Bias in Military Decision Making
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- Опубліковано 7 лют 2025
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On the face of it, military decision making attempts to appear unbiased and merit-based. That means on a large scale bias has to be kept out. But that large "unbiased-ness" creates room for some small acts of bias.
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Note: The views expressed in this video are the presenter's and do not represent the policy or guidance of the Department of Defense or its subordinate elements.
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Guess the 4-star who put his finger on the battalion command assessment program selection process recently wasn't quite subtle enough. ;-)
100%...That's a great example of someone "Tilting".
I admit, my "sampling" of the US Army was a very limited, unusual and poorly timed 2 years, 9 months and 6 hours, 1968-1971. My very best officers were from the ROTC or surviving OCS lineages. I think Chuck hit the key factor: sticking around long enough to acclimate fully to the "military mind."
Thanks for the comment.
So when the really senior brass is putting their thumb ever so slightly on the scales for the junior level brass, what is their motivation? What to they want besides merit? That’s the real question you need to figure out. Control for “doing a good job” and see what’s the next most correlated variable. Keep going till you get to the “unfair” factors and then you can see how much marrying the 3 stars daughter helps you and how much calling out “The emperor has no clothes.” hurts.
When it comes to senior brass influencing the real junior folks, I honestly think it is a combination of some vague sense that they "should" be "helping" people and a bit of "that looks like me when I was young".
I think that 'the system' gives West Pointers the benefit of the doubt, at least early in their careers. A GO I worked for had this bias towards West Pointers (he is one). I also saw this at consulting firms when interviewing newly minted MBAs. If you were an Ivy League grad and had a not so good first interview, they gave you a pass to the next round anyway. Two bad interviews and you were done.
@andrewyoung7675...you make a lot of good points. I particularly like that final one about "two bad interviews and you were done". Letting someone get away with a bad interview IS a bias, but in the end the organization can't tolerate someone who never does well.
I suspect, but have not Googled around about it, that the percentage of USMA grads at the GO ranks used to be higher than it is today. These (perhaps once correct) observations tend to take a LONG time to weed out of the groupthink/perception.
Assignments/duty positions, and how well you do in them, seems to be the overall consideration for both NCOs and Os. I laugh when I hear the Army talk about stabilizing folks for 5 years in duty assignments. There are few places where this actually works, and you have to be aggressive in getting that next career enhancing position. OERs/NCOERs are very important, but so is variety of assignment and duty position. This has to be actively managed by YOU. Add in joint assignment requirements, functional areas etc. and you have quite a gamut to navigate.
And yes, proximity and the right mentors are indeed a factor.
I share your suspicion about "stabilizing" folks. I doubt that it has long term benefits for the individual and even if it does it only serves to make them a bit of a one trick pony.
And for full disclosure, I include myself in that assessment. I showed up at the Pentagon in 2009 and retired in 2023 and the only time I left the puzzle palace was for a short deployment and War College. I managed to get promoted, but I was well aware that I was a pentagon shaped peg that only fit in pentagon shaped holes.
@@the_bureaucrat Yep. You can include long time residents of Fort Liberty (Bragg) in that as well. For them it's a real transition to a leg unit - especially if overseas. Not all, but enough.
Not what I expected...but this is a caustic system nonetheless. Promotion by zero failures is a serious bias flaw.
Analogously, let's say that "the best" pilots will be selected as instructors before promotion as general officers. Now, we further define "the best" pilots as those pilots who return with undamaged aircraft. Aircraft are expensive, right? So, it seems reasonable that we'd prefer zero failures by pilots - that's certainly the case for commercial airline pilots!
Yet this meritocracy system avoids all risk. It ignores the contribution of daring pilots who risk it all to shoot down enemy aircraft (equally valuable) or save the bombers or provide close support to ground troops. All of that is high-risk behavior. And in this meritocracy system, ALL RISK IS BAD!
What happens? The "good" pilots who take zero risk and contribute essentially nothing to warfighting are promoted to instructor roles. In those schools these instructors sternly caution and counsel their subordinate student officers against taking risks as a combat pilot. And for their loyalty, many of these instructors are later selected for promotion to general officer, where again they implement policies against taking risk in combat. Zero failures!
I'll argue this analogous model is exactly the malignant system the US Army is using to promote ALL LEADERS. And the Army has been on this trend for the past +70 years. Warfare demands risk-taking. Yes, risk assessment and risk mitigation - but only in as much as we TAKE THE RISK! But in the US Army, taking risk is the end of your career path.
Dr. Christopher E. Larsen
Veteran, US Army Infantry Senior NCO
Author, The Small Unit Tactics SMARTbook (The Lightning Press)
Dr. Larson, I watched your videos over and over, so thank you. In support of what you state,
my older cousin served in Vietnam as a door gunner. When he got there, he had a choice of crews he could fly with. One aircraft was full of bullet holes, the other not so much. Using his blue-collar comon sence, he picked the shot up helicopter, and you obviously know why. He made it home. The other crew didn't. May they rest in peace. I can't believe the US army doesn't know this. The mill. academy's a stocked full of kids who are naturally compliant.They have never even been in a street fight. They make wonderful cogs in a hierarchy, so they are promoted. In business, they are called empty suits/ yes-men. Look at what happened to Kodak Corp as a result of this or even General Clark in Italy during WW2.
@christopherlarsen7788 Thank you for career & contributions to the awareness of the challenges the US faces in promoting GO's who must interface with a variety of civilian Executive Branch politicians. (Vuetnam Vet 1969-1970)
@gregorybrennan8539 Thank you for your thoughts. Perceived "Risk/Reward" calculations are a tough decision process when blending clearly opposing goals. I'm thinking of political career builders, military industrial complex lobbyists, and then upwardly promotion-oriented officers versus effective battle-winners.
@@gregorybrennan8539 - Agreed. It pains me. I'd rather be wrong about this...but my experiences have taught me otherwise. The military punishes success. Instead, it redefines zero risk as "success."
Outstanding viewpoint! Thank you for telling the truth.Hooah!
A certain amount of luck also helps. And avoiding recruiting command.
Oh yeah...recruiting command is like playing roulette with your career.
@@the_bureaucrat The recruiting officer who recruits a division's worth of troops gets as much credit as the one that brews a General's coffee just one time. The officer that screws up in recruiting command might as well have punched a General.
I remember reading an article a lot of years ago about the reverse, prejudice in the military. The bad kind, racial prejudice. The results of a study came out as you might expect: prejudice in the military exists but it was less prevalent than in the general public. And going down the structure it was less at command level than in the general military, less at division level that at command level, etc all the way down to least prevalent at company level. They never sited a reason but I always suspected it was the root of any prejudice is “us vs them” and the closer we get to where the rubber meets the road the definition of”us” changes. If you wear the uniform, you’re one of “us.” If you wear the unit patch, you’re one of us. Etc.
@santamanone, I've always attributed that lack of prejudice to "readiness". When someone first joins the military, they might be carrying some cultural baggage about different groups of people. But once you're in the motorpool trying to get a Bradley back to 10/20 standards, you start measuring people by what they can get done...not some visible quality. I remember when DOMA came along and we switched from Don't Ask Don't Tell...slowly you learned who was gay or lesbian and frankly no one cared because the real question was "Can you get the mission done?".
BLUF, “Just because your in the Army…doesnt mean you know of the Army.”
Things go on behind close doors that aren't public knowledge. Nothing we can do about the favoritism, family lineage etc.
Well said. The favoritism will always exist and we peons just have to navigate around it.
@@the_bureaucrat The struggle remains real for us peons. All we can do is continue to teach others that are coming up in the system.
The HR department is universally staffed by Karens.
Do you think they get assigned there because they are Karens or become Karens due to the assignement?
I never saw any real difference in ability in officers regardless of how they got their commission. Although fresh out of West Point Lieutenants tended to be a bit "green". But as for Army preference and bias I don't think there's any doubt, at least when I was in 30-35 years ago. I was told point blank by a lot of people how it was and that West Point had first choice of promotion/assignment/etc. And I never ran across a non West Point Grad that moved higher than Lt. Col. Although I'm sure it did happen.
It can be done. My dad retired in ‘73 as an O6 after serving 30 years and rising through the ranks from PVT to Tech Sgt (now SFC) before being appointed a WO then direct commissioned.
ROTC regularly get above LTC these days and into the GO ranks. Although I will say that prior service often have enough time in service that they can avoid all the BS and walk away with a nice paycheck.
@@the_bureaucrat in ‘73, when dad retired, he was making just under $20k in retired pay, by the time he passed his retired pay was just over $90k. Needless to say he never received a red cent for his 50% disability…
I knew lieutenants who were promoted to captains because they had a pulse
Sometimes all it takes is being educationally qualified.
This issue begs the question; How much bias, if any is given to the grads of the quasi academies? The Citadel, V.M.I., etc?
@santamanone, I gotta do something about the Senior Military Colleges. I won't be able to answer your question because I don't have the number of LTs coming out of those schools. My experience was that SMC grads got less of a boost from their network and more from the fact that they were accustom to "uniformed life".
@ The senior military colleges sound like an interesting topic. I’ll be watching for that one.
Heaven forbid that everyone knows the "secret recipe". Then everyone who is good at doing a job will also know how to succeed at moving up. Then it will be harder to justify and hide moving up the mediocre officers who are just well connected, when so many other officers are actually better than them AND doing the secret recipe.
(Obvious snark involved here 😉)
Snark acknowledged, over.
A Dreidel. Or flip of a coin, sacrifice a small fuzzy animal..
Oddly accurate.
Never trust a 2Lt with a compass.
Never trust an NCO who trusts a 2LT with a compass.
Do a good job as an O5 and get good paper. The caveat is that this random LTC shooting for O6 needs to migrate to jobs and rating pools where opportunities for ACOM/MQ OERs are possible. Being in a small pool, or smaller pools with joint senior raters who likely have immature Army O5 profiles, might not be a winning combination.
Perhaps not bias, but an observation on many of those who become GOs. At each rank we sort officers into assignments. Officers at the high end of the OML (starting with USMA and ROTC) naturally migrate to the most well resourced units. This reoccurs at each promotion level, so the organization often ends up with senior officers who are not well positioned by experience to work with scarcity or priorities resources.
That is a really good point about the types of organizations that you get assigned to. I've seen plenty of junior LTCs who wanted to go do some highly specific (low priority) thing and then wondered why they didn't progress like the guys who went to high priority units.
@@the_bureaucrat We all have to make choices, but sometimes we don't understand the risks, or the opportunities.