“Eliminate the red trousers? Never! The red trousers are France!”
— French Minister of War Eugène Étienne, 1913
When the French Army went to war against Imperial Germany in August 1914, it did so with a military absolutely convinced of the superiority of its military traditions on the modern battlefield, of which the traditional red trousers worn by its soldiers were the most literally and figuratively obvious. Despite evidence that more inconspicuous uniforms were necessary, any proposals to change something viewed as foundational to the French Army’s legacy and heritage were fiercely opposed, despite the obvious need for a change. It was only after hundreds of thousands of casualties at the Battle of the Marne—at least some of which were attributed to the ease with which Germans could spot French infantry—that the French Army finally retired its red trousers from the battlefield. The reluctance to abandon practices borne of tradition is a strong one across military establishments, which often resist change until the realities of war force it upon them. In an era of increasingly rapid military innovation and adaptation, and renewed rivalry between the great powers, members of the American defense community should ask: What is our pantalon rouge?
As then Air Force chief of staff (and subsequent chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) General Charles Q. Brown described in 2020, the US military faces an imperative to “accelerate, change, or lose” the coming fight. This clarion call underscored the need for the Department of Defense to embrace bold, transformative thinking in its approach to innovation. Our service chiefs have since initiated significant reforms to force employment concepts, organizational structure, and the incorporation of new technologies, reflecting a bold yet disciplined embrace of progress that seeks genuine improvement over change for its own sake. While each service reconsiders its doctrine, organization, and technological capabilities to better confront emerging threats, one orthodoxy remains sacrosanct: the joint force’s anachronistic officer-enlisted divide. If it wants to remain the world’s premier military force, the Department of Defense must expand the aperture of its innovative reforms to unlock the full leadership potential of the modern force, establishing a unified military hierarchy and rank system, instituting competitive, merit-based promotions across all ranks, and significantly broadening the direct accessions program to draw upon the unparalleled pool of talent in America’s civilian workforce.
The officer-enlisted divide that characterizes America’s rank system has historical roots in the most successful military forces of the eighteenth century: the British military under King George III, the French military of King Louis XVI, and the Prussian military of King Frederick II. Their dual-track, class-based rank systems were modeled after the societies from which they drew their manpower, with aristocrats and landed gentry commanding large numbers of conscripted peasants and urban laborers, employed in large formations on an open field of battle or the high seas. So distrusted was the general population from which the conscripted masses were drawn that Sir Arthur Wellesley blatantly expressed his sentiment in 1813: “We have in service the scum of the earth as common soldiers.” Officers were gentlemen for whom a commission was a marker of prestige, while conscripts were often impressed from the streets and were generally expected to flee at the first sign of battle if not under the harshest possible discipline enforced by members of a higher caste. Enlisted conscripts with a university education were virtually unheard of, and the primary requirement to succeed in the enlisted ranks was the ability to march in step and the mechanical memorization and drill required to load and fire a musket. While the lessons of eighteenth-century conflict can be extraordinarily informative at the strategic level, the tactical realities of twenty-first-century warfare bear little resemblance to the line formations and marching in step of Saratoga or Waterloo. And yet, the United States is still employing a rank system inherited from the monarchies of the premodern Europe.
To say that the demands of war on the military professional have changed since the era of musket and sail would be an understatement. Individual military personnel might control equipment worth well into the tens of millions of dollars, including advanced fighter aircraft, unmanned reconnaissance platforms, modern armored vehicles, and precision artillery systems. The most junior service members routinely understand and employ technical skills unfathomable in the eighteenth century, including electronic warfare, cyberwarfare, space systems operations, and intelligence analysis involving millions of data points. At no point in American history has the military fielded such a well-educated, technically adept junior force, nor faced a greater need for capable, high-caliber leadership. Fortunately, the United States has the education, skill, and experience it needs in droves. In sharp contrast with the era of the American Revolution, for example, Western societies are almost entirely literate and numerate, with nearly 38 percent of the American population over twenty-five possessing a bachelor’s degree, and nearly 15 percent holding a graduate degree. Moreover, the United States is unburdened by a formalized class system, granting it the ability to match citizens to positions in national service by merit alone.
The officer-enlisted divide is, in many ways, the elephant in the room. It contains numerous anachronisms that we as military professionals know are bizarre, but which we accept out of pure inertia. Enlisted experts with decades of leadership experience, many with higher education (31 percent of Air Force senior noncommissioned officers have a bachelor’s degree or higher), are deemed incapable of senior command. Thirty-year-old college-educated E-6s with ten years of military service report to twenty-one-year-old O-1s with no work experience, leading to the universally held and completely justifiable understanding that the noncommissioned officer is the one who really leads the team. Outside the medical and legal professions, civilians with much-needed skills and an interest in national service often find the military an unwelcoming prospect—despite their value, the military’s bottlenecked and restrictive officer accessions programs, rigid promotion structure, and poor optimization of talent act as effective deterrents. Completely contradicting the commonly held assertion that education, experience, and skill should be the determinant of promotions, because the promotion pool for each rank is so limited and selection rates so high, the primary factor which determines promotions between O-1 and O-4 (82 percent of the officer corps) is time in grade. Promotions from E-4 to E-5 involve intensive study, testing, and a competitive board process, which saw the Air Force select only approximately 23 percent of those who were eligible in 2023. Meanwhile, Air Force promotions from O-3 to O-4 in that same year saw selection rates of approximately 84 percent. Even more confounding is that promotions to O-2 and O-3 are entirely automatic, with no consideration of merit whatsoever. Time in grade has become the de facto standard for our officer corps not because it effectively measures talent, but because the current system artificially narrows the pool of eligible candidates available for selection. Rather than choosing the best leaders based on merit from a broad range of sources, we promote from rigid, siloed groups where time served matters more than performance or potential, advancing on along fixed rails at a set pace regardless of whether the system’s occupants are ready to lead.
The bottom line is that this system is performative, not functional, forcing us to confront a simple but vital question: If we were designing a rank structure from scratch, is this the system we would choose? In peacetime, the anachronisms of the current system may be dismissed as familiar quirks of legacy or heritage, but in a war against a great power adversary, they could cost lives and compromise missions. There are, of course, aspects of the current system that do add value. The clear chain of command. The concept of setting an established criteria for promotion to each rank (as inadequate as the current criteria might be for the junior officer ranks). The effect of a clear hierarchy on unit cohesion and discipline in combat. But to argue that the current system is the only possible design that can sustain those elements is to display a profound lack of the creative thinking we have amply demonstrated in so many other areas. What might one alternative look like?
First, the services should establish a unified military hierarchy and rank system, retiring the bifurcated officer-enlisted ladders and normalizing continuous vertical mobility across the joint force. Opening the flow of talent from the vast group of dedicated men and women in our enlisted force to more senior ranks will allow for a more selective promotion system and higher-quality leadership. Second, the direct accessions program should be expanded to all career fields and grades, drawing upon experienced talent from the civilian workforce to supplement the force we develop from within the ranks. Direct accessions would be guided by clear, merit-based criteria for the career field and rank for which they are applying, using professional military education and acculturation to ensure cultural fluency and credibility. Finally, accessions and promotions to all grades should be competitive and based exclusively on merit, to include valuable experience and job performance, education, and relevant skills. By increasing the pool of talent upon which each grade can draw upon, time in grade should be abolished as a de facto standard for promotion. Freed from the burden of serving as mass-accession pipelines for the officer corps (over 60 percent as of 2022), the service academies and reserve officer training corps programs would commission a smaller, deliberately developed mid-tier leadership cadre that would enter the middle leadership ranks alongside peers drawn from the enlisted force and the private sector. These reforms would eliminate outdated constraints that have artificially limited the careers of 80 percent of our force based solely on their entry point into national service. They would dismantle artificial barriers to accessing the full spectrum of available talent by allowing junior personnel and civilians who meet merit-based requirements to compete for positions across the ranks. In doing so, they would empower the Department of Defense to be far more selective in choosing the men and women to whom we entrust American lives.
Fortunately, this has been done before. The US Foreign Service utilizes a unified personnel system from FS-09 to the SFS (senior leadership) ranks. Promotions are based on merit, and the Lateral Entry Pilot Program allows midcareer professionals from the civilian workforce to enter at a grade commensurate with their value based on relevant experience, education, and skills. Similar systems are utilized by a broad range of security-focused organizations to manage their civilian workforces, including the Defense Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, as well as by virtually every successful private sector startup on the planet. With clearly established ranks and positions, this type of system preserves the chain of command, with those in a higher grade possessing more authority and responsibility than those below them. It recognizes that different roles and positions require varying blends of administrative and technical expertise, and that arbitrarily tasking leadership to officers and technical expertise to enlisted personnel doesn’t recognize the reality that all ranks require differing blends of these skills depending on the role they currently serve in. What officer doesn’t use knowledge and technical expertise? What command chief or first sergeant doesn’t lead? The legal authorities and responsibilities granted by commissions and derived from Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution and Title 10 of the US Code would still be granted at the appropriate ranks without the arbitrary divide of an eighteenth-century caste system. It would emphasize the critical need to expand access to quality higher education programs across the ranks, and the pivotal importance of professional military education in training and preparing personnel drawn from all sources for the demands of each grade. Such a system recognizes the crucial role and leadership our noncommissioned officers play by finally granting them access to authority commensurate with their experience, education, and skills. Finally, it gives our joint force what it needs to win the future fight: leadership drawn from the best of our military and civilian workforce, with promotion consistently earned through merit.
If the US military is to prevail in future conflict, it must embrace innovation not only in weapons systems and new warfighting domains, but in its human capital. Real reform demands more than tactical adjustments or new gear; it requires strategic imagination. We must be willing to engage in bold, uncomfortable thought experiments that challenge our sacred cows, those institutional assumptions we’ve stopped questioning not because they are what we need, but because of path dependency. This proposal is not the only path forward, but it illustrates the type of unconventional thinking and rigorous debate we need to embrace if we are serious about preparing for the challenges of the next fight, not the last one. Out-innovating our rivals in peacetime may spare us the harder lessons that war is always eager to teach. If we cling to our red trousers when it comes to our most valuable asset—our people—change will still eventually come, but at far greater cost.
Captain Mike Cartier is a chief of staff of the Air Force PhD fellow at the Naval Postgraduate School, where he researches military innovation and great power competition. Most recently, he led strategic and operational analysis teams at US Air Forces in Europe – Air Forces Africa, enabling security assistance to Ukraine, NATO deterrence operations, and crisis response efforts across three combatant commands.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Naval Postgraduate School, Department of the Air Force, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Samantha Jetzer, US Navy