Army Losing Young Officers

Two recent articles put the departure of Lt. Col. John Nagl in the context of a larger pattern of bright young officers leaving the Army. Andrew Tilghman explored the issue in a December 2007 Washington Monthly essay. He wrote:

But the top uniformed and civilian leaders at the Pentagon who think hardest about the future of the military have a more fundamental fear: young officers...are leaving the Army at nearly their highest rates in decades. This is not a short-term problem, nor is it one that can simply be fixed with money.

In addition to long tours in Iraq, Fred Kaplan, writing in Slate, points out another reason the Army is having trouble retaining officers:

The prolonged and repeated tours in Iraq were among the reasons for the trend. This is not the case for Nagl. But he represents another problem that the all-volunteer military is facing—the growing influence of the modern soldier's family. It's not that more soldiers have families than was once the case; in fact, the numbers are about the same as they were 30 years ago. But it is the case that more men in the military are married to professional women. In the past, many, if not most, officers married women who had grown up in military families. (Gen. Petraeus married the daughter of West Point's superintendent.) They knew what the gig was when they took it—the endless rotations, the life of never settling down in one place, of a career officer. Now, many officers' wives (or, in the case of female officers, their husbands) have their own careers; they don't want to spend years in Fort Riley, Kan., then a few years more in Fort Hood, Texas. And at some point in the trade-off between private and professional lives, the officer gives in to his or her spouse, takes a stable job, buys a house, and gets out of the service.