Picking up on the themes of creating an organizational climate of innovation within the military, there are excellent tie-ins to be found in Chet Richards and Don Vandergriff’s summary of this summer’s Boyd Conference. Not being able to attend the conference in person, I am very grateful for such a readable summation of the day’s discussions.

I hope to be there in person next year…

xkcd nearly always provides an eerily accurate description of my life. It’s my favorite webcomic out there. Full stop.

Today it gives an added bonus as it provides a perfect summary of why you need both a decisionmaker and an analyst to make a good decision…

An important point from Fred Kagan’s piece in the NYTimes magazine last weekend:

McMaster’s own fate has reinforced these apprehensions. President Bush has singled out McMaster’s campaign at Tal Afar as a model of successful strategy. Gen. David Petraeus, now commander of United States forces in Iraq, frequently consults with McMaster in planning his broader counterinsurgency campaign. Yet the Army’s promotion board — the panel of generals that selects which few dozen colonels advance to the rank of brigadier general — has passed over McMaster two years in a row.

McMaster’s nonpromotion has not been widely reported, yet every officer I spoke with knew about it and had pondered its implications. One colonel, who asked not to be identified because he didn’t want to risk his own ambitions, said: “Everyone studies the brigadier-general promotion list like tarot cards — who makes it, who doesn’t. It communicates what qualities are valued and not valued.” A retired Army two-star general, who requested anonymity because he didn’t want to anger his friends on the promotion boards, agreed. “When you turn down a guy like McMaster,” he told me, “that sends a potent message to everybody down the chain. I don’t know, maybe there were good reasons not to promote him. But the message everybody gets is: ‘We’re not interested in rewarding people like him. We’re not interested in rewarding agents of change.’ ”

You get the behavior your reward, and the promotion system simply doesn’t seem to be rewarding the standout stars who have the experience and the intellect to confront the new challenges of the US military’s 21st Century mission. First Hammes, now McMaster.

Tying this back to a post I wrote in the spring, if we’re going to reduce the amount of C2 we need, we need officers able to think creatively and act independently to overcome unstructured problems.

“The crux of the problem in our Army,” Wass de Czege wrote, “is that officers are not systematically taught how to cope with unstructured problems.”

The UN named Maj. Gen. Zhao Jingmin the first Chinese force commander for a UN peacekeeping mission. China’s already the 13th-largest contributor of peacekeepers to the UN, and they’re just getting warmed up. In the past four years, China has increased its peacekeeping contributions by more than an order of magnitude (see Stratfor graphic posted on TPMB’s blog). As this continues, expect to see more of these firsts.