Staffing the Postmodern Army (2002)

Author Gregory G. Washington contends that the Army's current personnel readiness system is outdated, in part because it was designed for an industrial era that has passed. If the Army is to maintain personnel readiness, it must develop new strategies of personnel management to accommodate influences and realities that imbue 21st-century American society. PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITY of professional military leaders is to advise the government on the importance of maintaining a military force structure that can accomplish the National Command Authority's strategic objectives. Those leaders recognize that three pillars support the fielding of such a force: equipment readiness, resource support, and personnel readiness. Each pillar encompasses myriad subordinate issues. Equipment readiness, for example, includes maintenance; transportation; research and development; and procurement. Resource support includes budgetary, land-usage, and supply issues. Personnel readiness, arguably the most important pillar, includes training, recruiting, retention, promotion, administration, and morale. This article focuses on personnel readiness by considering strategies that have been designed to help the Army achieve a high level of personnel readiness in the postindustrial United States. In February 2000, General Eric K. Shinseki, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, commissioned the Army Training and Leader Development Panel (ATLDP) to determine why record numbers of officers were leaving military service. The Army's senior leaders seemed surprised at the level of dispirit the panel found. Officers were disgruntled and quite clear about the underlying reasons for their dissatisfaction. Most notably, the ATLDP found that officers perceived a significant incongruence between the Army's stated values and its practiced values. This disparity between word and deed is symptomatic of the changes in societal values experienced in the United States in recent years. Ours is a society that is shifting to a perspective, partially as a result of the passing of the industrial era. As society shifts, so too must the Army. What is Postmodern Thinking? The word postmodern is used to represent one of three general frames of reference by which individuals and societies apply meaning to the world around them. Our perceptions of the world around us profoundly affect everything about us, from language and relationships to thoughts and actions. Philosopher Walter Truett Anderson describes the three basic frames of reference using the terms premodern, modern, and postmodern. He contends that society has gradually evolved from premodern thinking and is moving more decidedly into an era of postmodernism.2 In the premodern era, most people were illiterate, which limited their access to information, other than by word of mouth, from authority figures. Religious and political leaders determined what was to be accepted by the masses as truth and reality. Generally speaking, it did not occur to individuals that there could be any way but the right way, the way being what their social leaders dictated. Anderson further explains that, while modern thought was born from those beliefs, modern thinkers accepted that people from other societies held different worldviews.3 People of that time traveled to new places, saw new things, and became enlightened to the fact that some societies were different from their own. While modern thinkers accept that people think differently, they tend to find fault with those differences and believe that the only correct way to perceive the world is from their own societal perspective. The era, on the other hand, tolerates difference and clearly understands that frames of reference determine individual and societal perceptions of reality. People who possess different worldviews attach different meanings to like stimuli. Defining the Postindustrial Era As the modernist, or realist, continuum outlines frames of reference for comprehending reality, the industrial, or technical, continuum refers to business management strategies. …