On “The US Army and the Pacific: Challenges and Legacies”

This commentary responds to David M. Finkelstein’s article, “The US Army and the Pacific: Challenges and Legacies,” published in the Autumn 2020 issue of Parameters (vol. 50, no. 3)

A Historical Perspective on Today’s Recruiting Crisis

This article analyzes the US Army’s successive recruiting crises, identifying their consistent patterns and the efforts to resolve them, and makes three provocative arguments. First, there is a long-standing institutional tension between recruiting personnel for the combat arms and technical and administrative specialists. Second, many of today’s talent management problems were first identified in a 1907 General Staff report and reiterated in subsequent studies. Third, the Army has pursued innovative recruitment strategies, but much of their success depended on factors outside the service’s control. The essay concludes with four history-based recruiting lessons and an affirmation that the 2019 Army People Strategy recognizes the need for the Army to revise its talent management approach

Samuel Huntington, Professionalism, and Self-Policing in the US Army Officer Corps

Drawing on Samuel P. Huntington’s three phases of self-regulation used to determine if an occupation qualifies as a profession, this article focuses on the third phase of policing and removing those who fail to uphold the standards set forth in the first two phases. It reviews how the US Army implemented this phase following the Civil War through the post–Vietnam War years and the implications for the officer corps

Organizational Reasons For Decision Aid Implementation

Although substantial research efforts have been devoted to determining the reasons for the success and failure of decision aids in organizations, little has been done to examine the reasons why an organization chooses to implement the technology. We propose that understanding the relationship between decision aids and organizational reasons for implementation can assist in achieving a higher level of congruence between the organizations’ goals and the technology. This paper proposes and empirically tests a framework that categorizes four primary reasons – improved decision-making, improved financial outcomes, improved communication processes, and improved learning/training processes. The results support the four proposed dimensions and provide a structure to the multitude of potential reasons for developing and implementing decision aid technology.  The framework can be used by organizational managers in the initial stages of implementing a decision aid technology as well as during the functional stages of the decision aid to assess the initial and ongoing contribution the decision aid is making toward meeting organizational goals

The Benefactor: Assessing the Financial Performance of Charitable Organizations

This project provides students with a simulation of the process used by many private foundations in distributing grants to charities. In particular, the project is based on a fictitious benefactor of a large private foundation who has decided to appoint accounting students to grant-making committees. The committees are responsible for using not-for-profit specific financial performance measures to evaluate local charities and determine which charities should be awarded grants. The charities determined to have the strongest financial performance are awarded operating grants from the private foundation. The project complements traditional lecturing methods by providing a realistic context for introducing students to the importance of the not-for-profit sector and the accounting and financial performance issues faced by charitable organizations

The Rhetoric of Emergence in Narrative

This essay addresses rhetorical narratology’s approach to widely disparate scales of time and space in narratives of emergence, in which micro-events without centralized agents or clear causal relationships produce macro-scale effects. It uses rhetorical narratology’s a posteriori approach to address the difficulty of narrating causality between these scales and resists systematizing relationships of scale. Rhetorical narratology worries less about conditions of scalar interaction that undermine narratability, focusing instead on contingencies that mediate these scalar engagements. In particular, it explores hybrid relationships between rhetorical modes of narrative and lyric that emphasize interrelationships between event causality and conditions of being that are key in narratives of emergent behavior. If truth value is determined by ways that narratives establish coherent relationships between narrator and narratee in terms of purpose, then a rhetorical approach to scale and emergence considers how individuals use available resources to describe and explore relationships between different scales to achieve certain purposes

A Robotics Engineering Certificate for Students Across the Navy

The article of record may be found at https://www.onr.navy.mil/-/media/Files/ONR-Publications/Future-Force-22-Vol-6-No-4-2020.ashx?la=e