Opaque MoD promotion policy

Kunal Biswas

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By Ajai Shukla
Business Standard, 16th Apr 14

With India on track to get a new government next month, the army --- arguably the country's most admired institution --- is mired in embarrassing uncertainty about who will succeed General Bikram Singh as army chief on July 31, 2014.

The last succession, when Gen VK Singh handed over command to Gen Bikram Singh on May 31, 2012, was mired in controversy and lawsuits. This time again the Supreme Court is hearing a petition by a senior officer, Lieutenant General Ravi Dastane, who cites an array of policy violations to allege that the army and ministry of defence (MoD) have denied him the right to be an army commander. If the apex court rules in his favour, Dastane will be in consideration to be the next army chief. He will be the senior-most army commander, although Lt Gen Dalbir Singh will still be the senior-most lieutenant general.

At fault is the army's and MoD's failure to create transparent promotion policies for its top-most appointments. The Armed Forces Tribunal (AFT) --- the MoD's departmental judicial tribunal --- in rejecting Dastane's petition last September, embarrassingly noted that the absence of a clear promotion policy was repeatedly bringing aggrieved officers to court.

Dastane has pleaded before the Supreme Court that the army and MoD have reduced the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet (ACC) --- the final authority on appointing top commanders --- to a rubber stamp, by placing before it a single name for each appointment. This violates an earlier Supreme Court judgment which had ruled in 2000 (Union of India versus Lt Gen Rajendra Singh Kadyan) that appointments should be on merit as well as eligibility, with the ACC choosing between at least two candidates for each appointment, rather than merely rubber-stamping the appointment of the senior-most eligible candidate.

The army and MoD told the AFT that they internally evaluated seven eligible officers who senior enough to be considered. The AFT judgment notes that "there was no Selection Committee constituted", but the army chief and the MoD zeroed in on two candidates for two posts and sent the names to the ACC. The AFT concludes that the principle of merit was thus kept in mind.

Dastane is challenging this conclusion. In addition, he contends that the army illegally undermined the "discipline and vigilance ban" (DV ban) policy. His petition argues that, on May 31, 2012 --- the day army chief, General VK Singh, and western army commander, Lt Gen Shankar Ghosh, retired --- Lt Gen Sanjiv Chachra and Dastane himself, the two senior-most lieutenant generals eligible to become army commanders, should have been recommended to fill their vacancies the same day. Lt Gen Dalbir Singh, while senior to both, was ineligible, having received a "show cause notice" from the army chief, General VK Singh, for a rogue intelligence operation. Dalbir, therefore, was under a DV Ban.

Inexplicably, the MoD moved to elevate only Chachra to army commander. It left the second vacancy unfilled, pending a decision on Dalbir's DV Ban. The new chief, General Bikram Singh, quickly lifted the ban on June 8 and Dalbir was appointed army commander on June 15.

Dastane contends that this effectively "reserved" a vacancy for Dalbir Singh for 15 days, until his DV ban could be lifted. The AFT has rejected that contention, but the Supreme Court will examine it afresh.


The backdrop to this was bitter internal feuding between Gen VK Singh on the one hand; and his successor, Gen Bikram Singh and Lt Gen Dalbir Singh on the other. With Gen VK Singh trying to amend his date of birth and gain an additional year in office, he was targeting Bikram and Dalbir as beneficiaries of his early departure.

An army commander is a senior lieutenant general, appointed to head one of the army's six geographical commands --- the western, northern, central, eastern, southern and southwestern commands. A seventh "functional command" is the Shimla-based Army Training Command (ARTRAC). In addition, army generals take turns, alternating with their navy and air force counterparts, to command the tri-service Andaman & Nicobar Command (ANC) in Port Blair.

To be appointed army commander, a lieutenant general should have successfully commanded one of the army's fourteen corps, and also have two years of service left before retirement at the age of 60. The ACC selects army commanders from a list of eligible names forwarded by army headquarters (AHQ), through the MoD.

Source : Broadsword
 

Bhadra

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An Officer Corps That Can't Score

How military careerism breeds habits of defeat

An Officer Corps That Can’t Score | The American Conservative

The article is about US Army but IA seems to be suffering from same shortcomings;

By William S. Lind "¢ April 17, 2014

The most curious thing about our four defeats in Fourth Generation War—Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan—is the utter silence in the American officer corps. Defeat in Vietnam bred a generation of military reformers, men such as Col. John Boyd USAF, Col. Mike Wyly USMC, and Col. Huba Wass de Czege USA, each of whom led a major effort to reorient his service. Today, the landscape is barren. Not a military voice is heard calling for thoughtful, substantive change. Just more money, please.

Such a moral and intellectual collapse of the officer corps is one of the worst disasters that can afflict a military because it means it cannot adapt to new realities. It is on its way to history's wastebasket. The situation brings to mind an anecdote an Air Force friend, now a military historian, liked to tell some years ago. Every military, he said, occasionally craps in its own mess kit. The Prussians did it in 1806, after which they designed and put into service a much improved new model messkit, through the Scharnhorst military reforms. The French did it in 1870, after which they took down from the shelf an old-model messkit—the mass, draft army of the First Republic—and put it back in service. The Japanese did it in 1945, after which they threw their mess kit away, swearing they would never eat again. And we did it in Korea, in Vietnam, and now in four new wars. So far, we've had the only military that's just kept on eating.

Why? The reasons fall in two categories, substantive and structural. Substantively, at the moral level—Colonel Boyd's highest and most powerful level—our officers live in a bubble. Even junior officers inhabit a world where they hear only endless, hyperbolic praise of "the world's greatest military ever." They feed this swill to each other and expect it from everyone else. If they don't get it, they become angry. Senior officers' bubbles, created by vast, sycophantic staffs, rival Xerxes's court. Woe betide the ignorant courtier who tells the god-king something he doesn't want to hear. (I know—I've done it, often.)

At Boyd's next level, the mental, our officers are not professionals. They are merely craftsman. They have learned what they do on a monkey-see, monkey-do basis and know no more. What defines a professional—historically there were only three professions, law, medicine, and theology—is that he has read, studied, and knows the literature of his field. The vast majority of our officers read no serious military history or theory. A friend who teaches at a Marine Corps school told me the most he can now get majors to read is two pages. Another friend, teaching at an Army school, says, "We are back to drawing on the cave wall."

As culpable as our officers are for these failings, they are not the whole story. Officers are also victims of three structural failures, each of which is enough to lay an armed service low.

The first, and possibly the worst, is an officer corps vastly too large for its organization—now augmented by an ant-army of contractors, most of whom are retired officers. A German Panzer division in World War II had about 21 officers in its headquarters. Our division headquarters are cities. Every briefing—and there are many, the American military loves briefings because they convey the illusion of content without offering any—is attended by rank-upon-rank of horse-holders and flower-strewers, all officers.

The pathologies that flow from this are endless. Command tours are too short to accomplish anything, usually about 18 months, because behind each commander is a long line of fellow officers eagerly awaiting their lick at the ice-cream cone. Decisions are pulled up the chain because the chain is laden with surplus officers looking for something to do. Decisions are committee-consensus, lowest common denominator, which Boyd warned is usually the worst of all possible alternatives. Nothing can be changed or reformed because of the vast number of players defending their "rice bowls." The only measurable product is entropy.

The second and third structural failings are related because both work to undermine moral courage and character, which the Prussian army defined as "eagerness to make decisions and take responsibility." They are the "up or out" promotion system and "all or nothing" vesting for retirement at 20 years. "Up or out" means an officer must constantly curry favor for promotion because if he is not steadily promoted he must leave the service. "All or nothing" says that if "up or out" pushes him out before he has served 20 years, he leaves with no pension. (Most American officers are married with children.)

It is not difficult to see how these two structural failings in the officer corps morally emasculate our officers and all too often turn them, as they rise in rank and near the magic 20 years, into ass-kissing conformists. Virtually no other military in the world has these policies, for obvious reasons.

Of these two types of failings, the structural are probably the most damaging. They are also the easiest to repair. The Office of the Secretary of Defense, the president, and Congress could quickly fix all of them. Why don't they? Because they only look at the defense budget, and these are not directly budgetary issues. They merely determine, in large measure, whether we win or lose.

Fixing the substantive problems is harder because those fixes require changes in organizational culture. OSD cannot order our officers to come out from the closed system, fortified with hubris, that they have placed around themselves to protect the poor dears from ever hearing anything upsetting, however true. Congress cannot withhold pay from those officers who won't read. Only our officers themselves can fix these deficiencies. Will they? The problem is circular: not until they leave their bubble.

If American military officers want to know, or even care, why we keep losing, they need only look in the mirror. They seem to do that most of the time anyway, admiring their now-tattered plumage. Behind them in the glass, figures in turbans dance and laugh.

William S. Lind is author of the Maneuver Warfare Handbook and director of the American Conservative Center for Public Transportation.
 
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Ray

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Indeed today all seem to be concentrating on monkey see monkey do and careerism.

No serious soldiering is being done or so it appears.

And yes, Money is a a big issue.

One of my officer, who is doing extremely well professionally, told me he is contemplating quitting now that he has completed the mandatory service to earn his pension. He said he was doing so for better financial pastures out in the civil world.

I tried to dissuade him by giving all the argument that the army profession is not a 'career' but a calling, and also how much the Army has invested in him to train him and educate him and the facilities given to him and his family by the Army.

To this he said, he and his family too has given much to the army and so its quits in so far as owing anything to the Army.

That is not patently true.

I am retired and even now I am beholden to the Army since it has given me and my Family the greatest boon - free medical care with the best possible facility. And that is what is the most critical issue and a great financial drain for those who retire and reach the twilight years.

My Family and I can live free of such fear that we may not be able to get the best and requisite medical treatment.

Those who take premature retirement for 'better pastures' outside should never forget that they too will get this eternal medical facility and none of us who have donned the uniform can ever claim that they have nothing to be beholden to the Army or feel guilty about abandoning ship (in a manner of speaking) and not continuing to serve the Army.

The Army still and continually looks after all who donned the uniform and none should forget that.
 
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Bhadra

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Mental and Intellectual collapse is a cuase of worry - indeed.
 

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