Captains' Exodus Has Army Fearing for Future (Washington Post)
By Roberto Suro
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 16, 2000; Page A02
The Army is losing captains and other junior officers at such an alarming rate that it could have trouble filling leadership positions within two or three years, according to a new report circulating among senior commanders.
More money and earlier chances for promotion have not helped. During the fiscal year that ended last month, the attrition rate among captains accelerated despite pay increases and other incentives to keep them in uniform, senior Army officials said. More than 11 percent of the Army's captains decided to leave the service over the past year, continuing a trend that began in fiscal 1997, when the attrition rate was less than 8 percent, the officials said.
The exodus of captains, at nearly twice the rate considered acceptable in the early 1990s, is a highly sensitive, even embarrassing, difficulty for the Army command and has become all the more so because it is an issue in the presidential campaign. Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, and his colleagues are anxious to address the problem as soon as possible without getting caught up in the partisan fray, senior officers said.
Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the Republican candidate, cites the retention problems as proof that the military has decayed under the Clinton administration and promises salary increases and health benefits to reverse the trend. Vice President Gore counters by pointing to pay raises and other initiatives undertaken by the administration, and the Democrat also promises more spending for the future.
In recent surveys conducted by the Army and outside experts, young officers have loudly complained about unpredictable reassignments and repeated deployments away from home as an important factors driving them out of the service. Shinseki will unveil new initiatives to deal with the "turbulence" problem during a speech Tuesday to the annual convention of the Association of the United States Army, according to senior Army officers.
All of the services have had trouble retaining officers in recent years, but elsewhere the problems are more concentrated among individuals, such as pilots and computer specialists, with skills that are highly marketable in the civilian economy. As a matter of both pride and policy, attrition has hit the Army harder because the exodus is not strictly correlated with outside opportunities but reflects a widespread disillusionment with the service among junior officers.
The Army started the new fiscal year this month with about 1,300 fewer officers than its personnel goals called for; the biggest shortage was among the approximately 20,000 captains, according to still unpublished statistics. If the trend continues to accelerate, the Army will not be able to sustain staffing levels within two or three years, according to officers familiar with a recent briefing for some senior commanders. The shortage of junior officers will soon hit the crisis stage if the Army wins approval for plans to expand its ranks by as many as 40,000 soldiers.
"You can't create new units unless you have the officers to lead them, and you can't make captains overnight. It takes years to grow them," said a retired general officer familiar with internal deliberations on the attrition crisis.
For personnel management purposes, the Army organizes its officer corps into cohorts according to the year an individual gained his or her commission. Over the long term, it counts on a gradual reduction in each cohort to ensure that there is an adequate crop of candidates for promotion at each stage up a narrowing pyramid of ranks until there are just a few hundred left competing to become generals.
Since 1997, the Army has experienced growing attrition among the cohorts that became officers during the first half of the 1990s. Roughly four to 10 years after joining the officer corps, these captains, who are in their late twenties or early thirties, usually command companies of some 175 soldiers or are training in a specialty so they can take staff jobs after promotion to the rank of major.
The losses in the cohorts that make up the more veteran captains – those who earned their commissions in 1990 and 1993 – are already severe enough to generate concern that the Army will lack the desired number of candidates for promotion as these cohorts become eligible for higher ranks if the current trend continues, according to officials familiar with the latest projections.
"If we, as senior leaders, do not take action now to turn this around, we may not be able to meet our future requirements," said Gen. John M. Keane, the vice chief of staff, in a bulletin to senior commanders last spring, when the attrition rate among captains stood at 10.6 percent.
Concern has mounted in recent weeks because the attrition rate continued to climb despite pay increases, administrative changes designed to give junior officers more career flexibility and Keane's letter, which urged commanders to make the retention of captains a top priority.
The Army is trying to make up for the shortage of captains with steps such as making some lieutenants eligible for promotion to captain earlier than before, loosening some selection criteria for promotion and requiring officers to give more advance notice before they can leave the service.
Other initiatives have aimed at the disillusionment that young officers have expressed. Keane's letter, for example, notes complaints about the greater workload put on young officers because the Army is deploying more often even as it is still adjusting to the reduction in strength that followed the end of the Cold War. Some of the new initiatives to be announced this week are designed to make life more predictable and stable for soldiers of all ranks, but there are other problems that will be more difficult to address.
"Additionally, we increasingly hear from these captains that they are frustrated by what they perceive as a 'zero defects' mentality and a resulting culture of micro-management," Keane wrote. While captains – especially those in command of companies – are anxious to take on responsibilities, senior officers obsessed with ensuring that nothing goes wrong on their watch constantly interfere, Keane said.
Job dissatisfaction ranked equally with a perceived incompatibility between Army service and family life as reasons cited for leaving the service in a survey of captains completed by the Army Research Institute earlier this year. Nearly a third of those surveyed said they were undecided about staying in the Army or already had plans to leave.
Those who leave are widely considered by their peers to be among the best officers, the survey found. While abundant job opportunities in the civilian economy enable captains to leave, the survey found that pay and concerns about financial well-being were not a major cause of attrition.
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