In fact, it's worse than this. Job A is subordinate to job B. You get promoted to job B if you are better at job A than your peers, even though the skill sets may be entirely unrelated. This lowers the average performance on job A, and puts someone new in charge who may not be good at job B.
This isn't an entirely fair analysis, because often being good just means being willing to put in an actual effort to the job, which is transferrable. And this is basically how promotions work everywhere. But it's still a worrisome model.
Edit: I talked to my friend who's father is in the military, and she says this: "In the military, my dad says you want to be the guy they can replace. You want to streamline things as best you can, fill your role, and do what you can to make the whole system run better, but without YOU specifically. Because they don't want to promote someone who they need where he is"
One factor that may explain this is that critical thinking is in a sense compartmentalised in intelligence functions.
Air Force Intelligence Officers do analysis, and their soldiers do analysis. However, in the Navy, intelligence sailors do analysis but there the officers are drawn from a common pool of naval officers under complex selection criterion (and not advertised to the public. This further emphasises that job design occurs as a crude greedy algorithm where the first generation of Officers where assigned the general job of defence and designed subor...
In response to the question
I posted that my military experience seems effectively designed to increase executive function. Some examples of this from myself and metastable are
Uniforms- not having to think about your wardrobe, ever, saves a lot of time, mental effort, and money. Steve Jobs and President Obama are known for also using uniforms specifically for this purpose.
PT- Daily, routinized exercise. Done in a way that very few people are deciding what comes next.
-Maximum use of daylight hours
Med Group and Force Support-Minimized high-risk projects outside of workplace (paternalistic health care, insurance, and in many cases, housing and continuing education.)
After a moment's thought it occurred to me that there are some double-edged swords in Military Rationality as well, some of which lead to classic jokes like 'Military Intelligence is an oxymoron.'
Regulations- A select few 'experts' create policies which everyone else is required to follow at all times. Unfortunately these experts are never (never ever) encouraged to consider knock-on effects. Ugh.
Anybody else have insights on the military they want to share here? I feel a couple of good posts on increasing executive function might come out of a discussion on the rationalities and irrationalities of the armed forces.