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The Conference Board Review® Article
Balancing Act
Gen. George Casey puts the U.S. Army on firmer ground.
By Matthew Budman
These are turbulent times for the U.S. Army, a massive organization that's still not quite big enough to handle the extraordinary demands being placed on it. As chief of staff, Gen. George W. Casey Jr. is on the hook for recruiting, training, and retaining troops to fight two wars — and planning for any number of unforeseen crises — all while operating at a level of accountability and transparency that your average Fortune 500 CEO would find untenable. (Last month, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates abruptly, and publicly, sacked Gen. T. Michael Moseley, Casey's counterpart at the Air Force, citing "declining standards" in nuclear security.)
The Army is the most scrutinized of institutions, never more so than when under strain, and its top leaders haven't traditionally made themselves available for questioning. But there's a new openness to fresh ideas and thinking, and in that spirit, Casey, appointed chief of staff in April 2007 after serving almost three years as commanding general of the Multi-National Force in Iraq, agreed to sit for an interview of unusual — even unprecedented — duration, with no ground rules. Over the course of an hour, he spoke about military collaboration with corporate America, the impending transition to a new administration, and why he's not overly concerned about the Army's shifting standards for recruitment.
And more communication is in the works: "I'm working on the notion of blogging," says Casey, who turns 60 this month. "I look at blogs periodically now, but the staff wants me to get out there and blog away. I'm not quite there yet, but I suspect I'll do that before long."
Matthew Budman, acting editor of TCB Review, met with Casey in his office at the Pentagon.
After thirteen months as Army chief of staff, what have you learned about steering an organization with some two million employees?
That it takes a long time to change direction. You hear the analogy about the supertanker all the time. When an organization like this gets out of balance, it takes a long time to put it back in balance; it's going to take us three or four years to get back to where we think we need to be.
When I came out of Iraq, I had about sixty days to transition. Part of that time, I just needed to regroup personally. The other part of the time, I had a transition team that I sent across the Army to ask them questions about the state of the Army now and what kind of Army we need for the future. They came back, and we put all that together.
So I came in with a notion of what I needed to do. But then I embarked with my wife on a four-and-a-half-month tour around the Army, where we got out and hit every different kind of unit and installation and talked to soldiers and talked to families. I took a few things out of that and modified what the transition team had said, and basically announced a vision of what it was we needed to do — and that was to put ourselves back in balance.
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Return to the July/August 2008 The Conference Board Review® issue.
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