In war for talent, Army’s new direct commissions an admin ‘disaster’
By Davis Winkie
Thursday, Nov 16
In order to fight tomorrow’s wars, the Army is increasingly looking to its past, and a space officer’s recent appointment illustrates how far its efforts have come — and how much further they have to go against bureaucratic headwinds.
Capt. Jenniffer Estrada Lupianez, a newly minted Army Reserve space operations officer, works by day as a research scientist in the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Intelligence and Space division. She also looked to the past — her family’s — when she decided to follow her uncle and late father’s footsteps into the Army.
But in doing so, Estrada Lupianez became the first space officer to emerge from the Army’s embrace of an older tradition: appointing specialized officers based on civilian expertise rather than forcing them to go through typical commissioning programs. The direct appointments were a crown jewel of recent Army talent management reform efforts — collectively dubbed the “war for talent” by now-retired Gen. James McConville, the service’s former chief of staff.
Eight decades ago, when the world was at war, the Army needed experts it couldn’t mass produce: medical professionals, lawyers, intelligence analysts, communications experts, electrical engineers, industrial planners, film actors and more.
https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2023/11/16/in-war-for-talent-armys-new-direct-commissions-an-admin-disaster/
