If you haven’t thought about it from this perspective, consider this about a diminishing military: we can’t expect that leaders will reduce mission requirements when there are fewer service members – “Do more with less” sounds appropriate.
And a subsequent effect is that the service members who remain will have less of a say in their assignment choice, as “personal preference” cedes ground to “needs of the Army.” Some officer and NCO leaders will receive assignments to perform unglamorous duties in less-than-optimal locations. And they’ll think their career is over because of it.
The Making of a Leader: Dwight D. Eisenhower by retired Army Colonel Robert C. Carroll in the 2009 Edition of Military Review, shows how General Eisenhower’s career had a similar tone. Carroll recounts Ike’s string of “not-so-elegant jobs that many might consider career-enders, but would later pay huge dividends.”
The article is a quick but engaging walk through Eisenhower’s career and the Conclusion is a good summary of the take-away points. Here it is verbatim, with the SlideShare document below.
Conclusion
“This case study of Eisenhower’s career illustrates the Army’s unique way of growing its leaders. Today, even as it did at the turn of the last century, the Army moves its officers into varied jobs in diverse organizations across the globe, anticipating they will assess each unique situation in short order and act decisively, while gaining valuable experience for higher and more demanding assignments. Thus, an assignment that some may think diverts an officer away from the preferred career trajectory to success may actually turn out to be the foundational assignment that makes that officer uniquely qualified for leadership at a higher level.
In such a fashion does the Army make its officers. In such a fashion do great leaders make themselves. As Ike says in his autobiography, At Ease, “Whenever I had convinced myself that my superiors, through bureaucratic oversights and insistence on tradition, had doomed me to run-of-the-mill assignments, I found no better cure than to blow off steam in private and then settle down to the job at hand.”