And from my very, very limited interactions with GEN Dempsey, he is the right leader to implement these sorts of changes.

Watching 1AD turn around from redeployment/port and march back into the building fight in Iraq of 2004...first indicator of a great leader.

Listening to him at Carlisle - nearly every Army classmate of mine was fascinated by his forward thinking. This is a leader who won't be constrained in his thinking.

LTG Barno - you're right about the challenges. It will all boil down to how does one save the Army from the multiple effects of budget cuts, a return to garrison, and a group of officer/NCO leaders who have known nothing but fighting.

Great pick - great list!

I think General Barno gets things done in smart fashion here-- good soundbytes for the paradigms ("people are the Army"), broad requirements emphasizing the need to clean up the act on a lot of functions, and all of it stated succinctly.

The only addition I would have made would have been to #10: Resilience. I would have tacked on a little joke about building bridges and indiscretions with goats. General Dempsey can accomplish all nine of those other things with varying degrees of spectacular success, and they'll call him a good Chief of Staff. But if he messes up #10, he'll always be "Dempsey the vet-indiscretionator."

I hear that the General is a fine leader and an intellectual - that is good for him, good for the nation, good for the Army, and good for me as a tax paying concerned citizen.

I was thinking though, I recall Brigadier General Christian de Castries was seen as a wily cavalryman also, until he get got in over his head . . . .

Daunting indeed. I just have to wonder where Barno was with all these good ideas a few months/years ago when he didn't have the (Ret.) after his rank? Heh, better late than never.

I don't get the jokes from JG about goats, enlighten me? I will say the Army doesn't understand resilience, lots of work to be done there, what they are selling now is a start but it doesn't begin to address the problem.

Finally, I didn't serve with Dempsey, but he did me an unknowing favor a long time ago which I am eternally grateful for. I did serve in his old unit not long after he left though...and I know Bandits Don't Fail Those With Whom They Serve.

I got my fingers crossed he will rise to the challenge of this Top 10 list, in truth he has nowhere but up to go vice his predecessor.

And the task of re-orienting combat leaders to the reality of garrison training in a fiscally austere environment, and the leadership challenges that will entail, is at the top of the list.

No doubt that most commenters on this forum will find LTG Barno’s essay too fawning and pro-Army, but I think that, on the whole, he is mostly right. I agree that GEN Dempsey is a fine choice and probably the best candidate. Afghanistan is far from over (barring a major policy change in the near future), as is the terrorist threat from certain extremist non-state actors. I think the Army will still be significantly operationally engaged during GEN Dempsey’s tenure as CoS; I doubt we’ll have trouble keeping the “war babies” in. But the OPTEMPO should slow down enough to properly implement ARFORGEN (Army Force Generation), the three-phase cycle of reorganization, training, and operational deployment. A return to a true regimental system would be fantastic for implementing the less centralized and flattened organization and personnel systems that LTG Barno is recommending. I can see a requirement for expanding special forces and/or extending traditional special forces missions to “conventional” units with the goal of both building/retaining regional expertise and deploying to prevent future wars rather than simply training to fight them. The Army will also need to “relearn” high intensity conflict. The rise of near-peer regional powers like the so-called BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China) and future national policy that will no doubt be more circumspect about becoming involved in another long term counterinsurgency should combine to make COIN less likely in the future while threats of conventional military action (think North Korea) will increase. In any case, the Army (and probably DoD as a whole) needs to realign strategic ends, ways, and means. And maybe on a level of lesser importance, the Army needs to fix the uniform situation from replacing the ACU with a camo pattern that actually works to getting rid of those God-awful “mall cop” Class-B’s (the one with the white shirt and blue trousers). And don’t get me started on the stupid black felt bag they make us all wear on our heads (only the French could invent headgear so worthless). I wish GEN Dempsey all the best as he takes on the challenges that await him.

After 1st AD's bloody 15 month deployment in OIF I, Dempsey had his commanders and JAGs purge hundreds of combat veterans with other-than-honorable discharges for things like possession of marijuana, short AWOLs, and drunk and disorderly problems.

There was no attempt to treat any of these soldiers for PTSD, give single soldiers in the barracks any leadership, or rehabilitate soldiers who had serious issues with what they had seen and done in Iraq.

This is like leaving wounded soldiers on the battlefield, in my opinion.

One thing we know about old Marty boy is that he knows how to look the other way when people are being tortured and murdered.

Amen.

...or cancel 7).

....look, sclerosis comes with heritage and age. The world around, ie, major industries and organizations, us that, regardless of their belief in their selves, a time for a wholesale cultural revolution at the top. It is time for the leadership to go. Start bringing into the Army and other services professionals from the side at all echelons. We might find that this will invigorate the organization.

As Frederick the Great once observed, like Prince Arthur's mule, an officer goes gray in the ranks and while there becomes, like the mule, proficient in the routine but has no ability to soar to victory, only to trudge thru campaigns. TRADOC is where the mules rest.

We spend more by factors than any of our challengers yet we can not seem to produce anything other than the most elaborate of galleons decades after needed. This profligate behavior continues well after the rest of society is in hock. Time for management change until we match the Pirates or O's or America's team, the Nationals.

Okay, he's not in office yet, but let's see real change.

1) Eliminate overhead. Will he support Gates idea to cut Generals and HQs in Europe after Gates leave?.An Army HQ, and Corps HQ, and two Division HQ to command four brigades? Will he keep open two big bases that the Bush admin directed to close, but his Generals quietly kept open?

2) Will he cut the massive overhead in Korea, with an entire Army HQ to command a brigade? The entire Daegu complex is just fat.

3) Will he support a pay freeze for four years to retain force structure? The Jan. pay raise could have funded 30,000 more bodies.

4) Will he stop the firing squad solution for good NCOs and officers who make mistakes, like DUIs or smoking a joint.

....starting to see the use of the words like 'backfilling' coming out of program executives to provide documents that justify decisions made in years past for quick reaction spending to eat up either supplemental or expanding war appropriations. (This is the side of the war where while some are getting killed many are making a killing.) It is like creating documents to show that substance sits beneath decisions made when in fact what was occurring an every REMF for his or her self raid upon a treasury left wide open. It is to assure the final days of a career sit upon a pinnacle of costs (a measure of military or civil service success) and establish a well seeded after market for professional service annuities to large vendor recipients of this largess.

Will back dating be directed to assure consistency if an unlikely audit is feared?

If Gates is concerned he'd order those practices stopped immediately. Go back to simple business case analysis and engineering cost verification with SarBox accountability before spending a dime of any money upon stampede money decisions. CYA is expensive and a very bad investment. Paying for the defense of Maddoff or watching Fox News for 'fair and balance' is a more lucrative decisions.

Nice to-do list, but might want to recalibrate number #1. We did not ‘win’ in Iraq and continue to flounder in Afghanistan. Hope he has the courage to ‘finish’ these fights by pulling out all Army personnel out of these misbegotten adventures.

We operated past the airframe half-life point much earlier than planned, and are fielding plans for replacements late, with more slippage likely.

Sorry to be late to this fight. Dave Barno's list is interesting and important, however THE issue for the era is solving the affordablilty of this Army.

Affordability measured not in bumper stickers supported by power point slides about numbers of soldiers or quality of life or such - those are inputs. The relevant metric is measuring outputs, that is the ability of the Army to sustain forces out. That metric makes it clear today's Army is simply unsustainable.

As I recall we have something like 45 BCTs and they are out about 1 in 2 or in round numbers that is 110,000 trigger pulling soldiers out at any one time (and that widely seen as unsustainable) . Today, that 110,000 soldiers out costs the Nation just under a quarter a trillion dollars a year. It doesn't get a lot better in the out years - as we have seen in the drawdown from Iraq, pulling soldiers out of Iraq has not had a material impact on the Army's bill to the taxpayers.

This situation has been a decade in the making (the Army budget in August 2001 as I recall was about 68 billion). So I submit much of Dave Barno's list is about increasing that quarter of a trillion dollar bill to the Nation, the reality facing Marty Dempsey is vastly different. Unicorn out

Sorry to be late to this fight. Dave Barno's list is interesting and important, however THE issue for the era is solving the affordablilty of this Army.

Affordability measured not in bumper stickers supported by power point slides about numbers of soldiers or quality of life or such - those are inputs. The relevant metric is measuring outputs, that is the ability of the Army to sustain forces out. That metric makes it clear today's Army is simply unsustainable.

As I recall we have something like 45 BCTs and they are out about 1 in 2 or in round numbers that is 110,000 trigger pulling soldiers out at any one time (and that widely seen as unsustainable) . Today, that 110,000 soldiers out costs the Nation just under a quarter a trillion dollars a year. It doesn't get a lot better in the out years - as we have seen in the drawdown from Iraq, pulling soldiers out of Iraq has not had a material impact on the Army's bill to the taxpayers.

This situation has been a decade in the making (the Army budget in August 2001 as I recall was about 68 billion). So I submit much of Dave Barno's list is about increasing that quarter of a trillion dollar bill to the Nation, the reality facing Marty Dempsey is vastly different. Unicorn out

re " fielding more or less of more-or-less the same thing."

Contractors are flying '80's vintage rooshun rotary in support of our Afghan war. Only the more over-powered of the NATO-US rotary can hack it, hauling a reduced load, and that's wearing out, depleting the VERTREP capability across the force and fleet.

The rotary reset alone is a half trillion problem.

Education is not part of the Army culture, and while I agree with LTG (R) Barno's assertion that it should be, I doubt that it will happen on GEN Dempsey's watch. Many officers view education as a necessary evil to get to the next level of command, and here I am referring to the mandatory schools (career courses, CGSC) that are the "gates." Education (such as graduate school or a fellowship) are viewed as unnecessary (and perhaps even career-damaging) diversions from the "real" Army. Until the Army rewards officers for undertaking education beyond the mandatory Army schools, the Army as an institution will continue to pay lip service to the "importance of education."

I have a corollary to BolandJD's uniform comments: we need to quit wearing the ACU (and its successor) to EVERYTHING. It is not a uniform that is suitable for every occasion. The justification that we are an "Army at war" is worn out, and now it's just an excuse for not wanting to wear Class B's on the Washington Metro. I hate seeing events on TV where the other services are in their service-dress uniforms, and there's the Army, wearing a field uniform topped with a black beret. We should look as good as we are.

"For the second year in a row, the U.S. military has lost more troops to suicide than it has to combat in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Our people are killing themselves in droves. Barno the revolving door CNAS barker and battlefield loser missed this little fact. Typical of today's fascist officers.

http://www.congress.org/news/2011/01/24/more_troops_lost_to_suicide

"According to four current and former NESA Center employees, all of whom asked for anonymity for fear of retribution, Barno has been investigated by a special unit of the Defense Department's Inspector General's office that focuses on senior officials. The allegations are that he created an office that misspent taxpayer funds, abused contractor employees under threat of termination, awarded jobs based on favoritism rather than merit, and created an overall atmosphere of fear and intimidation at the center."

I wonder how this got swept under the rug.

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/03/24/exclusive_former_top_us_afghan_commander_accused_of_mismanagement

General Dempsey does have good ideas and the ability to lead, but the inflexiblity of the garrison Army is strong...I have seen people in charge of captain career courses give a faculty member hell because he actually took the captains to a fuels unit in order to teach the strengths and capabilities of the units instead of following the powerpoint plan of instruction...innovation, flexiblity and adaptability are very weak values in a lot of the institutional Army...Barno is spot on...the best and brightest will be crushed and they may leave in droves unless something drastic is done...

Beat Navy and USAF, in the budget wars.

It's no joke.

Those other services are similarly oriented toward the center of mass, which lies along the Capitol-Pentagon axis. Follow the money.

I like the last paragraph:
"This Army is at a strategic inflection point -- success in the next war may well rest on how it manages this wrenching transition. "

I would band the items in groups of 3-4 –remember that CSAs (as strategic/organizational leaders) shoot for 3-5 things to accomplish in their tenure and are lucky/happy to get 2. One of the roles of the CSA is to posture his successor and the CSA-after-next for success--so first things first.

My recommendations:
GEN Dempsey first priority is to continue to provide combatant commanders with relevant and ready landpower for this fight and meet operational requirements across the globe (Title 10 responsibilities are comparable to Organizational/Business Strategy).

Second priority is to retain and develop human capital--that includes intellectual and moral aspects of the human dimension. As Jim Collins stated "First Who, then What" (have to have a strong Leader/Leadership Strategy--this addresses the culture). Having bright, talented, and motivated folks who understand the Mission enables a lot of good things in tough times.

The third priority is to capture lessons from contemporary operations (not just in theaters of conflict) and provide reflective thought to develop concepts that will drive transitions in preparation for the next fight(s) or POTUS-directed activities. (Given Organiztional and Leadership Strategies that lay out the "what" and the "why", this priority provides the context for the "how".) For Army, the framework is DOTMLPF to develop and integrate capabilities for the future force.

Three "Big" Things are strategic in nature and essential for the Army.