The Problem with the CSM Problem

Irrelevant Parameters article haunts Command Sergeant Major Program

Sergeants Major existed since 1775

The earliest mention of the sergeant major rank in the fledgling United States Army was soon after assuming command of the Continental Army in 1775, General George Washington and his staff standardized the table of organization for the infantry regiment, patterning it after the British Army. They included the position of sergeant major to each regiment or battalion headquarters, along with a noncommissioned officer element.

In 1778, Washington appointed Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben as the second Inspector General of the Continental Army. von Steuben attempted to improve the tactics, regulations, and discipline of the Continental Army. In his Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States, the “Blue Book," von Steuben defined the role of the sergeant major. By writing that he, “must pay the greatest attention to their [noncommissioned officers] conduct and behavior….” In his instructions, he noted that the sergeant major should be well acquainted with management, the discipline of the regiment, and of keeping rosters and forming details. He was expected to be an expert in counting off the battalion and attending parades. Though early on the sergeant major was an assistant to the Adjutant, his role with the enlisted and noncommissioned officers was formed at the beginning.

Coming out of World War II and then Korea right on its heels, it was after the latter conflict the military was suffering in recruiting and retention and congress was rightly concerned. The cold war was heating up and our nation was on edge, and with the Berlin Blockade only four years in the past, there was a major concern that military service as a career would not attract and retain capable career personnel. As a result President Dwight D. Eisenhower directed the Secretary of Defense to study the problem, and the Womble Board, led by Admiral J. P. Womble, identified among other things that the distinction between ranks for both officers and NCOs were reduced and should be widened. But it wasn’t until the 1957 Cordiner Committee, led by chairperson Ralph J. Cordiner, chief executive of General Electric, that any tangible action would be taken.

SuperGrades

Cordiner’s Report of the Defense Advisory Committee on Professional and Technical Compensation included a recommendation that resulted in the Defense Department adding paygrades E-8 and E-9 for all services, this widening the pay gap and reducing stagnation at the top of the enlisted pay structure. Using research data compiled by the McKinsey & Company, Cordiner and his committee showed that the average enlisted man progressed to E-2 in just one year, leaving only five pay grades remaining to differentiate between achievement and responsibility across the enlisted ranks. In their final written report, they noted that the average enlisted man would reach the top pay grade of E-7 “in about 12 years, leaving him with a future of 8 to 18 more years in that grade before retirement.

May 20, 1958, Public Law 85-422 and established the E-8 and E-9 pay grades in the U.S. Armed Forces. Often called “the supergrades,” the first soldier to be promoted to Master Sergeant (E-8) and later Sergeant Major (E-9) was reported to be Theodore Dobol . Since there were time in grade requirements NCOs first had to be promoted to E-8, it would be over a year later when in April 1959, the first NCOs were promoted to E-9. But with the creation of the new grades, the question was what to call these individuals. First called staff sergeant major, it was in 1962 Army Chief of Staff General George H. Decker decided the most senior noncommissioned officer would be addressed as “sergeant major,” regardless of military specialty. However, this created a problem. Although only one E-9 in any color-bearing unit could actually be the senior enlisted man, at echelons above the battalion, many staff sections also had an E-9.

The resulting problems associated with identifying the senior enlisted member of an organization compared to those on staff added confusion for the new rank, and misunderstandings of their roles in the hierarchy. Needless to say, old soldiers were miffed, and there was a perception of haves and have nots. Those attitudes, coupled with the lack of a concrete defined role of the sergeant major, caused a loss in pride and prestige in the rank. In order to identify a sergeant major as the senior noncommissioned officer within a unit, the Army set out to create a title and rank to truly recognize these leaders. Under the direction of the Army Chief of Staff, General Harold K. Johnson, the Command Sergeants Major (CSM) Program was established in July 1968. The program would, “create a small body of selected sergeants major for ready assignment to all major commands of the Army.” Johnson also approved the insignia of the command sergeant major be changed to make them identifiable. He recommended  that a simple change, such as “…adding a wreath around the star might suffice….”

That pronouncement alone did not adequately define to commanders and the force on what the command sergeant major roles were, or for that matter, same for the sergeant major. It was not until the “NCO support channel,” (NCOSC) was first codified in the 1978 Change 8 of AR 600-20, Army Command Policy that it was formally described that NCOs operate within a parallel communication chain to the chain of command. Whoo boy, people still today are burnt up about that development. Paragraph 2.2, noted the Staff or technical and noncommissioned officer channels “supplements the chain of command and is used to accomplish routine, but important tasks and responsibilities.”

NCO Support Channel

The introduction of the word command to the Command Sergeant Major rank has probably been the most controversial change to the enlisted ranks since squad leader duties went away from the buck sergeant (E-5) to the staff sergeant (E-6). More than 10 years later in 1979 during a TRADOC senior commander’s conference, CG General William DePuy sharing his thoughts on the newly described NCOSC that, “He [the sergeant major] sort of floats around out there and observes what’s going on with soldiers and tells the old man about that. Fine, I think he can do that, but that’s a very limited view of what a sergeant major is supposed to do.” DePuy also pointed out that, “the overwhelming number of captains commanding companies…rejected the claim of the sergeant major to any authority at all over unit noncommissioned officers.” The conferees agreed that the line of authority from the CSM on down through the noncommissioned officer echelons must be clear and understood by all. He reiterated that the noncommissioned officer has two responsibilities, “to accomplish an assigned group of collective missions…” and, “to supervise the training of the individual soldiers in that squad, section or crew.” He concluded that it, “should be almost an exclusive responsibility of the first-line supervisors under the direction of and with the support of platoon sergeants, first sergeants, and command sergeants major.

On its 20^th year birthday and with a role that was maturing in an institution with then over 200-years of history and tradition, the command sergeant major rank and the position was herald by an enlisted force that had been previously compressed and lacking upward opportunities. Due to the men and women who served in those ranks several long overdue benefits were afforded to NCOs that previously had been denied. With that rank, the people who served in those sergeant major positions helped create opportunities for advancement for all enlisted, not select MOSes, such as an enlisted career pattern. They also helped develop professional military education, and were intimately involved in the creation of a sequential and progressive enlisted management system. That, compared with the attitudes at the conclusion of WWII when the Doolitle Board was created in direct response to a barrage of criticism on the War Department about alleged abuse of enlisted men during the war. It was a source of pride for many at that time that now commanders at each echelon had a senior enlisted advisor at their disposal.

The Army’s Command Sergeant Major Problem

That same year in 1988, Brig. Gen. (Ret.) John C. Bahnsen and Col. (Ret.) James W. Bradin penned an article for the Army War College’s magazine Parameters called The Army’s Command Sergeant Major Problem. A review of Parameters website until most recently highlighted that article as being in the top 10 “most popular pages” as recently as 2022. Without a doubt those two old soldiers combat records were stellar and their Vietnam service can hardly be matched. There were nine Silver Star medals and two purple hearts between them. “Doc” Bahnsen (who sadly recently passed), was an Aviator who retired in 1986 and had last led troops in command in May 1980. Bradin, commanded armor and aviation units during his two Vietnam tours. He was a former battalion commander stateside and was Commandant of Cadets at the Citadel beginning in 1982. Though they both waxed poetic on the ills of the Command Sergeant Major in their article, much of the foundation of their arguments was either from their experiences gathered during their heroic Vietnam service in and out of command, and three unidentified World War II era senior NCOs with questionable credibility, Frank, Henry and Don.

They mostly spoke in the first-person singular, so it is not easy attributing a statement to either. According to them, Frank as a role model was coming from their memory twenty years earlier while they served together in Vietnam. Overweight (slightly, according to the article, but hey, standards) Frank’s attributes were him getting shot in flight helicopter in contact without complaint, strong, and fearless under fire. Henry may have been illiterate with only three years of schooling. During Vietnam there was a program known as, Project 100,000, (POHT) where every year the military, mostly Army, were required to assess at least 100k men who were below entry standards. It picked up several derisive nicknames like McNamara’s Moron’s, after the Secretary of Defense who mandated the program. Though there is no indication in the article that Henry was a POHT inductee, it was noted he had attained his GED (note, so did this author). And Don, another “brown shoe army” veteran who also likely came from aviation or air cavalry as the article states they all three “were running mates,” the bulk of the opinionated article come from the authors aging memories and a one-hour conversation with a disgruntled old soldier, with nary a researched fact on enlisted history. That appears to be a part of the backstory of one of the most quoted articles on the woes of command sergeants major.

Shooting the Messengers

Besides Don’s fuzzy memory of the good old days, his incorrect statements abounded. The sergeant major rank and position existed well before Don entered the service, and just like today, soldiers serving on the line in WWII, Korea Vietnam or Desert Storm likely did not run into a sergeant major because as Don correctly mentioned, the sergeants major of days gone by served at the battalion, regiment and higher. The average private soldier, squad leader or platoon sergeant of WWII seldom met them. But they existed, history shows they were the dudes the first sergeants submitted their daily reports to at the battalion. At least by position, the sergeant major has been around the Army since there has been one. Though Don watched “this thing [CSM Program] from the beginning,” he was apparantly misguided. And the fact that the NCOSC was written instructions codified 10 years earlier shows he was out of touch at the time.

Through Don it appears the authors projected their own misgivings about the Command Sergeant Major, and they use him alone to justify their confirmation bias. Don was to have said “smart folks in Washington decided that we needed the ranks of E-8 and E-9. They never asked us what we wanted, they just sat up there in Washington and decided that we needed our image enhanced.” The thought that a compressed grade structure was okay with a 20+ year enlisted man is a stretch, and as a former enlisted it is hard for me to understand his rationale. And then for him to offhandedly discount the multiple studies that went on both by the military, and those outside the military, and the decisions made based on data collected by the prestigious McKinsey Group and analyzed by industry leaders is nothing more than a hand wave at the decision to create the supergrades. Don sounded like someone passed over for a position who continuously talks bad about what he didn’t get.

Obviously not the benefactor of NCO education, which has arguably been the number one factor that has continuously been attributed to the development of the modern noncommissioned officer, Don was quick to knock down the pinnacle NCO course a few pegs. “The Sergeants Major Academy ought to be teaching them [students] that they are still NCOs.” After meeting a graduate “of that place,” he was quick to point out that the “poor dummy doesn't know diddly about training young soldiers, about killing the enemy and surviving to kill the next, but he can handle the division's ammo.” But good ol Don was correct in noting that they [the Army] “put this position [command sergeant major] in units and never trained the battalion commanders or the CSMs on their relationship.” Don may have been good enough for a time to be the honorary CSM for his wartime regiment, but his attitude was not a role model that I can admire.

Of Course CSMs do not Command

Point blank, enlisted soldiers deserve an uncompressed pay grade chart beyond grade E-7, the supergrades was, and is, needed. It’s more than just for retention, but enlisted men and women deserve the opportunity to increase their base pay (and ultimately final pay grade into retirement) that is commensurate with other grade cohorts…it’s a matter of fairness. To me it seems there is little debate about grade E-8 and the rank of first sergeant, and many do understand the technical role on a staff of the master sergeant rank. There is and was little push back on the E-8s. But except by those who have served with, alongside of, or as a sergeant major, the most misunderstood enlisted position is E-9 pay grade and the ranks of sergeant major, and almost militantly hated, the rank of command sergeant major. Criticized by many, and outright despised by some, the rank and position of command sergeant major continues to be the burr under the saddle of many officer and enlisted members. And there is a good reason why that is so, but blame the Army, not the CSM Program.

Partly, it is thanks to the language in AR 600-20, Army Command Policy, for the NCO Support Channel and the very changing nature of commanders imparting (or not imparting) authority to NCOs of their command. It changes from commander to commander, unit to unit, and post to post. If you believe soldiers are confused about how much authority a sergeant major has, imagine going 2-15 years as a sergeant major and your leash is lengthened or shortened with every commander you work for. And it’s not a new phenomenon. In talking about the NCOSC in 1966, Army Chief General Harold K. Johnson told a group of senior sergeants major, “you have to be careful now that in this sergeants major chain you are not establishing some kind of end run position, because this, if it ever developed, and if it ever were then ever identified, would be the very quickest way to torpedo the whole program.” Suspicion of sergeants major of a command like that espoused by those like Bahnsen and Bradin has continued to be a demoralizing and detracting pastime.

Command Sergeant Major Rob Gallagher, who parachuted into Panama during Operation Just Cause, served as a platoon sergeant with Task Force Ranger in the Mogadishu, Somalia, and fought on despite being wounded as Task Force 3rd Battalion, 15th Infantry enroute to Baghdad in 2003. CPT Hornbuckle rendered aid to his leg during the initial OIF I invasion. Image courtesy 3rd Infantry Division.

Over the years I have found myself debating and defending the command sergeant major program with facts with those who seem to get off by parsing words and picking nits, absent any real historical context. They go by what they think they know, or based on one or two assignments or intereactions with a certian CSM. You say toh-may-toe, I say tow-mah-toh. Some say the CSM has no authority, I read the reg to say the NCOSC has the responsibility for communication and “supervision.” I think 600-20 is apunative regulation still? They say the division sergeant major has no business poking their nose in their subordinate unit, yet the reg says they [NCOs] plan and conduct the “day-to-day unit operations.” A sergeant major correcting mustache and haircut standards got you bugged? The NCOSC gives them, and any NCO, the authority to ensure that unit soldiers “comply with the weight and appearance standards.” And let me tell you what, enforcing Army standards is the number one gripe heard around the world when it comes to what people dislike about CSMs.

There is no doubt to any NCO worth a damn that commanders “define the responsibilities and authority of their NCOs to their staffs and subordinates.” But if the CO tells unit commanders he wants the motorpool dress right dress by end of the week, its the company commanders who shout interference when on Friday the CSM calls a meeeting at the motorpool for a walk through. Don’y worry, the good ones know that when selected that they are sergeants major of the command, and not IN COMMAND. But it sucks to be you if you don’t like how the commander uses their sergeant major, or how much authority they give them. It’s their prerogative. But meanwhile as the article points out what happens when commanders extend their authority to the enlisted, resentment forms. In this case a bias forms about sergeants major, and that confirnation bias is something I call CDS.

CSM Derangement Syndrome™

To me the one thing that irks soldiers besides CSM enforsing standards and discipline appears to be related to what Bahnsen and Bradin call the “three Ps-Perks, Privileges, and Politics.” Because E-9s get a parking space at the PX, a military vehicle or a driver, or a nice house on the hill, this belief that senior NCOs are undeserving of any type of privilege that exceeds the person holding the resentment somehow feeds into the frenzy that materializes into what I call command sergeant major derangement syndrome (CDS). The way to diagnose someone with CDS is to use words around them like “command team,” “standards and discipline,” or “change of responsibility.” They get all puffed up or let out an exasperated harumpf loud enough for all to hear.

Though the ancient article is quick to point out many of the perks and privileges that bother the daring duo writers and Don the most, they were a little light on the problem of politics. Google shows a simple definition of politics as “the way that people living in groups make decisions. Politics is about making agreements between people so that they can live together in groups.” CSMs using politics as a way to function is no different than any other cohort, and is human nature that is not exclusive to sergeants major.

Lastly, the Bahnsen and Bradin article leaves nine mostly outdated recommendations minus one. Besides the obvious advice about commanders following the direction of 600-20 to “tell subordinates the limits of the CSMs power,” not surprising that the authors emphasis was on limitations, not extension of. They also saw little need of a command sergeant major beyond the brigade, though neither of them served as a division or corps commander, or otherwise qualified to speak with authority and experience on the actual functionality and effect of having a command sergeant major assigned while in command at that level. And it didn’t sound like Don was ever a DCSM.  But with all the negativity about their article that this author holds due to the underserved smear it has done on the CSM Program, their point that the “Army needs to reach a consensus on CSM duties” is one that I can endorse. It is high time that instead of a waxing and waning of authorities that is left to a variable, the “length of the leash” of the command sergeant major should be as clear to everyone in the Army as their commander’s, for the Army’s sake.

The good news is there is an antidote to CDS and it is also good eye bleach for cleansing you of the Bahnsen and Bradin article. If you really want to understand the command sergeant major role and position you should instead spend some time reading the Military Review article At the Point of Friction: The Role of the Modern Command Sergeant Major in Today’s Army by Lt. Col. Bernard R. Gardner, Maj. Andre C. Aleong, and Command Sgt. Maj. William H. Black. Their article notes that “doctrine still offers some ambiguity concerning the role of the CSM within the command team in combat and in garrison.” But in their well-documented article they attempt to define a best practice model very clearly for understanding how the command sergeant major can be a force multiplier. So, in the future when someone asks what a command sergeant major even does, or is suffering from CDS, print them a copy or send them the link to At the Point of Friction. Let’s make that a top 10 most downloaded article for 2024.