Soldiers Are Away from Home Now More than Ever Despite No Major Ongoing Wars

Sadly, this is a continuation of the "Do more with less" attitude.

I would often present to my leadership my ability to complete mission requirements based on a "cut-line" approach. I would list all the requirements levied upon my organization, prioritize them according my understanding of their wishes (specified or implied), and then put a cut-line showing where my current resource level allowed me operate.

Often, it would work (not all the times, but often) as the presentation was that I needed to complete these tasks without sacrificing quality and I would request reprioritization if they didn't agree with the placement of a requirement on the list.

Why the detour to that? Because many times the leadership doesn't push back to higher with the resource constraints we have and instead want to present the "Can Do Leader" that will figure out a way to "do more with less". Often, this leads to stressing personnel, quality of accomplishment, or a "soft redefining of a requirement" (well, they won't really know if I do this, so they said "all", but I'll only do "50%").

I remember relating to my boss once during a QTB that my role as commander was to manage failure. After getting the 'Stare of Death' from him he asked me to explain that comment. My answer was that he gave me more requirements/missions than I could accomplish with the resources (personnel, money, etc) I had and it was my responsibility to figure out which of those balls I kept in the air were glass and MUST be kept there and which were rubber and could drop - in other words, manage which tasks I would fail at.

You saw the same thing in the mid 90's during the Clinton years. The fall of the Soviet Union lead to a very serious cutback in manpower (the Peace Dividend), but the administration kept finding missions they wanted to man, from peacekeeping in the Balkans and Africa, to Civil Action Programs in Central and South America, Africa and others, plus the long term treaty stuff like Korea. It was really the beginning of mobilizing the Guard and Reserve on a rotation basis.

Military is short people so others have to do more. Sad really.