It's war: minister takes aim at defence | smh.com.au
Our Defence Minister thinks his department is "at times incompetent".
No doubt it is. The problem is that, at least as far as the uniform side of the fence is concerned, they expect people who may be quite good and competent at one job (flying a plane, being an engineer or battlefield tactician) to be sensible and competent in another role they never really intended taking on when they joined (management of personnel, running a quasi-judicial system for disciplinary breaches, conducting fair internal enquiries.)
Time and again, you can see a person who may have been quite good at his or her original job making a complete hash of the more generalist duties that certain positions may require. It's not for lack of attempted training and assessment; Defence spends an inordinate amount of time on management training, and assessment is continual. It's just that some people with good technical skills in some areas just don't seem to be able to engage common sense when it comes to other areas.
It's often truly puzzling as to how some really bad decisions can be made by uniform men or women who are clearly not dumb. Of course, this also means that Defence then has to spend an inordinate amount of time on internal review of such decisions.
I don't know the answer; maybe its inherent in having a relatively small defence force. But it is still discouraging.
2 comments:
Its odd that he was so frank.
My experience of public service decision making is the opposite. They get people with good management skills to make decisions that require technical background and expertise of which they have none. The ignorance is so profound that they don't even know what they don't know and they don't even know enough to ask the right questions or even start to get sensible background.
It may be better to have the current system in defence.
You mean, you hope that a combination of people with good technical skills who can't manage, and those with no technical skills who can manage, might work? The flaw in your optimism might be that the Public Servants don't really get to manage the uniform side anyway.
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