Tag Archives: leadership

Current Events

The Three “M’s”

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I know the author of this article. We never served together in the same unit, but during our careers we were within shouting distance of one another numerous times. Gary is the kind of Marine with whom I could saddle up to the bar at happy hour on Friday night at the O’ Club and shoot the bull. By that I mean we thought alike, had the same philosophies about Marine issues such as training, conduct, discipline, leadership, and the individual Marine himself. I fully concur with Gary in everything he says in this article. In fact, I would be shocked if any of my readers are not in agreement as well.

In the book I talk about some commands in which I served and one in which I commanded that were prime examples about which Gary is talking. An undisciplined command is like the old saying, an accident waiting for a time and place to happen. My fear is that with the current direction our military is headed accidents will be the daily headline news.

14 Feb 2022
Military.com | By Gary Anderson

 

 

The opinions expressed in this op-ed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Military.com. If you would like to submit your own commentary, please send your article to opinions@military.com for consideration.

Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps colonel. He served as a special adviser to the deputy secretary of defense and as a civilian adviser in Iraq and Afghanistan.

CBS’ 60 Minutes recently broadcast a feature on accidental training deaths in the military. The segment focused on technologies that could reduce fatal vehicle accidents. Training and discipline were barely mentioned.

I think they missed the point.

Most military accidents, in my experience, occur in units with lax discipline and inept leadership. I came to this conclusion early in my Marine Corps career.

As a young first lieutenant platoon commander, I joined a company stationed in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The company was commanded by a former enlisted man who had risen through the ranks by doing well in combat in Vietnam. He believed in hard and realistic training but had a “boys will be boys” attitude regarding off-duty conduct.

The company lacked discipline and had a “cowboy” mentality in the field that troubled me. During a tank-infantry exercise, a Marine who was riding on the back of the lead tank fell off and was killed by a tank that was following behind. He should not have been on the vehicle to begin with.

The next day, the battalion commander called me into his office. His message was curt. “I just fired your company commander. You are the new commander. Square that mob away, or I’ll fire you too.”

I got the picture. I survived that command and went on to a few more over the course of three decades, but the lesson stayed with me. No Marine or sailor under my command ever died or was seriously injured in a training accident or while off duty. Nobody died in combat either, but I write that off to pure dumb luck. I am sure many people who served under me considered me to be a martinet, but all left under their own power, and not feet first.

I encouraged hard training, hand-to-hand combat and live-fire exercises, but all were conducted by the book. Over the years, I studied unit accident rates, and what I found confirmed my earliest observation: An undisciplined unit is an unsafe unit.

As I studied organizations that had poor safety records — and this included aviation units — there were four interrelated signs of underlying safety issues, but all are connected to leadership.

First is a unit’s incident rate. Serious incidents range from automobile accidents to off-duty bar fights.

Second is how commanders deal with such incidents, which one can find by looking at the Unit Punishment Book. If minor infractions are ignored or trivialized, an atmosphere of laxness sets in that tends to permeate the command.

A third indicator is maintenance. A commander can learn a lot about a unit by just walking around. A sloppy work area in a motor pool is a good indication that the little things in maintenance are not being attended to.

Finally, there is the attitude of the commander. “Cowboy” commanders who think that injuries or accidents in training are part of toughening the troops eventually are disasters waiting for an opportunity to happen.

The normal military response to a horrific accident is for higher headquarters to call for a “stand down” to examine safety procedures. This has always seemed to me to be a case of closing the barn door after the horse has escaped. If senior commanders would begin looking at the real causes of problems by spending time talking to the troops and poking around in their workspaces before accidents happen, we might prevent some of these events such as the five recent mishaps aboard the USS Carl Vinson.

One of the primary problems leading to a lack of leadership is command climate surveys. Too many commanders are more concerned with being popular than running tight ships, as the surveys can be critical to their career advancement. Gen. George S. Patton and Adm. William “Bull” Halsey likely would never have survived today’s command climate evaluations.

This brings me back to the Vinson. If the fleet commander would visit the ship and look at the indicators noted in this article, I think that he would find that several, if not all, are present in the Carrier Air Group — if not among the ship’s total complement.

Fortunately, no one has been killed … yet. This does not mean that the commanders are inherently bad, but they probably want more to be liked than respected or feared.

In war, a commander’s job should be to accomplish the mission with the least possible casualties. In peace, it should be to accomplish the mission without killing anybody.

The Three M’s; Mission, Men, Myself

Originally posted 2022-02-15 09:47:59.

Current Events

The Corps Part V

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LOL. This one is funny even if it is a tragedy. I can see it coming. Cpl  Finicnick reports to his company commander that his Lt is an asshole and uses drugs. It matters not that Cpl Finicknick was a Sgt six months ago. OMG This reminds me of the HQMC imposed HumRel classes in 1970  that required us to sit in groups of officers and enlisted and everyone was allowed to say whatever they wanted. LOL, That did not happen in our battalion thanks to Major John I. Hopkins (MajGen, USMC (Ret) Deceased). God Bless him.  But I heard absolute horror stories from my peers from other units.

The Marine Corps wants junior Marines to have a say in who their leaders are

“Beginning in 2022, we will institute 360-degree feedback for leaders, on a pilot basis” says Commandant Berger.

BY  | PUBLISHED NOV 24, 2021 8:51 AM

Junior Marines could help determine whether officers and senior enlisted leaders are selected for promotion as part of the Marine Corps’ efforts to revamp its evaluation process.

Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger is calling for promotion boards to incorporate “360-degree feedback” into their decisions about which leaders will be selected to advance to the next rank.

Berger’s direction on using 360-degree feedback is part of his Talent Management plan, which was released on Nov. 3. The plan also requires the Marine Corps to retain more first-term Marines and creates the possibility that civilians with critical skills could bypass boot camp to join the service.   This will be Part VI, so stay tuned.

Currently, promotion boards largely base those decisions on Marines’ fitness reports, which only include notes on their performance from two of their supervisors, Berger wrote. In some cases, those supervisors do not serve in the same location as the Marines they are evaluating or don’t interact with them often.

“[Three hundred and sixty]-degree feedback, by contrast, includes the perspectives of a larger number of seniors, peers, and juniors and can include unflattering feedback that is prohibited from inclusion in a Marine’s FITREP,” Berger wrote.

This type of evaluation is already in use elsewhere in the Defense Department and it has shown to be effective in “identifying traits of toxic leadership” and helping to reduce the chances that toxic leaders will be promoted, according to Berger’s plan.

“Beginning in 2022, we will institute 360-degree feedback for leaders, on a pilot basis,” Berger wrote. “This feedback will be made available to the Marine and their reporting senior, with the aim of encouraging leadership growth. No later than 2024, we will incorporate 360-degree feedback into the selection board and assignments processes to ensure that this important input is properly considered by those selecting and assigning our future leaders.”

The Marine Corps has looked for lessons from business leaders as well as other military branches as it developed the pilot program for the 360-degree reviews, said Yvonne Reed-Carlock, a spokeswoman for Manpower and Reserve Affairs.

“The purpose of implementing 360-degree leadership reviews is to equip Marine leaders with real, honest feedback to identify their hidden strengths and unidentified weaknesses and to provide them with professional coaching to further develop and advance the capabilities of our force,” Reed-Carlock said. “To accomplish this, the pilot will solicit input from a Marine’s seniors, peers and subordinates to fully inform the picture provided to the Marine.”

The pilot program early next year is expected to include about 200 people to fine-tune the questions leaders are asked and to make sure that the right type of feedback is collected, said Lt. Col. Jim Armstrong, who works for the Marine Corps’ Manpower Management Division.

The Marines taking part in the pilot program will be field grade officers – majors, lieutenant colonels, and colonels – as well as senior enlisted leaders such as master sergeants and sergeants major, said Armstrong, who serves as the operations officer for the officer assignments branch.

Based on the pilot program’s results, Marines at other ranks and leadership positions could also receive 360-degree feedback, Armstrong said.

A 360-degree evaluation system is meant to prevent the promotion of senior leaders who may later be deemed unfit to command, such as one colonel who asked a former captain if she had been drinking before she was raped rather than referring her to trained staff for help. More robust performance evaluations may have also identified a brigadier general as a toxic leader before his subordinates reported him to the Department of Defense Inspector General’s Office, which determined that he had “disparaged, bullied, humiliated them, and devalued women.” 

For years, proponents have been calling for the Marine Corps to adopt a 360-degree evaluation system, but other military branches such as the Navy and the Air Force have used this type of feedback sparingly and for certain leaders and civilian executives.

After the Fiscal 2014 National Defense Authorization Act required the defense secretary to look into using this sort of feedback in evaluations, a study from the RAND Corporation recommended against doing so. Wow, sanity from the RAND Corporation for a change.
A sergeant instructor, evaluates officer candidates during close order drill at Marine Corps Officer Candidates School aboard Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, June 21, 2019. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Phuchung Nguyen)

Many of the people whom RAND interviewed for the study, including experts within the Department of Defense, said they did not feel that 360-degree feedback was the best tool to combat toxic leadership, especially in cases where toxic leaders had no desire to change their ways.

“Participants again pointed to other ways of finding these people that would be much more cost-effective (such as through anonymous reporting channels, climate surveys, informal discussion, or inspector general complaints),” the study says.

While federal agencies have used 360-degree feedback as part of coaching and mentoring, the government as a whole – including the Defense Department – has been reluctant to include this type of feedback for promotions, said Katie Kuzminski, a senior fellow and director of the Military, Veterans, and Society Program at the Center for a New American Security think tank in Washington, D.C.

“There was a fear that if the [360-degree feedback] were used for promotions or true evaluations as opposed to personal development that there could be some challenges with that – particularly if your peers in your unit are also your competition: There would be a way to skew the outcomes to make yourself look good by making someone else look bad,” Kuzminski said.

Berger is going much further than the rest of the military by looking at how the Marine Corps can use this type of feedback for promotions, she said.

“I do think that if any service can take the lead on this front, I think it would be the Marine Corps,” Kuzminski said. “Just from a cultural perspective, I think the real value that they place on taking care of fleet really matters – and certainly for more senior positions, there’s this saying that you hear from senior folks: If you had a helicopter full of 10 general officers in the Marine Corps crash today, you would have equally high competitive talent remaining to replace them.” Really? In today’s Corps? Hell that may even help save us. Let’s make it a C-130 with 50 on board. LOL Just kidding, of course.
I trust everyone caught the name of this new plan; the “Talent Management Plan..” That says it all; when was the last time you heard anything coming out in the Corps dealing with “management.” In my day that word was toxic to Marines. Oh well, just another day in the “New” Corps. When will it end? Surely this action will help recruiting; just knowing they can have an effect on their mean Gunny should help. 

Originally posted 2021-11-28 08:33:35.

Recent Posts

Smarter Privates,

18 Comments

but what about the NCO’s

Oh my Lord. What’s next? So, we will have a bunch of privates who have their own idea how to conduct this squad sized patrol, ambush, raid, etc. We are talking about teenagers, 17-18-year old private’s. Lord please help them for they know not what they are doing. What do you think Marines. Oh the joy of being retired! I can’t believe they are doing this at SOI for privates. Please read on and would love to hear your comments. Who knows, maybe I am just an old fart who hasn’t kept up with the times?

From the Stars and Stirpes. This is factual Marines

Marine Corps seeks to make ‘smarter’ infantry force with new course

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marine Sgt. Alec Escalante, a squad instructor with Alpha Company, Infantry Training Battalion, School of Infantry-West, moves a chess piece during a class on how chess correlates with battle tactics, as part of the first week of the Infantry Marine Course at SOI-West on Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, Calif., Jan. 27, 2021.
ANDREW CORTEZ/U.S. MARINE CORPS

The Marine Corps is ditching some of its formation marches and adding board games to a new, longer entry-level infantry training course aimed at creating Marines who can better think and act for themselves.

The Infantry Marine Course pilot program launched last month at the service’s School of Infantry-West on Camp Pendleton, Calif., where instructors were pictured instructing new Marines on how chess relates to battlefield tactics. The course focuses less on micromanagement and more on individual responsibility, the service said in a statement.

“Rote memorization, instant obedience to orders are good for certain things, and they’re not getting thrown away from this course,” Chief Warrant Officer 3 A.J. Pasciuti, the training battalion’s gunner, said in Friday’s statement. “We’re just going a step further, and understanding that the individual — and a collective of individuals — is what wins in combat.”

The new course was developed over a year and is based on Commandant Gen. David Berger’s plan for revamping the service for future conflicts.

Under Berger’s vision, grunts will be expected to fight in small units that will be highly mobile and independent, and often dispersed far from headquarters. The new course is aimed at giving rookie Marines the tactical and cognitive skills to act on their own, and takes a “fundamentally different approach” than its eight-week predecessor, the Corps said.

“To be more dispersed and more precise, we need privates now that can operate by themselves and don’t have to be told and shown where to go all the time,” said Lt. Col. Walker Koury, the training battalion’s commander.

The unit’s Alpha Company is taking the course first before a second one launches at Camp Lejeune, N.C., later this spring. It’s expected to alternate two more cycles between the east and west coasts before being finalized next year, the statement said.

Already about double the length of the course it’s meant to replace, the pilot is expected to eventually grow to 18 weeks, USNI News reported late last year. The added time and a dedicated combat instructor to lead each squad of 14 Marines allows for more practical application and repetitions, the service said in its statement.

Reflecting the transition from the industrial era to the information age, the Marine Corps’ seeks to shift from creating what Koury described to USNI News as “automatons” to what Pascuiti has called “autonomous Marines.”

“Through freedom of thought and freedom of action … they’ll have a higher level of understanding,” Pasciuti said. “Rather than ‘Do a thing because I said so,’ it’s ‘get to a fundamental end state, and here are the tools that can help you achieve that goal.’”

After initial training on a topic, Marines will be expected to apply their own thinking the next time it comes up. Instead of following itemized gear lists and being marched where they need to be, they’ll be expected to be more responsible for themselves throughout the course.

Playing chess is meant to encourage them to think about their actions in a complex environment. They’ll also no longer be trained in terms of narrow specialties such as rifleman, machine gunner, mortarman or anti-tank missileman, but instead will be expected to be proficient in every company-level weapon by graduation.

“The infantry Marine of the future will be able to do all (the skills of the specialties) and understand when and where that skill needs to be applied,” said Staff Sgt. Jude Stewart, the lead marksmanship instructor for Alpha Company.

During the first nine weeks, trainees will learn individual skills in weapons handling, land navigation and radio communications, mainly using the M27 Infantry Automatic Rifle.

Later weeks of the training will focus on testing the Marines’ knowledge while they work in fire teams and squads, learning to patrol over complex terrain and employ fire and maneuver tactics. Students also will lead several force-on-force actions during the latter phase.

“What we have to recognize is these young Marines, through a collective of individuals, will win the day for us,” Pasciuti said.

OKAY, let me have it, tell me I’m all screwed up.

Originally posted 2021-02-24 16:56:29.

Current Events

Leader of the Free World?

Video 6 Comments

Okay folks here he is without the teleprompter telling us – – – – – –  I don’t know what he is telling us, other than the fact he is sick. Should we feel sorry for him? I think not.  He chose to run for the job. The DNC needed a puppet, and he was their obvious choice. Any of the others running had a mind of their own, Joe did not and they knew it. Can you see the DNC telling Sanders what to do and say? They hid him in his basement only letting him out periodically for well planned events. I assume some of the “legal” votes he garnered were sympathy votes. I believe those who seriously voted democrat were, in fact, voting for the Ho. Can you imagine him meeting with world leaders and discussing issues like nuclear disarmament, trade agreements, etc.? I still cannot accept the theory the majority of Americans voted for this fellow. .

Originally posted 2020-12-31 08:59:49.