Whatcha Gonna Do PL?

Why do we hire 22-year-olds with no military experience to lead platoons? Why not keep them in the hands of NCOs with 10 years of experience? Why do we entrust company commands to young officers with half as many years of service?

As an officer, the delta between your age and that of your enlisted advisor converges throughout your career, starting at its greatest when you first pin on a butter bar. You likely won’t find yourselves in the same frame of life until you’re both contemplating your retirement. Only then can officers safely say, ‘In my experience…’ without eliciting groans and eye rolls.

It’s important to remember, your rank doesn’t give you good ideas. It gives you the responsibility to weigh different ideas and decide which one is the best. Honing that gut instinct takes time and reps, and just like legs tucks, you won’t get it if you don’t put the work in.

So why do we even have junior grade officers, whose (almost) defining trait is a lack of experience?

Because that experience isn’t always what we need. Not all experience is bad, but not all of it is good either. It’s context dependent.

‘I’ve been here before,’ can be a gut instinct honed after years of doing the job, and that intuition can be the thing that keeps you and those around you alive. But ‘Not my first rodeo’, can be the hubris of someone who fails to see that conditions have changed and they’re about to get everyone around them killed. How do you know the difference?

We don’t. That’s why we have lieutenants.

Ryan Crayne and I have both found ourselves in situations where, flush with badges and patches from our combat experience, we didn’t have a clue what to do next. Where twenty years of ‘Afghan habits’ were the exact wrong thing we needed to rely on. ‘The wars of the past two decades have produced highly specialized tactics based on niche experiences imparted on many Soldiers, but these may not directly translate to future challenges.’ For me, that came to a head in Baghdad in early 2020. Iran shot ballistic missiles into Iraq and the experienced leaders around me grabbed their rifles and helmets and ran to the rooftop, because for two decades, that’d been the right response.

Lieutenants bring in new ideas and new ways of working. Not everything I learned in college was immediately relevant to my career in the army — though both Econ and Anthropology 101 turned out to be surprisingly impactful. But some of the things I learned had a larger impact than I anticipated.

I was one of only a handful of people who owned a laptop when I joined my platoon back in 2004. This meant there wasn’t really anyone else poised to take advantage of the Garmin GPS track data our battalion’s Soldiers were generating every day as they drove around Ar Ramadi. We built a common road map one track at a time, all downloaded via a USB cable from my personal computer.

In 2008, when I deployed back to Iraq as an XO, we abruptly found ourselves having to communicate with the drone pilots for a mission via mIRC — a chat program from the before times. I was the only person in the headquarters who’d ever used it before, and so I quickly got tasked with teaching the NCOs around me. I had experience, just not the one the army had valued previously.

Ryan Crayne diagnosed this in his article ‘Slick Sleeves.’ ‘Senior leaders who dismiss the talents and skills of the next generation, simply because they have not deployed to these past conflicts, may be doing so out of hubris and bias, influenced by their own experiences in specific types of warfare.’

In his piece Military Writing: The “Lieutenant” Problem, Dan Gomez recounts a mentor’s advice, ‘The Army doesn’t need Platoon Leaders or junior officers; it needs field grade officers. You are there to learn.’ While that outlook certainly reflects the attitude of many army officers I’ve met, it’s also a recipe for organizational stagnation, and goes a long way toward explaining why our army is still mostly data illiterate.

While I did learn from the field grades above me throughout my career, I also didn’t settle for just learning the process. As a lieutenant I found ways to build an onboarding database, and as a junior captain I built tools to automate property accountability. We found a new way to map MEDEVAC coverage and helped find rocket launchers. And I found field grade allies who helped revolutionize the way we shared information and processed paperwork.

My NCO mentors were some of the best the has army ever produced, and they showed me unmatched patience as I slowly learned my craft. But they were also the first ones to show an interest in the new things I knew that could help them. I leveraged my data skills to buy them back hours of time to train with and improved the way they tracked their soldiers. These NCOs became my allies in a drive for change.

In my opinion, one of the most important things junior officers can do is examine the processes around them and see how they can be improved, because when you come back as a field grade, you’ll be the holders of those processes.

The bulk of my generation are now field grade officers. But Millennials and Gen-X didn’t do enough to drive the change the army needs to be ready for the next fight. The Secretary of the Army set out the objective of a ‘data centric’ army able to conduct operations in a contested environment, but we’re over a decade behind realizing third offset’s vision of human-machine teaming. The majority of our leaders still aren’t functionally data literate.

Instead, we’ve handed the mess to Gen-Z, in part because too many of us believed those mentors who told us to ‘shut up and learn’. We were too complacent, too willing to just learn and accept the process, which is why we have programs like DTMS, which even the Chief of Staff loathes. We’ve had some recent small successes, but we need to do more to change the way our force trains, equips, and operates. And we need you junior officers to help us.

Being a junior officer is very much about learning. But just because you’re junior, doesn’t mean you don’t know anything. We require our officers to have college educations because we expect them to know other things, often things the army doesn’t know yet. You are bringing insights straight into the force, and you get to circumvent a whole line of people lining up to kill a new idea because it doesn’t come from a person with the right velcro patch. Data was the thing that made me different. What’s yours?

Being a good leader, regardless of rank, requires two key elements: the humility to know you don’t know everything and the professional impatience to drive change where it’s needed. Embrace your role as both learner and innovator. Learn from the NCOs around you but work hard every day to make their lives better. Think about how you can change your organization for the better.

Well, whatcha gonna do PL?