“We don’t delay decisions—we ‘staff’ them until they become irrelevant.” – Anonymous
As a newly arrived lieutenant in my first Army assignment, many of my initial engagements were with members of our battalion staff. The adjutant made sure my transition was as smooth as possible, the operations officer helped me navigate the details of running my first qualification range, and the logistics officer shared a lot of a hard-earned lessons about property accountability. By the time I rotated onto the staff, I had a deep, abiding respect for how much effort they put into helping the commander lead the battalion.
But there were a few who I thought had worn out their time on staff. For whatever reason, they’d been in the same job, sat at the same desk, or done pretty much that same thing for years. In their own way, they were institutionalized.
In three decades of military service, I learned two immutable facts. One, you will likely spend more time on staff than not. Two, you owe to everyone – including yourself – not to linger in one job for too long. It’s easy to tell yourself that your knowledge and skills are indispensable. It’s just as easy to become a bureaucratic impediment to progress.
GUTS AND GLORY
Life on staff is hardly glamorous. But it’s necessary. Even the best commanders need capable staff leaders to help them keep an organization focused and on mission. “Without a staff,” wrote Lieutenant General Hunter Liggett, “an army could not peel a potato.”
This was a truism recognized by Napoleon, whose staff – largely managed by Marshall Louis Alexandre Berthier – became a model for detailed planning, cross-functional coordination, and rapid communication. Berthier, who served as Napoleon’s chief of staff, transformed the staff from a purely administrative focus to one that could coordinate and synchronize the operations of massive field armies through the General Staff.
While today’s staffs are vastly different than the Napoleonic staff in many ways, they share one notable – and cautionary – factor: the institutionalized staff officer. As General Kurt von Hammerstein Equord described, “A human petrification… without charm or the friendly germ; minus bowels, passion, or a sense of humor.” As if that wasn’t indictment enough, he added, “Happily, they never reproduce and all of them finally go to hell.”
THE INSTITUTIONALIZED STAFF: 10 Signs It’s Time to Go
This was borne out for me during an XVIII Airborne Corps command post exercise in the late 1980s, during which I was tasked to escort the senior staff of the Army’s 10th Mountain Division. After one especially long day, the division chief of staff, Colonel Herb Lloyd, suggested we draw a non-tactical vehicle from the exercise motor pool and go to dinner. Unfortunately, the officer who “controlled the keys to the motor pool” – an individual from my battalion who had held the same job and the same desk through the entirety of that first assignment – obstinately refused our request. With no other options, we crammed into my 1983 Mercury Capri and went on our way.
“That,” Colonel Lloyd said at the time, “is a sign someone’s been on staff too long.”
In the years since, I’ve pondered that statement a time or two. How do you know if someone has been on staff too long? There will be signs. Ten of them, to be exact.
1. The number of staff meetings you attended in the last year is higher than your score on your annual PT test.
For some on staff, meetings seem to be the only measure of their existence. That and PowerPoint slides…
2. You’ve actually experimented to see if it’s possible to squeeze in a fifth block on a quad chart.
When you serve on a staff for too long, “There is no joy in Mudville.” Oftentimes, you find fulfillment in producing briefing slides, white papers, and unremarkable policy memos. Another day in paradise, just living the dream.
3. You look forward to weekends and holidays because they give you “some f*cking peace and quiet to catch up on email.”
I’ve lived this personal hell. Way too many staff officers spend those “peaceful moments” filling up others’ inboxes at the most inopportune times.
4. You format your annual holiday letter as a five-paragraph operations order.
You know who you are. It’s not clever. It’s a sad sign of desperation.
5. You make jokes about never seeing the sun, but they’re not really jokes.
If the pasty skin isn’t a tell, your aversion to sunlight is a dead giveaway. Come out into the light…
6. Your best war stories involve PowerPoint.
Probably the surest sign of all. PowerPoint war stories are a thing. And they’re just as painfully boring as you would expect.
7. You look forward to “getting some downtime” during your next deployment.
In all fairness, I think I may have said this myself when I volunteered for an Afghanistan deployment when I was a G3. For the record, when 1, 3, and 5 are aligned, all roads lead to 7.
8. You spend more time with the 60-year-old staff sergeant on permanent staff duty than your own family.
His name was Buddy. I don’t know if that was his real name, but that’s what everyone called him. Nobody knew what he did, exactly, but he was always there, pulling maintenance on the floor buffer and inventorying the keys to the vehicles we turned in before the Gulf War.
9. You still sniff photocopies in hopes of catching a quick “mimeograph buzz.”
Okay, this isn’t really much of a thing anymore, but there was a time when you could gauge how long someone has been stuck on staff by the mimeograph maneuver – casually sniffing fresh photocopies when no one was looking.
10. None of your kids can catch a football, but every one of them can complete a Unit Status Report to AR 220-1 standard.
This guy lived in my neighborhood. When other kids were playing football, going paintballing, or just hanging around, his kids were in full uniform conducting Civil War reenactments, recreating the Battle of Shiloh between the houses.
Truth be told, no commander is complete without a good staff behind them. They exist to fill the gaps between the commander’s vision of the future and the detailed analysis, actionable tasks, and feedback mechanisms required to translate that vision to an attainable outcome. Nevertheless, there will always be those who become institutionalized, and not in a way that serves the needs of the commander.
