Towards a New Model Army? The Benefit of Direct Entry Senior Officers.

One of the most enduring principles in the British Armed Forces is the long held and strictly enforced view that ‘everyone enters the system at the same point’. All new recruits should enter via Recruit or Officer training and embark on a career at the same level of experience. Under no circumstances could it apparently be possible for a trained professional to enter mid-career, skipping the junior ranks and quickly becoming an SO1 or Colonel on the back of their professional careers to date.

The strongly held belief in many quarters is that the very business of soldiering is so exceptionally complex, that the culture is so strongly ingrained, that anyone seeking to enter the system at any other point would be an utter failure, and it would be a disaster for the Forces as a whole. This principle is almost uniformly rigidly applied, with the sole exception of the Chaplaincy and Defence Medical Services, where professionally qualified individuals enter the system in different ranks, by dint of their prior medical training.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

The result is arguably the last truly ‘closed shop’ in the public sector, where it is all but impossible to enter except at the most junior level. The result is that heavy career management is needed, plotting out the path of Lieutenant Bloggs on his first posting to the Blankshire Regiment, or Sub Lieutenant Badger on joining HMS MASSIVE on their career journey, being appointed to different postings and career development courses over the ensuing decades. At length as more seasoned officers, Colonel Bloggs and Captain Badger find themselves on the cusp of 1* appointments, where their career moves from to an entirely new set of conditions, culminating in the position as 2* where if no post is found for them, they will find themselves out of a job in their early 50s.

The one constant through all of this is that at every point in the system, they are being groomed for their future postings. Their performance as a junior officer may hinder later promotion, or set them on a path of postings that damage their prospects of becoming an SO1. Alternatively, they may find themselves identified as ‘good eggs’ and benefit from the plummest of appointments and largesse of seniors, and driven harshly to prepare themselves for senior appointments early.

The problem comes when a good officer like Commander Badger decides that they’ve had enough, that they wish to leave the Service and seek employment elsewhere, instead of staying on the glittering path and becoming a ‘young’ Commodore. The moment of 7-clicking (the process whereby an individual has to make 7 mouse clicks to confirm their intention to leave the Service) represents a loss of decades of investment in one individual, who forever more is lost to the Service.

In practical terms it also creates a gaping hole in the career managers plot, as a complex web of reliefs, handovers and career postings are disrupted due to the need to appoint a new SO1 to a different post, and then move many other careers around. Much like chaos theory suggests a butterfly flapping its wings in China can cause a hurricane in New York, the loss of a good officer at SO1 level can cause a chain reaction of events that causes disruption, resignations and career posting difficulties across large swathes of their branch.

There is currently no means of solving this gap, instead there is just one less officer to appoint, and one fewer credible candidate with the reach and potential to reach 2* and beyond left in the system. In a further 15-20 years time, the pool of officers able to contend for the CGS or CDS posts is limited by those that you have left in your pool of talent – not helpful if the best officers of that generation all left the Army decades previously as Lieutenant Colonels.

More practically this refusal to generate new talent exposes gaps among vital professionally qualified officers, particularly those with project management, engineering or other relevant professional experience. An officer stuck in postings that are not right for them in order to ‘meet the needs of the Service’ may well leave early, tempted by the generous offer from industry. This in turn leaves a critical lack of        qualified personnel in the system at the right points to help support the system, and lets gaps flourish as career managers spend time firefighting, not developing.

More widely, the Military is a closed system for the purposes of change, evolution and doing things differently. Its personnel all share the shared characteristic that they have been in the system for the majority of their adult lives, that their external frame of reference or understanding of how things are done differently is close to zero, and that their ability to be truly innovative or challenge is limited by the reality of working in a hierarchy where promotion is linked to the reports written on you. There is practically no incentive to be truly risky, or try something new in a change averse, risk averse culture where failure will probably doom your report, and thus your career.

How to do it differently?

What then is the solution to the problem of manpower, and how do you create a culture of fresh thinking and challenge? The simple answer is to think radically and change the career structure of the Armed Forces to permit direct entry at points other than as a junior officer. In simple terms, rather than treating each successive entry at Sandhurst or Dartmouth as a pool that diminishes in strength over time, treat the Officer Corps as a body capable of regeneration over many decades to come.

The military Officers career arguably breaks down into three distinct phases – junior officer (up to SO2), when your duties are, for the main, conducted primarily at an operational level and are linked to working on front line units, managing staff and leading people to deliver operational effect. At senior SO2 / junior SO1 level the career starts to becomes focused on supporting operations, acting as the enabler in the system to facilitate the front line, while providing upwards advice to senior leadership on how to solve problems – for instance postings in Capability Desks or Policy areas in the MOD. Finally at the OF5/1* level the postings move far more towards senior management, delivery of projects and leadership of large teams and organisations – for example commanding a major shore base, or leading a procurement team. At 2* level and above the pattern is similar, albeit at ever increasing levels of responsibility.

The ideal point where direct entry could be set up is at the senior SO2 – junior SO1 level. This occurs usually about 15 – 16 years in to a career, by which point the real ‘duffers’ have been quietly let go, and those who are left are starting to wrestle with the challenges of real world commitments like partners and families. It is at this point, having run themselves ragged for the best part of two decades that many good officers decide to leave, feeling tired out by the grind to get to SO1, and seeing little direct ‘quick wins’ ahead of them as they move away from front line leadership into the thankless role of being a Staff Officer for many years to come. Their career has entered a second phase, and it is not one that all Officers wish to do.

A pragmatic solution may be to introduce managed entry at this level by all three services to appoint new officers to fill the gaps emerging in their ranks. Targeted recruitment, aimed at individuals with the right mix of professional background (e.g. Engineers, Project Managers or IT specialists) could be run to recruit people who have spent the early part of their career working in these environments, have excellent professional experience and bring good networks too.

They could be appointed into the system to take on posts that are either currently gapped, or agree to fill 2-3 postings over the next five – eight years. Effective career management would target posts where their skills could be used and valuable, rather than just generically appoint a highly skilled project manager to be SO2 Equality and Diversity at RAF Little Snoring.

Such a move would likely generate uproar and outrage from many of the vested interests in the system. What could an outsider possibly know about the complex and difficult world of the Armed Forces, and how could they possibly come in as an instant Major or Commander?

The answer is simple – the Armed Forces do challenging work, but at its heart, much of the work of an SO1 is less about knowing how to close with and kill the enemy as it is about knowing how to manage a project, or deliver effective leadership to resolve an issue. You don’t need to have spent 20 years in the Army to be a project manager at Abbey Wood at SO1 level. The MOD regularly recruits ‘C’ grade civil servants to be project managers, and they are interchangeably used with the military on these desks.  The trick is to recognise that the more senior you become in the Armed Forces, the more removed you are, for the most part, from the front line and the more your role becomes about process and support to the front line. A good leader in these positions will rely on their team to provide the subject matter expertise when its needed.

By recruiting people in with credible prior experience, this provides a chance to replenish the talent pool, inject fresh thinking and real challenge from people whose experience of the outside world isn’t 20 years out of date and fix gaps that free up other officers to focus on the career development postings needed to prepare them for senior appointments.

Such a move would need to be carefully handled, requiring clear expectation management on both sides. Direct entrants would not be able to fill some posts, nor would they realistically be able to command a Regiment or Squadron and in turn compete for many of the ‘punchy’ operational jobs out there. But equally they would ease the burden and provide a pool of experience that can be used to improve how the military does business.

Some will immediately argue that if post can be done by direct entrants, then why can’t they be civilianised? There is a strong argument that many posts arguably could be civilianised, but other cannot. There is also a need for posting flexibility – it is not easy or always possible to move a Civil Servant to support the needs of the service (even though all Civil Servants at Band D and above have a ‘mobility clause’ in their contract). There are benefits to having the flexibility of uniformed personnel to move staff around.

There is also the wider issue of ‘if it doesn’t wear uniform then it doesn’t exist’ mentality which exists in many military personnel. Sadly there is a cultural aversion in some quarters to civilian personnel, be they civil servants or contractors. The act of establishing a hierarchy, and determining where people are in the pecking order by looking at their rank tabs and badges is deeply ingrained in all Service personnel – bluntly, many of them cannot work effectively with Civilians because they don’t know how to interact with or relate to them – particularly if told that the young project manager in their mid-20s is their senior manager for the project or task. Putting experts in uniform helps address this cultural issue and gives an immediate air of credibility when looking at signature blocks or uniforms.

One mitigation measure may be to adopt the principle of distinguishing flashes (e.g. much like RN Medical Officers have red cloth on their rank tabs) or establishing a ‘Corps of Specialist Personnel’ to which new entrants can wear the cap badge of and be managed through. If required to deploy, then OPTAG would quickly get these officers up to speed, much as it functions as a vital refresher for many regular and reserve officers now when selected for a deployment.

What are the risks?

Humphrey  does not think that direct entry is a good idea for the armed forces as a whole. The non-commissioned ranks work to an entirely different career model (best described as spending your career becoming a very deep specialist in one discipline), and it is much harder to plug professional experts in at these points without damaging the promotion prospects, particularly at the CPO / WO level. There is also the issue of trust in the SNCO cadre, that requires people to have been through the system to enjoy a subtly different relationship with their juniors compared to officers.

Similarly, there are some postings where this would not work – you would not want to appoint a direct entry infantry Major or RAF Pilot. But there are many thousands of more generic SO1/2 roles that could easily be adapted to be filled by anyone regardless of specialisation or cap badge. This idea is aimed far more at meeting the gaps above unit level, where your role becomes about specialist advice, facilitation or steering an issue than it is about unit leadership and tasking.

It feels like much of the objections come from a fear of change, and a fear of things being done differently. There are firmly established procedures for career management in the military, and such a proposal risks tearing up that book. In reality though the armed forces have regularly had to deal with people coming in and having fast promotion or doing things differently. Twice in the last century the British Armed Forces have fought in world wars that saw them expand in under five years from tiny peacetime forces to be many millions strong.

The history of the Armed Forces in wartime is of taking civilians and letting them quickly become senior officers – Enoch Powell, for all his later controversy, was a Brigadier at the age of 27. People in the war routinely commanded Battalions in their early 20s or were senior officers in their early thirties. Wartime has shown repeatedly that the injection of talent may be scary, but it is entirely manageable, and should be encouraged, not feared.

Another advantage is that such a model reopens the door to those who have left returning. Although there are tentative steps in this direction already, direct entry would be an easy means of bringing people back with experience and talent and offering them a second go at their career.

The challenge here though is to recognise that time does not stand still, and that in many fields people have gained credible and useful experience that is of real benefit to the Services. Applying the re-entry test and putting people in at an appropriate rank to their experience will be a challenge – but this is possible to overcome. It requires work to determine the credibility of civilian experience, its value to the military system and whether it reflects truly increased responsibility. But it should not be beyond the wit of man to take someone who left for good reasons as an SO2, but 10 years later with significant professionally relevant experience behind them, to bring them back in as an OF5 to fill a specific post that is vacant.

The risk is that the military place too many process hurdles in their way or try to use the easy cop out of saying ‘join the Reserves’. The system is already inflexible in how it applies medical standards – anyone joining today has to meet the new entry medical standard, fine if you are a fit young 18yr old keen to join the infantry – problematic if you are in your late 40s with all the various knocks, injuries and issues that life has thrown at you.

To make this work requires a leap of faith in ripping up the current medical standards and moving to a risk-based approach. Yes, people out there had eczema, or they take Omeprazole for acid reflux, or they may have wet the bed aged 13, but not done so for many years (an ironic bar to service given the military obsession with ‘swamping’) – that doesn’t mean that they cannot serve their country as a desk officer in Andover or elsewhere. Thousands upon thousands of recruits are lost annually to the medical challenges, including many putative rejoiners.

Saying ‘why don’t rejoiners join the Reserves’ ignores the problem that Reservists do very different jobs to regulars, and that someone who is a project manager may well not want to be some junior soldier in an Army Reserve unit at the weekend, but may want to serve their country during the working week (and as required beyond) using their professional experience. The Reserves are a fabulous organisation, but they are not the answer to every manning issue for the armed forces, and they also struggle with the continued stigma in the eyes of many regulars of being ‘STABS’, because apparently working in your spare time for the Army doesn’t make you a real soldier.

Similarly, as a hierarchy, the system seems scared at times of taking risk on people successful in real life – it doesn’t know how to handle them and actively wants rid of them. As an example of this, Humphrey recently applied to re-join the Reserves after a period away. Late last year he applied to a specialist Royal Auxiliary Air Force unit seeking to offer his prior military experience and set of communication skills back to the system and be part of the Armed Forces again.

Unusually this unit recruits nationally, and also insists on an interview with the CO prior to entering the Capita process. Having spent 7 months being strung along with various administrative issues delaying the process yet being told his skills and experience were exactly what the unit, and the wider RAF, wanted and that they were very keen to have him, he went for an interview.

Two weeks later he was rejected out of hand in writing by the unit as apparently after the interview it was felt by the panel that he was too senior in his civilian day job to be able to act as a junior media officer in the RAuxAF in his spare time.

There is no right of appeal to this decision, and Humphrey has wasted 7 months with nothing to show for it. Even if he had not had the audacity to be too successful at his job, and thus sufficiently safely mediocre to warrant appointment as an Officer in the RAuxAF,  it would have potentially taken another 12 – 18 months to clear the Capita medical system, as Humphrey is not a 17yr old new entrant anymore and like most re-entrants, would need a waiver. Potentially two plus years of not doing anything, with no guarantee of success at the end. While Humphrey feels rather aggrieved towards the RAF for completely wasting his time based on some seriously misleading advice, he is open to continuing to explore other options in the Reserves, if he can find a unit that will take him...

This rather personal example highlights that the system is just not geared up to taking people back in, that it wastes their time and that it is inefficient at seizing the opportunity to appoint keen motivated and willing people to join, and instead being too risk averse and too scared of fresh experience to want to take a chance.

This sort of practise needs to be gripped and addressed as part of wider reforms to really shake up how the Armed Forces are structured and recruited. We need to move away from the structure of direct entry only as a new person and lose the stunningly arrogant view that only a person with 20 years’ experience can possibly do a job in Main Building as a military officer (albeit one that is currently being filled by a civil servant).

We need to stop having a system designed to willingly lose talent and bear gaps in the system, thus making life more difficult for those who are left, and instead focus on bringing people in of all ages. The average 45-year-old may well not meet the PFA standards of a 17yr old, but they may well also bring a range of skills to bear that could save the MOD millions in contract negotiation, management of projects or delivery of systems.

It requires a flexible mindset shift to realise that wearing uniform is but one part of being a military officer, and that other skills are required too. Just because you didn’t do the full year at BRNC and then fleet time doesn’t mean you can’t not be a desk officer. It just needs some intelligent training and cultural immersion to make it happen effectively – the armed forces constantly brag about their flexibility and willingness to adapt and overcome, yet when faced with the prize of bringing new people, new talent and new expertise into the system, they fail at the first hurdle, hiding instead behind the attitude that ‘only regulars know best ’.

Of course amidst all the harrumphing of arguing that no direct entrant could ever do a military job, except by coming in at the bottom, there is a convenient disregarding of the military resettlement process. Anyone leaving the armed forces is pushed into all manner of jobs using both direct and transferable skills, and told to emphasise the value of their military experience when working in areas that they’ve never worked in thematically before.

If it is okay to assume that a 22yr veteran of the Armed Forces is able to successfully join and bring value to an organisation they have no prior experience in, often at a senior level, why is it beyond the bounds of possibility to do the same in reverse? What is never successfully explained or defined is what is it about the military that is so utterly unique that no one can possibly do their job, except as a new entrant, yet the same does not apply in return. The whiff of hypocrisy is overpowering. 

This article was inspired by news that the United States is moving to a new model of ‘direct entry’ for officers at up to 1* level for areas where gaps exist and skills are needed(HERE). If it is good enough for the US military, surely it is good enough for the UK?

SH, 06 Aug 18, pinstripedline@gmail.com / @pinstripedline