Hope is not a course of action.

Quote from a CPT in Special Forces whose Special Forces team spearheaded the attack against the major Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan, the fall of which marked the collapse of the Taliban regime. An Academy grad.

The job of army officers is the repetitive exercise of discretionary judgement.
In order to do this they must build up the abstract knowledge in their heads that deals exclusively with the leadership of people, of human beings.

Bureaucratization takes away the initiative from the officers.
If the Army wants to transform, they need to move away from the bureaucratic model of efficiency, to the professional model of effectiveness.
The Army must be a profession because bureaucracies cannot create expert knowledge.
Professions have an ethic, and that ethic builds cohesion.

Two quotes from a retired COL who is now a prominet scholar in the field of American Civil-Military Relations and the Army as a Profession. An Academy grad who served three tours in Vietnam as a Special Forces officer and worked in the Joint Chiefs under GEN Powell.

[Posted by a West Point Cadet]

AMDG