@jrolli, I wouldn’t say technical competence is less important than command competence, but I also wouldn’t manage our officers exclusively on technical competence. There’s a growing movement in the cyber officer ranks to focus exclusively on technical things and just sort of let leadership things fall where they may. Don’t get me wrong – we need these people and we need to pay them well for their expertise. This is why we have 17D and 26A, and we need to manage them appropriately.

https://xkcd.com/1425/ – I figure we both have a similar disdain for technical incompetence. If we are giving tasks to our Soldiers, we need to have realistic expectations for their feasibility. Similarly, if they push back with how that task or timeline is infeasible, we need to be able to assess that as well. Also, https://i.imgur.com/oZFie9f.gifv

When it comes to 17A, we need to think much bigger as commanders. Commanders brief red. There are only 168 hours in a week, and I’ve got at least 1000 hours of things I want to do myself, let alone to hand to my subordinates. What gets priority? What doesn’t happen? The bar for technical competence is much higher than any one person can reach, and arguably higher than our formations can reach in aggregate. If we don’t groom commanders to engage and maneuver institutions, we’ll continuously be a reactive force scrambling to catch up to the industry.