Military Review English Edition July-August 2015 | Page 49

ENTERPRISE LEADERS

be incentivized by established, unambiguous criteria
for selection and promotion.
The change initiative must be supported by a commensurate allocation of resources that clearly demonstrates the importance of enterprise management to
the entire Army. A new norm must emerge: leading
and managing the enterprise must become part of the
professional officer’s ethic, much as the Warrior Ethos
of the Soldier’s Creed has been.24
Conventional wisdom holds that changing a culture
takes time. The Army must leverage the impact of OER
changes by creating the systems that support change.
Synchronizing officer developmental assignments will
require patience and perseverance to align with the new
norm. To influence and shape the Army of 2025, the
Army should focus on the officer cohorts commissioned
between 2002 and 2007. These current company and field
grade officers will direct and manage the Army enterprise
of 2025. The Army’s leader development effort must support their growth through well-considered training, experience, and educational opportunities. These cohorts will
be the colonels graduating from senior-level colleges and
ultimately serving as advisors to the most senior defense
leaders. They will run the institutional schools, manage
Army facilities, and lead Pentagon directorates. In these
capacities and others, these officers will shepherd the planning, programming, budgeting, and execution processes to
enable the operating forces.
These officer cohorts will have extensive tactical and
operational experience. They should also understand and
embrace their professional responsibility to learn how
the Army enterprise works. It is their duty to lead and
manage it, just as they have led in the operating force.
Concomitantly, the Army must provide them with developmental assignments so they can acquire new skills and
perspectives through broadening experiences as outlined
in the ALDS 2013 (see the figure showing the Officer
Career Timeline on page 46).25 For the force of 2025, the
Army must identify specific enterprise-focused broadening assignments in which selected officers from the
various career field designations are immersed—such as
operations, operations support, and institutional support.
The ALDS 2013 provides a comprehensive approach;
it appropriately addresses ends, ways, and means, as well
as near- to mid-term guidance for programming and
budgeting. Nevertheless, it does not go far enough; it
misses an important mark by not defining enterprise
MILITARY REVIEW  July-August 2015

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(Photo courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress)
Montgomery C. Meigs, circa 1865

ontgomery Cunningham Meigs was
a career U.S. Army engineer officer
who was selected to serve as the
Quartermaster General of the U.S. Army during
the American Civil War. He was among the first
senior Union commanders to recognize the vital
necessity of building a logistics system on a vast
and unprecedented scale to support operational
military planning for the contemplated war effort. Under his leadership, a logistics system was
built that kept supplies moving forward with
increasing efficiency to support attacking troops
even as the length of supply lines stretched into
the thousands of miles. Some later historians
have concluded that without Meigs’ strategic
foresight and genius for energetic execution
in building the necessary logistics system to
support the Union forces, the campaigns of such
luminaries as Generals Grant and Sherman
would simply not have been possible. Speaking
of Meigs’ wartime contributions, Secretary of
State William H. Seward said, “that without
the services of this eminent soldier the national
cause must have been lost or deeply imperiled in
the late Civil War.”
Sources: David W. Miller, Second Only to Grant (Shippensburg, PA: White Mane Publishing Company, 2001);
See also text of Seward letter in Henry Benjamin Meigs,
Record of the Descendants of Vincent Meigs: Who Came
from Dorsetchire, England, to America about 1635 (Baltimore, Maryland: J.S. Bridges & Company, 1901), 258.

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