Under the classification of “throwing in my two cents worth,” I can’t resist commenting on the unfolding revelations about U.S. Army personnel evaluations of Nidal Hasan, the psychiatrist under indictment for mass murder at Fort Hood last November.
The Associated Press reports detailing Hasan’s evaluation irregularities and the erratic, inconsistent assessment by various supervising officers comes as no surprise whatsoever.
Without hesitation, I can verify that the military uses performance evaluations as a technique and device for managing and manipulating careers rather than objectively documenting performance and on-the-job behavior. The subjectivity of these HR processes is notoriously well-known among the ranks, and many enlisted soldiers and officers accept this with varying degrees of ascent, depending on the favorability of their own specific evaluations.
So it’s no shock the military brass now chooses to throw its peons under the bus, even those — perhaps especially those — who made honest efforts to document the deficits, warning signs, and outright misconduct swirling around Hasan earlier in his career. This is so typically Army … nay, so typically military! (I have experience working professionally among Army and Air National Guard as well as U.S. Navy personnel.) These are organizations for which self-preservation is the inherent mission. Consequently, they’re populated with officers and NCOs who instinctively circle the wagons to defend their own job security when hostile forces arise, and they won’t hesitate to cut anyone down who might threaten their comfortable stability.
Invariably, that means the gutless homebodies at the highest levels freely exercise their prerogative to slice and dice up those with smaller … well, let’s just not go there. This is pretty much guaranteed whenever there’s no hope to be gained by standing together, which of course is clearly the case, we now plainly see, where Hasan is concerned — no startling tactic when it comes to administrative mismanagement, as opposed to, say, when the actual lead bullets are flying wildly about the troops.
There’s no organization like the Pentagon to operate by the principle that the finest, most upstanding and honest deeds will not escape unpunished. And if you ask me, the rueful fact of it is that Nidal Hasan’s unfortunate targets were, in the final assessment, several levels of rank below their rightful mark.
