What the Army Could Have Done Better

Ever since I was a little kid, I was enamored with the idea of being a soldier. I remember staying up late with my uncle, a now retired Special Forces team sergeant and veteran of the Iraq war with countless deployments to combat, to help him shine his boots. He always exuded a confidence that I didn’t see in other men. Not even in my own father. The stories he told, the things he knew, and the cool guns he had… these were all things I wanted for my own future.

As I matured I realized that I didn’t look up to my uncle because he knew how to take guns apart and put them back together blindfolded. It wasn’t that he knew how to speak Arabic. It wasn’t because he knew how to start a fire or climb mountains. And it wasn’t because he jumped out of planes for a living and, when he landed, he got to put his hands in his pockets without a sergeant major shouting at him from across the drop zone.

I looked up to him because he had a truly unique value proposition; one that many don’t truly understand. There aren’t a lot of people on the planet who can do what he does. And every day, he went into work in direct alignment with that value proposition. The skills he acquired, the ones that became his passion, were put directly to use throughout his career.

I think this is what makes retirement a difficult transition for many veterans. It’s difficult to enter a workforce where no one understands what you bring to the table. It requires a deep self-reflection, a translation of your skill sets and, potentially, a complete rewrite of your value proposition.

Although I never earned the green beret like my uncle did, I did find my own unique value proposition through my experience in the Army. My value proposition, however, wasn’t put to use like his was.

My Story

In 2013 I raised my right hand to join the Wisconsin Army National Guard as an Infantryman. Shortly after graduating OSUT (One Station Unit Training — basic and advanced individual training combined), I signed a contract with Army ROTC and in 2017, I was commissioned into active duty as an Infantry officer with a branch detail (a temporary assignment to one branch while officially belonging to another) to the Signal Corps.

That branch detail was an afterthought to me in 2017. I was mentally preparing for one thing: to take an infantry platoon to war. I still wanted an opportunity to provide unique value in the way that my uncle did. I wanted to jump out of planes and coordinate the fearful destruction of our nation’s enemies. Unfortunately (and yet, fortunately), that never happened. I arrived at 4-25 Infantry Brigade Combat Team just as they were returning from a 2018 deployment to Afghanistan. I would train, but I would never see combat. One of my greatest regrets in this world is that I never took my platoon to war, and yet, one of my greatest reliefs was that I never had to.

After 11 months of leading my platoon I was hired as the Deputy Commanding General’s Aide de Camp for US Army Alaska. During my time in this position, my inevitable promotion to Captain was fast approaching and the reality that I would soon no longer be an infantryman was quickly setting in. Impostor syndrome planted its roots.

How was I, an Infantryman who had trouble mapping a printer, supposed to lead a group of technical professionals in the Signal Corps? I found myself looking through the broadening catalog for a unique opportunity: something that would provide me with some deeply technical training beyond what would be taught at the Signal Captain’s Career Course.

I came across the Artificial Intelligence Scholar program through US Army Futures Command. The program consisted of attending Carnegie Mellon University to pursue a Master’s degree in Data Science, followed by a two year assignment with Army Futures Command.

I read the program requirements: “Strong candidates should have a bachelor’s degree in Statistics or Computer Science, or otherwise show evidence of mastery of this material.” Well, I had neither of those. But I decided to throw my dart just to see if it would stick to the board. So, I applied anyway.

A few months later, I received an email from Army Human Resources Command (HRC): “Congratulations, you’ve been accepted!”

My government phone, screen still showing the email, bounced down the stairs. Elated, I brought the news to my wife, who turned around and applied for the University of Pittsburgh. The next day, I received a call from my branch manager who told me to get ready to PCS (Permanent Change of Station — a military relocation), as I would be slotted for the next open class of the Captain’s Career Course.

Just before my wife and I PCS from Alaska to Ft. Gordon, Georgia, she receives her letter of acceptance to the University of Pittsburgh. I begin the career course and we begin house hunting in Pittsburgh: doing research on neighborhoods, calculating commute times, and looking for pet-friendly rentals. At the same time, I buy a book on Python and start trying to brush up on statistics in preparation for the program.

HRC had been radio silent since the acceptance email. Despite my own requests and those of multiple other candidates for clarification on when our report dates would be, when our orders would be issued, or what to expect when we arrived, we received nothing. Then, after approximately 3 months of silence, 3 weeks after moving to Ft. Gordon, and 3 days after finally receiving an RFO (Request for Orders — the precursor document to actual PCS orders) for Pittsburgh, I receive another email from HRC:

“You’ve been determined to be at significant risk of not being accepted into the Data Science program at Carnegie Mellon. You will not PCS to Pittsburgh. Contact your branch manager for next steps.”

No further clarification. No apology for the mishap. No responses when we reached out for answers. My gut reaction was: “You’re not even going to let me try? You’re upending my life on an assumption?”

My branch manager calls. She was taken by as much surprise as I was. (The irony that my branch manager and the individual who sent me the email likely work in the same building is not lost on anyone). The talent marketplace where I would have otherwise competed for my next assignment had just closed. My branch manager deliberately kept me out of this market since I was supposed to be going to Pittsburgh.

I never received closure from HRC or from AFC. No one ever reached out to apologize or offer any sort of consolation. This was the first time I really felt like the Army didn’t give a shit about me. I wasn’t a human being with a career, a life, and a family. I was a DoD ID number in a spreadsheet that had just been callously replaced with an empty cell.

I wasn’t the only one affected. HRC had done such a poor job of communicating anything to the selected candidates, or to those candidates’ branch managers, that one soldier was on leave, in Pittsburgh, closing on a house when he got the same news that I did. Another decided to separate because his wife had already accepted a job in Pittsburgh with Amazon.

Finding my new value proposition

This experience alone would have been enough for me to leave the Army. But, I was still committed to serve and, it was through this experience that I found my way into the FA26B (Data Systems Engineering) branch. My branch manager pulled some strings to get me into the very next course. The Tuesday following that callous email from HRC, I found myself sitting in a CCNA course.

At this point, I’m still very much an infantryman. I didn’t even know what an IP address was. But, I studied hard, and I was the first student in the class to sit for the CCNA certification exam and pass.

At this moment, I had found my new passion for technology. By the end of the course, I had earned 6 additional IT certifications and started a homelab. I spent my free time (and still do) tinkering with open source technology, building servers, writing software, testing software, and thinking deeply about the strategic application of technology to solve the world’s most complex problems.

My value proposition shifted. It was no longer to coordinate the destruction of our nation’s enemies. It was to strategically apply technology to complex problem sets so that the infantryman and operators who came after me could coordinate that destruction.

I was ecstatic. I couldn’t wait to get to my first duty station as a systems engineer and start applying my new passion.

The divergence of my duties from my value proposition

Almost immediately, however, I realized that despite holding the title of Information Systems Engineer (and later, Data Systems Engineer), it would be my burden to communicate this new value proposition. Holding the title of Information Systems Engineer or Data Systems Engineer held absolutely zero value and did nothing to communicate to my leadership how I should be employed. My first unit as a systems engineer was with the 101st Airborne division. I recall a conversation with my soon-to-be boss, the S6 OIC (Officer in Charge), in which he admitted to me that he didn’t really know what a 26B did.

My 2 1/2 years with the 101st Airborne were spent in a constant tug of war between myself and my leadership who were asking me to spend the majority of my time doing boilerplate officer work. I was consistently tasked with writing OPORDs (Operations Orders), polishing PowerPoints and action officer duties, not to mention the additional duties required of all officers like staff duty, Field Officer Duty (FOD), and Investigating Officer (IO) duties.

I would communicate my value. I would write presentations to explain why myself and my team needed time and space to do the technical work required to provide this value. It would be met with nods and the occasional verbal promise that this time would be prioritized, only to be followed up with actions that spoke the opposite.

Eventually, my time at the 101st Airborne comes to a close and I find myself hired at 3rd Special Forces Group. I was certain that this assignment would be better. The innovative mindset of the Special Forces community was certain to be better at managing their technical talent.

But, unfortunately, that was not my experience. My first three months at 3rd Group were spent as the acting OIC due to a transition gap. I spent a majority of my time preparing for meetings, attending meetings, coordinating with the other staff and briefing the XO (Executive Officer) on topics I was still getting up to speed on myself. I was elated when the new OIC arrived so that I could focus on technical projects.

That only lasted about 6 weeks. The new S6 OIC deployed almost immediately and, for 6 months, I found myself working primarily on the logistics of two things: a radio fielding, and a starshield terminal fielding. Not the technical problems with this equipment or even its implementation. I spent 6 months working on the question of “How are we distributing this equipment?”. I would do analysis, write PowerPoints and emails explaining why we should distribute a certain way. Someone would chime in with a different opinion, and I would have to re-evaluate. Rinse and repeat for 6 months. Not to mention that all along the way I would chase down today’s answer to the question of “When are we actually getting these radios/terminals?”

Finally, the OIC returns from deployment. He takes the reins on these logistics and I return to my technical projects; briefing the command’s CTO, building things in our cloud environment, advising our battalions on data problems. I finally felt like a systems engineer again.

Once again, this lasted approximately 6 weeks. One day, the OIC informs me that the XO has tasked me as the action officer for the upcoming memorial ceremony (a deeply non-technical task that could have been done by anyone else in the building).

My decision to leave

This, ultimately, was my final straw. I realized that the communication of my value proposition just wasn’t working. It had been nearly 5 years of this tug-of-war. 5 years of satisfying my desire to work technically through passion projects and homelab experiments, only to go into work to see my leadership’s eyes glaze over when I talked about it and have them ask me to perform work that any other soldier could do. I would always be a cog in the wheel first, and a passionate technical expert second. It was time to go.

I didn’t leave the Army because I was treated like a DoD ID number in a spreadsheet on more than one occasion by HRC. I didn’t leave the Army because I was sent to the field on my wife’s birthday, though another bus was leaving two days later. I didn’t leave the Army because on that same training event, our busses home were cancelled moments before we boarded them because someone in an adjacent battalion had lost a pair of night vision goggles in the woods. I didn’t leave the Army because I pulled field officer duties (a 24 hour shift of running around base doing random security checks) 4 times in two months.

And I didn’t leave the Army because I was asked to be the action officer of the Group’s memorial ceremony.

I left because I was sick of going in to work every single day knowing that the value I brought to the table didn’t matter. My technical skills were interesting, but irrelevant. My passion was appreciated, but not applicable. I was a replaceable pawn on the board. If I didn’t write the OPORD or plan the event, someone else would stand in my place and do it. So, I decided to let that happen. I decided to take my talent somewhere it would be valued and not just raise eyebrows as something mildly interesting.

I will be forever grateful for my time in the Army. If not for this journey, I would have never found my passion for technology. But, the Army has a lot of work to do in capitalizing on the technical talent within its ranks.

What the Army could have done better

I’m not writing this as an essay of complaints. I’m not writing this as a sob story nor am I seeking sympathy, apologies or condolences. I want the Army to take some action.

If I were king for a day, these are the problems I would solve immediately.

The 26B problem

FA26Bs have no place at the BCT level. Every other staff directorate at that level has an O2 or O3 (First Lieutenant or Captain) counterpart to the staff primary who serves as that directorate’s deputy. The S6 does not. The only officer in the Brigade S6 other than the OIC is the 26B. Therefore, in almost all cases, a 26B will serve their first three years or more doing the work of a 25A (a Signal Corps officer). Their technical skills will atrophy. They will think “This isn’t what I signed up for.” and they will leave the Army.

This is such a systemic problem that I want to make this very clear to any senior leader in the Army who may read this. The action I am calling for is not to put this on the roadmap for the next modernization effort. I am not simply calling attention to it so that a council of decision makers will have a meeting about it.

If I were king for a day, I would swiftly, immediately and with absolutely zero hesitation re-code every single BCT-level 26B billet to a 25A billet and rename it to “Deputy S6”. This is an action that needs to be taken now, in an agile manner. Refine the downstream effects after the fact.

This will prompt the 26 branch to find better homes for those officers and it will meet the needs of that staff directorate by allowing them to hire 25As into a real billet.

Yes, they will go unfilled. The signal corps likely does not have enough O3s to fill them all. But, those staff directorates will survive. They already do with nearly 50% of O3 26B billets being unfilled throughout the Army. By doing this, the 26Bs will move on to more fulfilling assignments, and we will slow the hemorrhaging of technical talent from this particular wound.

The career track problem

When you join the Army, you are handing the pen and paper on which your story will be written to someone else. Or, perhaps more accurately, something else. The bureaucracy of Army Human Resources Command has a templated, pre-planned route for your career. You are getting on a train with predetermined stops and a predetermined destination.

Over the course of your career, your branch manager makes every effort to keep you on this path. And they will do so regardless of your value proposition. If you are an infantry officer, you will take a platoon, do company XO (Executive Officer) time, go to the career course, take command, do some staff time, do a broadening assignment, go to ILE (Intermediate Level Education), become a battalion S3 (Operations Officer) or XO, go to BCAP (Battalion Command Assessment Program), take battalion command, and at some point, you will retire just like everyone that came before you.

It doesn’t matter if you’re also a machine learning engineer with a degree in applied artificial intelligence and you tune LLMs during nights and weekends for fun. Sure, you may have a short broadening assignment where you get to apply those skills. But, largely, that talent will be wasted and you will walk the line.

I don’t think technical talent across our ranks leaves the Army because the civilian world pays better. They leave because they’re passionate about their technical work and, at some point, the Army forces them to stop doing it in the name of keeping their career on track.

Broadening opportunities like the AI Scholar program or the Army Software Factory are ephemeral. They are a fun side quest on a soldier’s boilerplate career. And that’s where the Army is failing.

Other armies take a different approach. There is no up or out. If someone is content doing their job as a corporal, they can stay there for 20 years. Why force someone into work that is outside the scope of their value proposition?

If I were king for a day, I would kill the concept of up or out throughout the United States military as a whole. If someone finds their niche in a position where they are applying unique technical talent, we are doing them a disservice, and the Army a disservice, by forcing them to either move on, or get out.

The leadership education problem

In my experience, leadership throughout the ranks does not know how to employ technical talent. I see functional area officers across all branches, warrant officers, and even soldiers with uniquely technical MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) codes (like 25D, Cyber Operations Specialist) routinely mishandled. The root of the problem is always the same: no one knows what to do with us.

There isn’t an easy answer to this problem. If I were king for a day, I would need a magic wand to put all of the knowledge into all of the leaders’ brains and force them to act on it.

I think the best thing that we can do about this is to talk about it. We need buy in from the Army’s highest leadership that these functional areas, these warrant officers, and these technical wizards in the NCO corps, need to be positioned where they can weaponize those talents. They need to be supported in their efforts to practice engineering, and they need to be treated like the technical experts that they are.

Conclusion

I’ve already been asked by several leaders what the Army could have done to keep me. Ultimately, I left for more reasons than my professional dissatisfaction. I have two young daughters. I want them to grow up around their grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles. Short of allowing me to telework from the state of Wisconsin for the remainder of my career, there was nothing the Army could do to keep me.

But, the Army could have made it a much more difficult decision for me.

The Army isn’t bleeding technical talent because the private sector pays better. It’s losing it because it treats technical talent like any other cog in the wheel; because the value of technical talent, quite frankly, just isn’t valued.

The changes I’ve recommended might sound radical. But this is Josh Noll’s opinion:

If we don’t make a change and start capitalizing on our technical talent, we will pay the price in the next war against an Army that has done so.