That leads to the need of reviewing selection content and methods. The present selection system has been clinically analyzed by Maj Gen Suman in an earlier IDR issue. Such a review is also necessary for the content and methods of training officers progressively all through their service. Intelligence has to be fertile and sharp, while it is intellect, which puts it to good use, necessitating the presence of one and potential and scope for the other. Candidates from varying backgrounds and thinking, ideas and motives appear for selection and initial training. Employment considerations, family traditions, starry ideas of patriotism, serving the nation and suchlike, financial inducements, glamour and many others play their part in attracting or forcing candidates, who do not always have a clear enough understanding of what exactly in retail is required in their persona in order to get selected.
Also read: Recollection of 1971 War
Many low and slow starters turn into high fliers later, and vice-versa. Selection content and methods need to reduce the hit-and-miss chances in selection, by fine-tuning it through well thought out identification of requirements, attitudes, psychological make-up and mental horizon. Today’s combat scenario needs not only fighters but also administrators, managers, teachers, thinkers and technical experts, all conversant with combat demands and dangers, uncertainties and fatigue, and all having their mixes of intelligence and intellect, brain and brown, aggression and self-control.
Soon after entry the first agenda would be naturally to bring the background influences, attitudes, motives, thinking etc. on to the common denominator, namely, the aspect of soldiering, its content, nature, ethos, demands and characteristics, so as to subordinate individual predilections to the main theme. Excessive emphasis on drill, bull, obsessive orderliness, blind obedience and confirmity beyond rationality destroy individuality.
No-mistake syndrome and keeping everybody on the hook all the time, be it in peace or wartime. No-mistake syndrome spawns over supervision, which, in turn, starts the disease of the senior doing his juniors job. The syndrome itself is fecundated by the desire to please his superior and create good impression.
Pontification on tradition, discipline, immunization to fear by group and mechanical, automatic actions, though necessary to an extent, drive towards attempt to homogenize individuality and destroy the thinking faculty, so essential in developing courage and innovativeness. In our training repertoire there is little emphasis on instruction regarding what professionalism is, what characterizes military profession, what it entails, what parts drill and tradition, discipline and obedience physical toughness and intellectual strength aggressiveness and self-control play and to what extent.
Penchant for drill, strict obedience, unthinking conformity and strangle hold of tradition are all authoritarian ingredients that tie down leaders and help perhaps survival. But survival is not the goal of soldierly action; it is to win- a positive, active, aggressive action, and therefore needing sufficient room for ideas, innovative approach, out-of-box thinking and individuality. Our present system, an authoritarian, rigid, conventional, stifling one needs to create scope for individuality thinking, initiative, ideas and intellectual content, difficult though it is to loosen its authoritarian grip (of minimum basic survival demand and survival instinct). It is this authoritarianism-high on drill-bull and low on intellectual and initiative-that deters and put off those who have and want to use their brain.
The army itself also is a culprit. It seems to be deeply and senselessly embedded in routine, drill, waiting inordinately for something to happen or attending to small thing with fastidious meticulousness, wasting enormous energy and time, obsessed with no-mistake syndrome and keeping everybody on the hook all the time, be it in peace or wartime. No-mistake syndrome spawns over supervision, which, in turn, starts the disease of the senior doing his juniors job. The syndrome itself is fecundated by the desire to please his superior and create good impression.
Armed Forces are identified with dealing with violence, killing, destroying etc., for which they have to be ready to sacrifice, imbibe strict discipline, develop unquestioning loyalty and obedience and so on with less than necessary analysis of why these traits are required. Nevertheless these become the bottom line, with stress on the “minimum” and the “hazardous”. One wonders at this exclusive emphasis on the minimalist approach. Aren’t there other larger, maximal, aspirational lines above it? if so why don’t they find urention and emphasis? They don’t because they do not seem have been identified, developed and practiced as military service ethos, management imperative and military culture in the rush of meeting the bottom line.
Military recruitment advertisements flaunt “can you do it” placards. Do what? Join and stick on to military service? In what expectation? To achieve what, satisfy what? With what avenues available? The above challenge is titilltive of human manliness, a matter becoming less relevant as women too have been entering the profession. Even “challenge” needs replacement by promises of “opportunity, awareness and scope” for the candidate to inspire, motivate and attract him to the profession to realize and enjoy his potential and pursuit. It needs necessary scope for intelligence, excellence and intellectual content, apart from financial recompense for attracting entry into the profession and falling in live with the conditions and restriction imposed by it.
Also read: Where are the real leaders?
Now what about motivation to continue in service? Financial incentives serve the purpose up to an extent and no further. Thereafter it is job satisfaction, sense of honour, status and pursuit of personal excellence. That is what the service chiefs have highlighted too. Job satisfaction is possible only if ideas, innovative sprit, constructive criticism, frank opinion and exercise of expertise and chosen skills are allowed necessary space, tolerance and understanding; if these are encouraged and sustained and permitted to develop and be practised. More than a thousand officers are wanting to leave the army, nearly ten thousand officer vacancies exist, with hundreds of entry vacancies in the academy going undersubscribed.
Now what about motivation to continue in service? Financial incentives serve the purpose up to an extent and no further. Thereafter it is job satisfaction, sense of honour, status and pursuit of personal excellence.
The existing environment, works ethics and restriction under the garirs of discipline, obedience, tradition and so on deny job satisfaction because of senseless waste of time in adhering to form rather than substance; because of depriving officers of private time and scope for personal pursuits; because of organizational and its higher leadership failure to help subordinates widen their mental, intellectual horizons and pursue their personal inclinations in these spheres. In its holy mantra of “career profile” the system appears to prepare pegs to fit into all kind of geometrical holes. For example engineer officers gathering MES expertise are transferred in their contributive years into general staff. So is it for Border Roads. Those attuned to long years of command experience are thrust into senior staff appointments and vise-versa, an invitation to disaster. Preparing officers at their contributive stage in career as jacks of all trades generates a lot of job disillusionment.
Job satisfaction entails providing opportunity and scope to the officer to develop skill and expertise, and then to put them to practice in his service, particularly when he reaches professional adulthood and contributive period of his career. It has a close relationship with intellectual bent as well as desire for pursuit of personal excellence. Intellectual pursuit does not mean gathering doctorates in science, arts and literature, (though they help to an extent). It means providing berth for a vision, a look- beyond and relating his professional undertaking with other human activities-scientific, social, economic, administrative and many others-. It is in this development that throws up a vision that the armed forces are pretty thin. There is no “vision paper” for officers career, contribution and conduct. Large number of officers want private time, personal study, break from long periods of office routine and escape from over supervision. They want to pursue their interest, hobbies, inclinations, and also contribute to the profession. They listen to what Bertrand Russel says “The performance of public duty is not the whole of what makes a good life, there is also the pursuit of private excellence.”
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