Reforming the Wheel: Lessons from the Royal Navy’s Bold Step Toward Adaptive Leadership by CDR Salamander 2 DEC
Vandergriff Introduction and Analysis:
In the timeless dance of military evolution, where the fog of war demands not just warriors but wise stewards of human potential, the Royal Navy’s recent pivot under First Sea Lord General Sir Gwyn Jenkins offers a clarion call.
Jenkins, a Royal Marine breaking the admiralty’s glass ceiling, isn’t content with the status quo of promotion—a system he rightly critiques as overly subjective, top-down, and perilously prone to elevating toxic leaders who charm their way upward while corroding the ranks below.
As he notes in his address at the Portsmouth Guildhall, this vulnerability stems from assessments that prioritize how one “presents” to superiors over tangible impacts on teams.
The Navy’s response? Trials to diversify evaluation methods, gathering data on leaders who foster exceptional environments rather than merely organizing checklists. It’s a gentle disruption, as CDR Salamander aptly observes: a zero-sum game where every flawed promotion sidelines a better talent, but one ripe for recalibration through evidence and humility.
Contrast this with our own U.S. military apparatus, still shackled to an Industrial Age personnel machine—rigid, ticket-punching, and emblematic of what I term the “Second Generation Warfare” (2GW) culture.
In my writings, from The Path to Victory to my Substack series on adaptive leadership, I’ve long argued that 2GW is the attritional slog of massed formations and hierarchical control, a mindset that permeated the Cold War’s bureaucratic behemoth. Our War Department clings to it like a relic: the “Millington Diktat” of scripted career milestones, FITREPs that reward sycophancy over substance, and a promotion pyramid that incentivizes risk-aversion and hoop-jumping.
Why the stagnation? Institutional inertia, of course—entrenched elites who ascended via the very system they now defend, fearing that reform might expose their own ascent as more lottery than merit.
Add the echo chamber of post-9/11 expeditionary ops, where metrics of compliance trumped measures of adaptability, and you’ve got a personnel system that self-selects for compliant managers, not innovative commanders.
Salamander nails it: “The system is what it does,” and ours has fruited a cadre more attuned to PowerPoint than peer review, leaving exceptional officers—like those I’ve mentored who bailed for civilian pastures—on the cutting room floor.
Yet, as we teeter on the brink of great-power competition, the imperative is clear: transition to a Third Generation Warfare (3GW) culture, one that maneuvers with speed, initiative, and decentralized decision-making to not just survive but dominate Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW). 4GW, as I’ve detailed in pieces like “Why the U.S. Army’s Personnel System is Failing Us in the Age of 4GW,” isn’t state-on-state slugfests but the asymmetric swirl of non-state actors, cyber shadows, and hybrid threats—where victory hinges on resilient, adaptive teams that out-think, out-learn, and out-innovate the enemy.
A 3GW force grasps this: it empowers small units with mission command, values judgment over checklists, and fights 4GW by turning chaos into advantage. But here’s the rub—this transformation can’t be bolted on; it must begin at the foundation: the personnel management system, which shapes military culture like clay under a potter’s wheel.
Our current 2GW personnel relic undermines this shift at every turn. It rewards uniformity—same schools, same rotations, same sanitized reports—fostering a culture of conformity that stifles the diverse, agile minds needed for 3GW/4GW.
Jenkins’ trials, spotlighting “vignettes” of corrosive high-flyers versus unsung team-builders, echo my call for multi-rater feedback and peer assessments: tools to surface the quiet professionals who deliver results, not just dazzle in briefings. Without such reforms, we remain vulnerable, promoting the persuasive poison that erodes unit cohesion just when 4GW demands unbreakable trust from squad to staff.
So, what now? Drawing from my Substack essays—”Rethinking Officer Evaluations: From Checklists to Competence” and “Building Adaptive Leaders: A Roadmap for DoD Reform”—I offer these targeted recommendations to jolt our system forward:
Implement Multi-Source Assessments Immediately: Ditch the top-down monopoly. Introduce 360-degree reviews incorporating subordinates, peers, and mentors, weighted toward behavioral outcomes like team resilience and innovation. Pilot this in selective commands, as the Royal Navy is doing, to generate data proving its predictive power for 4GW scenarios.
Decentralize Promotions with Mission Command Principles: Empower unit commanders to nominate based on demonstrated adaptability in exercises simulating hybrid threats, not just box-checking. Tie this to a “developmental portfolio” where officers document real-world adaptations—echoing my advocacy for narrative evals over numeric scores.
Cultivate Institutional Humility at the Top: Senior leaders must lead by example, as Jenkins has, admitting the system’s flaws. Mandate annual “reform audits” by external panels (academics, allies like the UK) to benchmark against 3GW benchmarks, breaking the entitlement cycle Salamander decries.
Invest in Adaptive Training Pipelines: Redirect resources from rote schooling to wargames emphasizing 4GW dilemmas, with promotion credit for those who excel in leading under uncertainty. This builds the cultural shift from 2GW compliance to 3GW initiative.
The Royal Navy’s experiment isn’t revolution—it’s evolution, a humble nod that perfection is the enemy of progress. For us, emulating it isn’t optional; it’s existential. In the words of a wiser era, “You get what you reward.” Let’s reward the leaders who’ll win the wars we actually face—not the ones we scripted in the last century. The hour is late, but the wheel can still turn.
Begin Article:
Royal Navy is Re-thinking how it Promotes its People, so Should we
you get what you reward
Dec 2
Promotion and selection are zero-sum games. For every bad leader given the nod, a better leader is left on the cutting room floor.
No system is perfect, there will always be bad selections and the correct selections. The key is if your system is very good at making the good selections, and minimizes the odds of bad selections.
If you are unhappy with the results of the system you have, then you should change it.
Systems in a rut generally trend towards increasing error, as they have lost the ability to self-correct as circumstances and requirements demand. A little positive disruption, if you have the right disruptive agent, will make a system better.
A gentle way to disrupt a system is to make a little change that impacts mostly those who are content with and feel entitled to the fruits of the existing system.
It was a good move to adjust things at the U.S. Naval Academy when Lieutenant General Michael J. Borgschulte, USMC, was appointed Superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy. He is the first Marine to hold that position.
That is but a shadow of what happened over at the mother country. Their equivalent of the Chief of Naval Operations is the First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff.
In May of this year, General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, Royal Marines, was appointed to the job. He is the first Royal Marine to hold that position as well.
This raised eyebrows, and that is good. Both USNA and the Royal Navy have not had a good run of things as of late—and breaking the wheel of entitlement and expectations by giving the honor to their respective Marines as opposed to another Admiral sets a tone, and provides an opportunity for review, change, and hopefully improvement.
Let’s look at what is happening across the pond. General Jenkins has had some very interesting things to say about a topic we visit on a regular basis here: the how, why, and who we select for promotion.
Anyone who tells you we only select the best, brightest, and most qualified is either delusional, self-serving, or unaware. We all can tell stories of exceptional officers we served with who were passed over while others clearly inferior were promoted. Or as company or field grade officers, they simply took an off-ramp early to the civilian sector, as they saw nothing higher in the military they wanted to jump through the various hoops to get to.
Incentives and disincentives matter. We promote people who best respond to, and reflect the incentives and disincentives of, the system we have in place for career advancement. From the rigid Millington Diktat that still has changed little since I was a Midshipman, to what personalities thrive under other personalities and get the nod. Everyone is one FITREP, a boss who does not like where you went to high school, or an ill-timed PCS cycle—regardless of their objective fitness—from being off-track and career unrecoverable.
The system is what it does, and you shall know it from its fruits. When you look at the last quarter century, are you sure we have the best system?
I’m still waiting for someone senior enough on our side of the pond to start that conversation, but General Jenkins has made the point clear he’s up to experiment. What he is saying sounds solid.
At the First Sea Lord’s conference in Portsmouth Guildhall, General Sir Gwyn Jenkins cast doubt on how the Royal Navy promotes its leaders.
“I have a real issue with the way that we assess our needs at the moment,” he told the audience.
“I think we are very subjective in our leadership assessment tools. It’s very top down. How your superior feels about the way you present yourself largely dictates how you get reported upon.”
Gen Sir Gwyn believes this can lead to the wrong people being promoted.
“[This] makes us very vulnerable to promoting toxic leaders, if we’re not careful, who, by their nature, are very persuasive up even while they’re damaging below.”
The First Sea Lord announced that several trials have been running with the goal of identifying different ways to assess leadership, as well as collecting data to prove these individuals are top-notch leaders.
…
“We’ve already got a couple of really powerful vignettes on the negative side, where we’ve identified leaders who are, again, getting really good reports, [but] appear to be having quite corrosive effect on their people.
“That’s a really interesting insight. And on the flip side, [there are] people who aren’t getting the outstanding reports but appear to be creating exceptional team environments.”
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The First Sea Lord believes these are the people who deliver rather than those who organise.
The largest barrier to improving, modernizing, or in any way changing how we evaluate is that you need a senior leaders secure enough to admit, “ Yes, I rose to the top in our present system, but I’m not sure this is the best system to produce the cadre of senior leaders our service and our nation deserve.”
I don’t think anyone would push back.
It would be a nice statement of institutional humility…something we are in dire need of.”