Bleeding Talent: How the US Military Mismanages Great Leaders and Why It's Time for a Revolution

The inability to adjust pay on an individual basis ties directly to the heart of the personnel dilemma facing the Pentagon. Moving from a central-planning system to a market is fraught with uncertainty, as we know from the recent history of Eastern European countries. But at the center of the Gordian knot is how to match supply with demand, whether

In theory, the armed forces could reform one or more of the five core issues described earlier incrementally rather than adopting wholesale change.

Why does the American military produce the most innovative and entrepreneurial leaders in the country, then waste that talent in

the military brings out the entrepreneurial traits in people that they may not realize they possess.

Rather than using bureaucratic and centralized boards to review formal evaluations, other professions use open and informal processes—résumés and letters of recommendation. And it’s not as if other professions, say, medicine, for example, are wild, free, unregulated markets. Quite the opposite. Medical professionals must be licensed and certified,

a highly regulated bureaucracy routinely leads to a surprising behavior: nepotism.

In the end, experiments with market-based assignments need flexible compensation systems. Commanders need the freedom to lay off people before the plan says they can be rotated out, and they also need the freedom to promote whomever they think is best to fill jobs in their units—whether that means promoting someone ahead of schedule, hiring a forme

The army, navy, air force, and Marines make extremely expensive human capital investments in their people, but they are failing to manage that talent.

upon closer inspection, the reforms seem evolutionary, not revolutionary. It is a first step, but unfortunately it is so minor that advocates of the peer and subordinate review clearly lost to the old guard, yielding a symbolic change that will likely prove nothing and probably just linger for a decade.