Strategic Leadership: A Recommendation for Identifying and Developing the United States Army's Future Strategic Leaders

Abstract

Abstract : The Army's current model for identifying and developing its strategic leaders occurs far too late in an officer's career progression, thus limiting the benefit the officer, the Army, the nation, and most importantly, the soldiers receive in return. The Army can improve on its strategic leader development by implementing a program that identifies a pool of officer candidates earlier in their careers with the requisite performance, skills, and cognitive capabilities to deal with the complexities of future strategic decision making. To better prepare the next generation of future Army strategic leaders, the Army must be able to identify a pool of officers early in their careers who demonstrate the desired characteristics and potential for continued service as future strategic military leaders, given that the Army's current best predictor of future performance is current performance. This paper proposes three approaches to the early identification and development of the Army's future strategic leaders. The approaches range from the very broad to the very selective. The approaches are as follows: (1) the mass Intermediate Level Education strategic leader education approach, (2) the implementation of the Junior Officer Strategic Leader Development Program, and (3) the Army Strategic Leader Development Program approach. The six criteria used to evaluate the three approaches and their associated weights are cultural acceptability (10%), peer acceptability (5%), ease of implementation (5%), cost (10%), provides exposure to strategic leaders and decision makers (30%), and percentage of target population who become strategic leaders (40%). In comparing the three approaches against the criteria and weights, the second approach, the Junior Officer Strategic Leader Development Program is the clear choice.