> but it hasn’t because a dwindling number of good
> [people] have kept it going despite itself.

YES. that’s a huge point, and it’s something that’s been coming up in discussion in my neck of the woods quite a bit. i wonder if i’ve actually been hurting the institution. every time an officer (or an NCO, or an EM) does something crazy and outside of the box to save the day, in spite of the scheduled programming—or even just puts in the extra hours of work to make some stillborn plan work—we’re removing the feedback loop from the army.

that said, is there any way to let the system realize it’s failing without letting the actual people involved fail?

yes, a lot of us posting in this thread are captains. i’m not sure how omninerd is composed demographically, but even if we’re the only six captains on here, i think that structrually speaking, captains, senior lieutenants and mid-to-senior NCOs are the people who are closest to the effects of the problems we’ve been discussing. and they’re definitely the people who end up forced to choose between being bureaucratic "enablers" and subjecting soldiers to the consequences of systemic failure. more significantly, the captains are the people in the position to stay or cut bait… i was discussing some of these topics with a few NCOs the other day—people who are known throughout their respective organizations for being very good at their jobs—and they told me pretty frankly that if they didn’t already have more than a decade and a half in the army, they’d be looking for other lines of work. i think if the army’s retirement benefits were set up differently, we might be seeing an NCO drain as well.

any MAJ or higher on the o-nerd? anyone have any stats on who’s actually leaving?