DoD civilians will take more command positions

DoD civilians will take more command positions
Staff writer - Staff writer
Posted : Tuesday Nov 6, 2007 14:07:39 EST

Career civilian executives at the Defense Department will be taking over more leadership posts held by generals and admirals in the coming months and years.

Positions overseeing logistics and other non-warfighting operations — traditionally considered as military billets — will increasingly be done by members of the Defense Department’s Senior Executive Service (SES), said Patricia Bradshaw, the deputy undersecretary of Defense for civilian personnel policy, in a Nov. 2 interview.

A directive signed Oct. 25 by Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England formally gives the top tier of senior career executives authority comparable to some of the military’s highest-ranking generals and admirals and political appointees.

“They’ll be invited to senior meetings and have a seat at the table,” Bradshaw said. “They’ll occupy positions that have real scope of authority and responsibility for major portions of the organization.”

Bradshaw said the department’s 1,300 senior executives have been underutilized since the SES program was created in 1979.

“It’s not that it was deliberate,” Bradshaw said. “It was just the hierarchy and the way it was during a different era. If you go back to a lot of our SES, they’ll say, ‘I could always be a deputy, but I could never be in charge.’ ”


Rest of article at: http://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/11/fed_seniorses_071106/



uhc comment: It appears there are not enough soldiers in the soldiers department, so they're now proposing to load it up with civilians? :wtf:

Could be my computer. Link appears to look the same??? Oh, well, here it is anyway....
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/11/fed_seniorses_071106/

Interesting...and yes, sounds like the shortage is working its way up.



However, don't we need the most experienced making the decisions? We've already seen what happens when the inexperienced make decisions.