Eliot Cohen: Rotating commanders is wrong; also, the first step in solving a problem is recognizing you have one

When I was writing my most recent book,
one of the things that struck me is how rotating commanders
undercuts military effectiveness. So when reading a West Point oral history interview of Eliot Cohen, the Johns Hopkins strategist and historian, I was
pleased to see him hit the point solidly:

The rotation of commands, by the way, is -- this is kind
of a technical point -- but it's -- it is still insane that what we do is we
rotate divisional headquarters and corps headquarters to these places. And
that's just military malpractice. I mean it means you have no institutional
continuity whatsoever.

Tom again: Cohen makes an interesting
observation in the same interview:

...the
military obviously likes to say, "Don't
come to me with a problem. Come to me with a solution." I think that's sort
of bogus. I think first you've got to realize that you've got a problem, and
sometimes the solution to the problem may not be clear. But you're only going
to begin figuring it out once you acknowledge that you've got a problem.