Gen. Casey on a Crisis in Generalship (Text)

General Casey was asked a question on a Failure in Generalship by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling. Here is his response.

Briefly, I don't believe that there is a crisis in generalship, and I don't believe we need Congressional support to help us sort our way through it. Now as I have gone around the army in the first 4 or 5 months here I have talked to leaders at all levels. I asked them the question. I got to the level where I talked to a bunch of majors, and I asked them what they thought about the Yingling article. They all kinda go, "we were going to ask you about that." I said "I asked first." You get a mixed bag. Some folks think there is a problem. and I will tell you I believe we don't do as good a job as we need to training our senior leaders to operate at the national level. We do a wonderful job training tactical leaders. and we do a pretty good job training operational level leaders at the corp and division level. but we don't do a good enough job at that level. That came out loud and clear to me in my transition. and that's kind of one of the things that Lieutenant Colonel Yingling gets at in his article. From that perspective we recognize that. I've already revamped our General Officer training program to start moving us in that direction. i think it's healthy to talk about it and I've directed all of the War College and the Command and General Staff College and all our advanced courses to talk about it. Sit down with the young folks, who have much more experience than we did, at the early times in their career. Find out what they think. and don't sweep it under the table. Let's get it out there and talk about it. We are putting out a new doctrinal manual, it will be the first manual since September 11, about how we gonna fight. It's entitled Full Spectrum Operations. I sat down with about 30 majors out of Leavenworth and I asked them to read it and we talked about it. The insights were striking. so we've got a lot to learn from the young folks. They're very invested in what we're doing here. We need to continue to seek them out and have a dialogue.

h/t: SWJ Blog.

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