Military Review English Edition January-February 2017 | Page 39

POLITICS-AND-POLICY OFFICER
Similarly , the S-9 typically focuses on infrastructure development , and the operations officer ( S-3 ) is engrossed in planning operations , evaluating key terrain , and coordinating between the other warfighting functions within the brigade . No functional area officers — whether foreign area officers , strategists , or strategic intelligence officers — are assigned at the brigade level . Given the likely continued emphasis on partnerships between conventional Army units and their HN counterparts , the Army cannot continue to accept this deficiency in the brigade staff . Without a trained and resourced politics-and-policy officer , only in rare instances will a commander obtain critical information by setting aside one of his or her officers or directing a staff element to look at these issues instead of or in addition to their mission-essential tasks . The politics-and-policy officer need not be its own functional area that forces an officer out of the operations track and command pipeline like the strategist , acquisition , or foreign-area officer specialties . Rather , it could be an additional skill identifier consisting of formal schooling and a utilization tour . Selection must be competitive and nominative , and schooling should consist of formal master ’ s degree programs in international relations , foreign policy , public administration , finance and business , or regional studies , with coursework in economics and public policy . Officers who acquire this additional skill identifier should be managed similarly to those who complete the School of Advanced Military Studies .
With a planned reduction to thirty BCTs by fiscal year 2017 , the Army would only need to allocate a minimum of sixty officers to a maximum of ninety officers per year to this program . 7 One politics-and-policy officer per BCT would require thirty officers , with an additional thirty in a one-year graduate school program ready to replace the existing politics-and-policy officers after a twelve-month utilization tour . If the Army wanted to send each politics-and-policy officer to a two-year graduate program , an additional thirty officers would be required .
The question of how to incorporate these officers back into the appropriate key development and command pipelines remains . The Pentagon is already implementing personnel reforms that are expanding officer opportunities for advanced civilian schooling . Such enhanced education proposals are a key component of Defense Secretary Ashton Carter ’ s effort to overhaul the military personnel system . According to the Military Times , “ the emerging slate of reforms will include new benchmarks designed to encourage officers to go to civilian graduate schools and other ‘ broadening assignments ’ that involve spending time beyond the insular military community .” 8 The politics-and-policy officer billet could be a necessary component to institutionalize already existing military education reforms and bring enhanced capabilities to the BCT without making new , costly investments outside of existing personnel reforms .
Deployed BCTs could benefit from a politics-and-policy officer immediately . During my time with 3rd BCT , it was clear that the brigade ’ s separate missions of building partner capacity , training and equipping an HN security force , and advising and assisting HN political and military leaders at times had competing strategic ends . In some cases , our efforts to equip and train the Kurds undermined our efforts to advise and assist the government in Baghdad . At an even more granular level , our partnership with units committed to the defense of Baghdad often took training time and space away from our HN partner units that were apportioned to liberate areas north and west of the capital . Given that no existing brigade staff section had a primary responsibility to aid the commander in processing or prioritizing competing tactical and strategic measures of performance and effectiveness , it was incumbent upon the leaders within the brigade to come up with creative solutions .
The brigade task-organized and established an advise-and-assist cell comprised of officers for whom the advise-and-assist mission was neither their primary mission nor their area of expertise . Each day , they had to make decisions on how and where to spend their finite time and resources , a situation that could be at least partially alleviated by the politics-and-policy officer , whose daily responsibility should be to organize
Maj . Adam Scher , U . S . Army , is the executive officer of 1st Battalion , 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment . He previously served as an assistant professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the U . S . Military Academy . He graduated from West Point in 2004 and from Columbia University ’ s School of International and Public Affairs in 2013 . A veteran of multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan , he most recently served as a brigade politics-and-policy officer for 3rd Brigade , 82nd Airborne Division , during its deployment to Iraq in 2015 .
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