Crawl, Before You Walk, Before You Run: Toward Meaningful Army Transformation
Abstract
When planning a trip on the software Map Quest the application asks you two questions. The first is, "What is your desired destination?" and the second is "What is your starting point?" It is the premise of this author that no trip can be planned without knowing that critical starting point. Trying to plan a trip without knowing that piece of information would be a meaningless effort. Departing on that trip without knowing where you are starting from would be crazy. Regardless of whatever wonderful destination you have in mind if you never take into account your starting point, you will always be lost. Why then is the United States Army doing exactly that? Leaders in the Army talk on a daily basis about this exciting organizational journey that they call "transformation". Those strategic leaders pontificate endlessly about what the future Army organization will look like. Quite frankly they are wasting their time discussing the "to be" Army when they do not have any idea what the current or "as is" Army looks like. Only after we identify what the "as is" Army looks like can we then draft a route to the future. This paper will focus on the Army organizations that exist within the Pentagon and its field operating agencies. It is not the intent of this paper to identify what the "as is" Army looks like. That would be an impossible task as the empirical data required to quantify what the 23,000 people are doing in the Pentagon simply does not exist. Instead it is the intent of this paper to explain an affordable executable accurate and common sense solution to quantify where our man-hours in the Army's bureaucracy go. If the ideas outlined in this paper are executed it will set the stage for a meaningful transformation effort.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Mar 19, 2004
- Accession Number
- ADA424195
Entities
People
- Jacob B. Hansen
Organizations
- United States Army War College