The Quality of Command

Robert H. Scales - Nimitz Berkeley

PhiGéo

Dans ce compte rendu du livre de Thomas Rick intitulé The Quality of Command, Robert Scales critique l'approche selon laquelle il ne faudrait pas hésiter à congédier les généraux que l'on juge médiocres afin d'améliorer la qualité du corps des officiers supérieurs. Scales propose plutôt une approche fondée sur l'amélioration de la formation des jeunes officiers, notamment au plan académique.

Voici un extrait du raisonnement de Robert Scales :

"One constant from Marshall to Petraeus is that the winnowing process for the selection of general officers begins around the grade of major, when a few are singled out for early promotion and advanced military schooling. In DePuy’s era, as in Marshall’s, one such midcareer pruning was enough, because during the Cold War, the army knew that it needed to concentrate on promoting officers with a special talent for maneuvering large units on a conventional battlefield. Today, however, good generalship requires a broader range of strategic gifts, including ones that do not necessarily reveal themselves at lower levels. The generals of the future will have to be capable of going beyond fighting from a battle plan to seeing the battlefield before any plans have been formulated, thinking in time and imagining cultural, political, and geostrategic circumstances that have yet to materialize. They will need not just tactical and operational skills but also intuition, imagination, agility, and a deep understanding of “the politics of war,” in every meaning of that phrase."
The Quality of Command: Thomas Ricks' new book identifies an urgent challenge facing the U.S. armed forces: how to produce good generals. But Ricks' solution -- regularly firing underperforming officers -- is based on flawed historical analysis and would do more harm than good.