Comment of the day: Thinking seriously about a whole new approach to rotations

The other day Butch Bracknell posted this comment, below. I think something like he proposes makes a lot of sense. Sure, doing it this way might be less "fair" to the entire officer corps. But what do you want -- to be equitable or to win? Wars should be fought for the nation’s interests, not for those of officers and their careers:

The rotations problem has been intractable but could be solved with a sea change in the way we've attacked the problem. We should have built a command there and sent officers and key leaders on 3 year PCS tours, with incentives to stay for year 4. We would have had to PCS families to an intermediate location like Turkey, Kuwait, UAE, and Bahrain. We'd let officers and key leaders go in for 3 months and out for 2 weeks on UNCHARGED leave, with no cell phones or email. Rinse and repeat. O-5 and O-6 command tours would be for 3 years. There would be no de facto requirement to rotate everyone thru the war as a career check in the box.

Commanders would rotate in, serve, and rotate out, then rotate in again to the SAME battlespace. Would this cut down on command opportunities? Yes. All the more incentive to rise above your peers if you really want command. We've talked a lot about the value of relationships with HN forces and political leaders, but we don't show we value it through our personnel policies. Our personnel policies look a lot like they did before the wars started and haven't kept pace, because our senior leaders haven't required them to morph in response to the operational demand signal.