Nichols allowed for a period of about ten years of waivers until the services could catch up with the way they made career assignments for mid-grade officers (0-4 and 0-5). The act was designed to be a forcing function to spur the services to program PME-1 into an officer’s career, thus causing them to send their best to one of the intermediate-level service colleges—including the one located here, at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, the Command and General Staff College (CGSC).
My role began when I reported as the deputy director of the Navy Element at CGSOC in July 2000. I had graduated from the course at CGSC but was eager to find out whom the Navy was sending to the school. The situation seemed to have worsened since I had been a student in 1996-97; the assignments then had been rather ambivalent, tending toward “pack” and below officers (I had already failed to achieve operational command screen).
By 2000 the Navy had started sending passed-over lieutenant commanders near retirement, while the Air Force and Marines were often sending their best. Previously, the Navy had sent mainly line officers; now it was sending nurses and in one case, a limited duty officer. The Navy took some heat for this after 9/11 but pleaded that the constraints of finding officers would mean it could not provide the requisite Sea Service officer for every staff group. The Army made the situation worse by expanding the CGSOC class without coordinating with the Navy. Around 2006 detailing improved a bit—by that time I had retired from the Navy.
Now it looks as if BUPERS and big Navy are up to their old tricks. Either that or the detailers simply refuse to make any meaningful change regarding how they detail people for the PME mandate. Part of this is the Army’s fault for allowing the Navy to send lieutenants who had not selected yet for promotion to fill the empty billets. The Navy seems to have made such precedents standard operating procedure.
What were once vices are now bad habits. Another black eye for the Navy is its failure to promptly assign a captain as director for the Navy Element, having filled the billet intermittently for several years with 0-5s. (One 0-6 was so inadequate he was relieved by an 0-5 after a command climate investigation.) Worse, whoever is assigned as director often retires out of the billet rather than taking his or her joint experience back to the Fleet. The Navy cannot even be bothered to put captains “out to pasture” in Kansas. What does that tell the other services? Especially the Army?
The Navy’s policies about whom it assigns as students and leaders in this very public perch at CGSC are ultimately self-defeating. Every joint billet the Navy “wastes” on officers whose careers are over or winding down means one less JSO it can offer up for flag rank. This makes the Navy look like a poor manager of its talent pool and narrows whom the Secretary of Defense can pick for high command.
There can be no better joint education for naval officers than to learn how to “speak Army”—that is, to learn about land warfare and the culture of the Army. The Navy, and the CNO in particular, need to start to take an active interest in sending the best possible people to CGSC billets—as students, leaders, and faculty. Otherwise, someone might think that we do not value joint education, or education period—education that is legally mandated.