http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/07/30/sergeants/index.html
A Salon investigation reveals that a shortage of skilled sergeants
has led to dubious promotions for inexperienced soldiers -- even
jeopardizing some operations in Iraq.
By Bill Sasser
7/30/08
FORT HOOD, Texas -- America's military commitment in Iraq and
Afghanistan is certain to remain a key issue in the presidential race
-- and soon that could include renewed focus on a "stretched thin"
U.S. Army. According to a Salon investigation, the Army is facing a
troubling shortage of qualified sergeants, the noncommissioned
officers considered to be the backbone of training and combat
operations. In fact, a new Army policy intended to boost this
critical leadership corps of NCOs has prompted a wave of promotions
for apparently unqualified soldiers -- and even jeopardized some
combat operations in Iraq.
In essence, an Army policy implemented in 2005 and expanded this year
lowered the bar for enlisted soldiers with the rank of E-4 to gain
the rank of sergeant, or E-5, by diminishing the vetting process.
According to more than a half dozen current and former Army sergeants
interviewed by Salon, the policy has produced sergeants who are not
ready to lead. In some cases, soldiers were promoted even after being
denied advancement by their own unit commanders. While awarding a
promotion once required effort on the part of a commander, those
interviewed say, the Army's current policy actually requires effort
to prevent a promotion, and has had negative consequences on the battlefield.
A sergeant interviewed recently at Ft. Hood for this article
recounted how he watched his commander feed the promotion papers for
one E-4 through a shredder shortly before their unit deployed to Iraq
in 2006. After two months in the field, that solider and another E-4
who had also been passed over for promotion were automatically
promoted to sergeant anyway, despite their commander's earlier
judgment. Problems soon arose during a combat patrol involving
"action on contact," an encounter with the enemy in which fire is
exchanged. "These two NCOs were immature and not ready as far as
leading other soldiers, and there were some 'oh shit' moments," said
the sergeant, who asked not to be identified and declined to provide
specific details about the combat incident because of security
restrictions. "We had to have a powwow and pull back on what was
going on. Fortunately, no casualties occurred."
The newly promoted E-5s, he said, also had problems with calling in
reports from the field -- which, in a combat scenario, could involve
such life and death decisions as requesting suppressive fire or
determining if an area is safe for medical helicopters to land. "We
had to spend a lot of time counseling and mentoring these new E5s in
the field," he said. "They have their sergeant rank and they still
have a lot to learn."
Sgt. Colin Sesek, a medic in the 82nd Airborne Division who returned
from a 15-month deployment to Iraq in November 2007, said automatic
promotions affected both the morale and effectiveness of medical
units in which he served and in combat units he observed. "There was
an E-4 in my platoon who was very disorganized and didn't care about
anyone else -- he always delegated down the line, even when it was
his job to do," said Sesek. "I'm trying to think of the civilian
equivalent of how to describe him -- 'shit bag' is what we called
him. He had been in the Army for a while and boom, he got paper
boarded" -- a term referring to the Army's expedited promotions
process. "When I heard he got promoted I said, yep, that's the only
way he would have gotten it."
Sesek said the promotion had wider effects within his unit, as other
platoon leaders followed this example and began promoting their own
E4s without hesitation. "In infantry platoons, too, I saw people get
promoted who shouldn't have been. The squad leaders told me, 'Well,
if that screwup in that platoon got promoted, then we'll promote ours too.'"
After six years of war, with multiple tours of duty commonplace, the
Army continues struggling to retain and recruit quality soldiers.
After failing to meet its recruitment goals in 2005, the Army
undertook measures to boost its numbers, with some success. That
included stop-loss orders (compulsory postponement of retirements),
bonuses of up to $50,000 for re-enlisting, and the loosening of
standards on criminal backgrounds, education and age. It also began
automatically promoting enlisted personnel with the rank of E-4 to
sergeant, or E-5 in the Army's hierarchy of service ranks, based on a
soldier's time in service, while waiving a requirement that
candidates for E-5 appear before a promotions board.
Under the current policy, after 48 months of service E-4s serving in
military specialties with shortages are automatically placed on a
promotions list. Although a soldier's name can be removed by his or
her commander, each month that soldier's name is placed back on the
list. This was termed "automatic list integration" by the Army (or
what the soldiers call "paper boarding"). This April, the policy was
expanded to include promotions to staff sergeant, or E-6.
Sgt. Selena Coppa, a communications specialist in the 105th Military
Intelligence Battalion, said she has noted a marked lowering of
standards for E-4s being promoted to sergeant. "The doctrine now is
that you just need to be trainable, and people who are not competent
and not good leadership material are being promoted," said Coppa, who
has expressed her concerns through unit performance surveys and
spoken directly to her superiors. "A sergeant major told me, 'Yes,
you're right, but there's nothing I can do about it.'"
Lt. Col. Anne Edgecomb, branch chief for the Army personnel team at
the Department of Defense, explained in an interview with Salon that
the Army was short 1,549 sergeants, mostly in combat occupations,
when the policy was implemented in February 2005. It has reduced the
number of NCO occupational specialties with shortages by 74 percent
since then, according to Edgecomb. She added that in many cases
promotions are awarded to E-4s who, due to manpower shortages, are
already doing the work of E-5s. "The policy does not change Army
standards for promotion," said Edgecomb. "Commanders have the
responsibility to stop a potential promotion when they determine a
soldier is not trained or is in some way unqualified in accordance
with standards."
Perhaps no part of the U.S. military has carried as heavy a burden in
Iraq as Army sergeants, who directly train, mentor, discipline and
lead boots-on-the-ground soldiers. After years of war, many of the
Army's most experienced sergeants have retired, left the service,
transferred to noncombat posts, or are recovering from battlefield injuries.
"Army NCOs lead on a very personal level and are the backbone of how
the U.S. Army is run," says Lt. Col. Gian Gentile, a former commander
in the 4th Infantry Division who teaches military history at West
Point. "In combat specialties such as armor and infantry, doing two
to three tours is having an effect on NCOs. They have been through a
lot and it puts tremendous stress on them and their families."
The current promotion policy is causing some doubts and bitterness
among veteran NCOs. "If these guys don't work for it and you give it
to them, we're not making leaders, we're making stripe wearers," says
Staff Sgt. Charles Bunyard, a senior scout in the 1st Cavalry
Division at Ft. Hood who commands a unit of Bradley fighting vehicles.
Bunyard has over 15 years of service in the Army, including two
deployments to Iraq, where he survived nearly a dozen IED blasts, was
grazed in the head by a sniper's bullet and broke a leg in three
places in a training accident. Sent home last year from Diyala
province after suffering a dislocated shoulder and a severe
concussion in an IED attack, he was diagnosed with post-traumatic
stress disorder and traumatic brain injury. But after five months of
recuperation, he was cleared by Army doctors to return to duty and
has volunteered for a third combat tour.
At Ft. Hood, Bunyard is spending 16-hour days training his squad of
new recruits for their first deployment later this year. Married and
the father of five children, several months ago he stopped going to
his scheduled doctor and therapy appointments, which he says
interfered with his duties. "I have a large responsibility to these
guys, and when I'm gone I'm cheating them out of leadership and ways
to learn better," said Bunyard, who still has memory problems and
sometimes speaks with a slur as a result of his brain injury.
While the Army needs thousands of new NCOs to replenish the existing
ranks, thousands more are also needed as the force expands. The Army
plans to add 65,000 soldiers to its ranks by 2010, as declared by
President Bush in his State of the Union Address in January 2007.
Quality and morale issues notwithstanding, official figures from the
Defense Department on re-enlistment show that the Army has exceeded
its retention goals for the past three years. But the planned
expansion will only increase the Army's need for NCOs and junior
officers, who have also been leaving the military in waves. A
shortage of qualified NCOs is tied to a shortage of junior officers,
as many of the latter choose not to re-enlist, says Gentile. "The
Army has holes in its officer corps as well, and enlisted soldiers
who would have become NCOs -- the cream of the crop -- are going to
Officer Candidate School rather than becoming sergeants," he
explained. According to Gentile, who served two combat tours in Iraq,
it's now not uncommon to see 26-year-olds with seven years of service
who are sergeants first class in charge of a platoon of 30 soldiers.
Before the war, he says, achieving that rank would have taken twice as long.
Some military experts doubt the force's capability at present,
particularly if it is needed to perform on a third war front. Two
former undersecretaries of defense for personnel question the ability
of the all-volunteer Army to meet its manpower needs in coming years.
"Our volunteer Army was not set up to fight a long war," says
Lawrence Korb, who served in that role in the Reagan administration.
"The idea was that an active Army would fight when needed and the
National Guard and Reserve were on standby as a ready reserve.
They've all been in constant rotation for over five years, and we no
longer have a reserve. What we're doing is mortgaging the future of
our Army." Edward Dorn, who served in the Clinton administration,
sees trouble on the horizon. "I think an increase of 65,000 by 2010
is out of reach with a volunteer force, unless you have a very
significant downturn in the economy," he said.
Not all E-4s are eager for automatic promotions to sergeant,
according to Bandon Neely, who served in a military police battalion
at Ft. Hood before leaving the service May 2005. When the policy
began in 2005, the Army also had begun to impose stop-loss orders to
prevent sergeants from leaving the service, "so a lot of E-4s did not
want it," Neely said. "Guys were being put up for promotion who
refused to take it."
Patrick Campbell, a sergeant in the District of Columbia's National
Guard who was recently awarded an automatic promotion, said he has
seen both the benefits and drawbacks of the policy. Campbell, who
served as a combat medic in Iraq in 2004 to 2005, said battlefield
experience quickly turned new sergeants into competent leaders.
"Being in combat forces you to learn fast -- your life depends on
it," he said. "At the same time, leadership training is needed but
it's being delayed because of the pressure of deployments. If you
promote people without training, what does it mean to be a sergeant?"
John Hagedorn, a sergeant who served in 2007 as a forward observer in
the 82nd Airborne Division assigned to an artillery unit in Tikrit,
said the high rate of NCO promotions disrupted the chain of command
in the platoons to which he was attached. Out of 70 personnel in
three platoons, only five soldiers returned without having been
promoted to sergeant, he said.
"The artillery soldiers I was assigned to would normally be operating
105-mm Howitzer canons, but most of them had no idea how to fire
one," said Hagedon, 23, who served 15 months in Iraq under stop-loss
orders and left the Army after his return in 2007. "The guys who were
promoted to E-5 would normally be the crew chief in charge of one of
these guns, and when they came home they were thrust into the
position where they were untrained in their mission. They would be
transferred to other posts and would get somewhere else and not know
how to use the gun."
Sgt. Hagedon's experience points to a problem documented by an
internal Pentagon report co-authored this year by Lt. Col. Gentile.
The report, which raises concerns that the Army's current focus on
counterinsurgency has weakened its ability to fight conventional
wars, cites among other statistics that 90 percent of Army artillery
units are unqualified to fire their weapons accurately -- the lowest
rating in history.
In Iraq, Sgt. Hagedon said, "All those promotions lessened the
significance of being in a position of leadership. It brought junior
leaders down to Joe Private level and stole thunder from the older
NCOs, who didn't like seeing all these young guys getting promoted so fast."
Hagedon said consideration of leadership potential played no part in
the promotion process, as the new policy created pressure on senior
sergeants to promote, regardless of performance. "If all the other
E4s are getting promoted, it will look bad if you don't promote your
guy," he said. "And if everyone else is getting it, they don't want
to cut an E4 out of the pay raise you get -- $200 a month."
The result in the platoons he observed was a breakdown in the chain
of command, which followed the soldiers home: "There was really no
difference between the enlisted guys and the junior leadership [in
Iraq]. They're hanging out together, being buddies, not like back in
the U.S. where the NCOs are constantly correcting soldiers of a
lesser rank. Then you come home to a training environment like Ft.
Bragg and it's a problem. You can't be hanging out drinking beer with
the enlisted guys one night and chewing their ass out the next
morning. You end up showing favoritism."
Such concerns may be exacerbating morale problems caused by multiple
deployments. In Hagedon's own platoon of forward observers from the
82nd Airborne, only two out of 12 sergeants chose to remain in the
Army when their enlistment ended.
Sgt. Major Tom Gills, chief of Army enlisted promotions, says that
the current policy has returned promotion rates to what the Army had
prior to the end of the Cold War. "Over the years, individual units
had adopted their own standards that were higher than official
standards," he said. "A lower and lower percentage of soldiers were
going before promotion boards. Through the 1980s, 25 percent of
soldiers were going up for promotion, while until recently only 5
percent were coming up for promotion."
But Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel who served in Vietnam and
now teaches U.S. military history and foreign policy at Boston
University, said soldiers in the all-volunteer Army will continue to
be overtaxed, even with the planned expansion. The strength and
morale of noncommissioned officers, he said, has always been a
critical measure of the Army. "When the Army began to fall apart
during Vietnam one of the red flags was the deterioration of the NCO
corps," said Bacevich. "Experienced NCOs began leaving in large
numbers, and the Army tried to make up for it with 'shake and bake
NCOs' -- enlisted men who went through a 90-day school. It didn't
work very well and it didn't stop the erosion."
Bacevich, whose son, 1st Lt. Andrew J. Bacevich, served in the 1st
Cavalry Division and was killed in Iraq in 2007, added, "We don't
have an Army that is large enough to continue with this sustained
rate of deployment, particularly if some other conflict arises
elsewhere. The best solution I see is to lessen our commitments abroad."
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