Tony Carr
I think of all the past versions of myself as ghosts, whispering to me the insight essential to improved judgment and decision making as I (hopefully) grow older. You’ll have to ask those in my personal circle whether it’s actually working.
But some of these interactions are exceptionally enlightening. Someone reminded me of an old article I wrote, and after re-reading it, I had to thank my ghost.
Below, I will share the words I wrote seven years ago. I still agree with them, unfortunately. But my ghost tells me to get beyond reacting to the outwardly exhibited behavior of the system I’m critiquing and pull apart why it continues to decay.
Which leads me to share three thoughts as a preamble.
Any system of any kind, no matter how ingeniously constructed, is dying from the moment it is born. The better the design, the more naturally durable it will be. But only via watchful and proactive remediation can its decay be slowed and its useful life extended. This goes for governments and institutions, organizations, and processes of all kinds. The article below unpacks how Air Force colonels have gone from comprising the vanguard of combat aviation to acting as glorified day care attendants whose loss of influence is inversely relative to their need for official approval. The reason I return to the issue after seven years to find it in worse condition is that nothing has been done in the interim to arrest the decay.
If colonels are generally gutless, it’s because the Air Force wants them to be. Every colonel started as an open-slate Lieutenant, responding to organizational incentives to build a career and a body of work defining their professional identity. If being operationally obsessed and driven by taking care of airmen got colonels promoted, everyone would exhibit such qualities. Since the Air Force incentivizes fawning minionism, everyone figures out what is politically fashionable and then notoriously flies the approved banner. One way to understand the unfolding DEI backlash is from the perspective of airmen who have been shuttled from pillar to post for 30 years, herded constantly to the next social shaping project. This reflects how military life has become a mirror for the constantly shifting faddishness of electoral politics. The services shift emphasis to maintain political approval, but will dependably go too far, flogging key messages until they collapse as a dead horse, then bludgeoning the horse. Colonels were once the umbrella shielding airmen from as much bullshit as possible. Now, they’re chain-feeding the bullshit cannons trained on the rank-and-file.
No comments:
Post a Comment