Seth Godin, author of some of the most popular career writing in the world, wrote a book disparaging the idea that “quitters never win.” Godin argued that “winners”—he generally meant individuals who reach the apex of their domain—quit fast and often when they detect that a plan is not the best fit, and do not feel bad about it. “We fail,” he wrote, when we stick with “tasks we don’t have the guts to quit.” Godin clearly did not advocate quitting simply because a pursuit is difficult. Persevering through difficulty is a competitive advantage for any traveler of a long road, but he suggested that knowing when to quit is such a big strategic advantage that every single person, before undertaking an endeavor, should enumerate conditions under which they should quit. The important trick, he said, is staying attuned to whether switching is simply a failure of perseverance, or astute recognition that better matches are available.
Beast Barracks is perfect for a multi-armed bandit approach to quitting. A group of high achievers, not one of whom has an iota of military experience, pulls the West Point “lever,” so to speak. That is, they begin a high-risk, high-reward program and from week one get a massive information signal about whether military discipline is for them. The overwhelming majority stick it out, but it would be unrealistic to expect every single member of a large group of young adults to have understood exactly what they were getting into. Should those few who left have finished instead? Perhaps, if they quit in a moment of simple panic, rather than as a reassessment of the future they wanted in light of this new information about military life. But perhaps more should drop out early too.
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In return for a five-year active-duty service commitment, every West Point cadet gets a taxpayer-funded scholarship valued at around a half million dollars. That’s why it is particularly vexing to the Army that since the mid-1990s, about half of West Point graduates leave active military service after five years, which is as soon as they are allowed. It takes about five years just to offset the development costs for a trained officer. Three-quarters are gone before the twenty-year mark, which would bring them to their early forties having earned a lifetime pension.
A 2010 monograph published by the Army’s Strategic Studies Institute warned that prospects for the Army officer corps “have been darkened by an ever-diminishing return on this investment, as evidenced by plummeting company-grade officer retention rates.”
West Point cadets have been making it through Beast and a challenging curriculum, and then leaving, at around the highest rates of all officer training programs—more than officers who came through ROTC (officer training while enrolled at a nonmilitary college), or Officer Candidate School (OCS), which trains college-graduate civilians or enlisted soldiers to become officers. Investment in officer training has recently played out exactly backward: OCS trainees stay the longest, followed by ROTC trainees who did not receive any college scholarship, followed by ROTC trainees who received two-year scholarships, followed by ROTC trainees with three-year scholarships, followed finally by West Point graduates and full-scholarship ROTC trainees. The more likely the Army is to identify someone as a successful future officer and spend money on them, the more likely they are to leave as soon as possible. The Army’s goal is developing career senior officers, not simply Beast survivors. From the military’s perspective, this is all a major backfire.
The pattern reached such proportions that a high-ranking officer decided that West Point was actually creating quitters and declared that the military should reduce investment in an “institution that taught its cadets to get out of the Army.”
Obviously, neither the academy nor ROTC are teaching cadets to leave. Did cadets suddenly lose the grit that had gotten them through Beast? It’s not that either. The authors of the monograph—a major, a retired lieutenant colonel, and a colonel, all current or former West Point professors—pinpointed the problem as a match quality conundrum. The more skilled the Army thought a prospective officer could become, the more likely it was to offer a scholarship. And as those hardworking and talented scholarship recipients blossomed into young professionals, they tended to realize that they had a lot of career options outside the military. Eventually, they decided to go try something else. In other words, they learned things about themselves in their twenties and responded by making match quality decisions.
The academy’s leaky officer pipeline began springing holes en masse in the 1980s, during the national transition to a knowledge economy. By the millennium, the leaks formed a torrent. The Army began offering retention bonuses—just cash payments to junior officers if they agreed to serve a few more years. It cost taxpayers $500 million, and was a massive waste. Officers who had planned to stay anyway took it, and those who already planned to leave did not. The Army learned a hard lesson: the problem was not a financial one; it was a matching one.
In the industrial era, or the “company man” era, as the monograph authors called it, “firms were highly specialized,” with employees generally tackling the same suite of challenges repeatedly. Both the culture of the time—pensions were pervasive and job switching might be viewed as disloyal—and specialization were barriers to worker mobility outside of the company. Plus, there was little incentive for companies to recruit from outside when employees regularly faced kind learning environments, the type where repetitive experience alone leads to improvement. By the 1980s, corporate culture was changing. The knowledge economy created “overwhelming demand for . . . employees with talents for conceptualization and knowledge creation.” Broad conceptual skills now helped in an array of jobs, and suddenly control over career trajectory shifted from the employer, who looked inward at a ladder of opportunity, to the employee, who peered out at a vast web of possibility. In the private sector, an efficient talent market rapidly emerged as workers shuffled around in pursuit of match quality. While the world changed, the Army stuck with the industrial-era ladder.
The West Point professors explained that the Army, like many bureaucratic organizations, missed out on match quality markets. “There is no talent matching market mechanism,” they wrote. When a junior officer changed direction and left the Army, it did not signal a loss of drive. It signaled that a strong drive for personal development had changed the officer’s goals entirely. “I’ve yet to meet a classmate who left the Army and regretted it,” said Ashley Nicolas, the former intelligence officer. She went on to become a math teacher and then a lawyer. She added that all were grateful for the experience, even though it didn’t become a lifelong career.
While the private sector adjusted to the burgeoning need for high match quality, the Army just threw money at people. It has, though, begun to subtly change. That most hierarchical of entities has found success embracing match flexibility. The Officer Career Satisfaction Program was designed so that scholarship-ROTC and West Point graduates can take more control of their own career progression. In return for three additional years of active service, the program increased the number of officers who can choose a branch (infantry, intelligence, engineering, dental, finance, veterinary, communication technology, and many more), or a geographic post. Where dangling money for junior officers failed miserably, facilitating match quality succeeded. In the first four years of the program, four thousand cadets agreed to extend their service commitments in exchange for choice.*