“Army’s people are our competitive advantage.” This statement forms a key component of Good Soldiering, Army’s cultural optimisation initiative. The challenge of recruiting and retaining the best (and the right!) people to our organisation is a common observation of our senior leaders, such as the Commandant of the Defence Special Operations Training and Education Centre Colonel Sean Parkes, and that of our allies, such as US Chief of Staff Army General James C McConville.

Finding and recruiting talent has been a focal area for the Army for some time now, as the then Chief of Army (now Chief of Defence Force) General Angus Campbell stated in 2016, and it appears to be working.

Enticing the best people to join the Army is a critical first step; however, ensuring we can retain and optimise that talent throughout each individual's career is another aspect that needs our ongoing focus. There are few positions in the Army with as much direct impact on our soldiers than that of a unit commander, in particular when it comes to retention.

The right commanding officer can have an inordinate impact on the retention of our people through providing a positive, effective, and inclusive command climate. One of the most striking things I experienced on my Pre-Command Course in 2018 was the contrast between the “constellation” of star-ranked officers who congratulated the course on having been carefully selected as the future leaders of our Army, and the wide range of scenarios laid out by the directing staff of instances where our predecessors had gotten things really wrong. This contrast highlighted – to me at least – that there is potential to further optimise the existing process for selecting our unit commanders.

The Army does have some good systems to identify potential for unit command, though there are some inherent limitations on these. Two examples are the recommendations on Performance Appraisal Reports (PARs) provided by assessors who have generally seen what makes an effective commander, and recommendations on Australian Command and Staff Course (Joint) (ACSC(J)) reports.

These both have some constraints; the PARs that form the basis of “merit” are largely subjective assessments from a range of assessor inputs that don’t benchmark against the wider (beyond the unit for assessor or formation for the senior assessor) cohorts, and while ACSC(J) presents an opportunity to achieve a broader peer group to benchmark, the course is heavily academically focused which limits identification of leadership/command potential. Finding the best talent to command our units is not a problem unique to Australia, and our US ally has taken some steps to further optimise this process that may be instructive for our own talent management.

The US Army, through its Army Talent Management Task Force (ATMTF), has developed a program to more objectively identify commanding officers from its talent pool. Aligned to an observation by General McConville that "We spend more time and more money on selecting a private to be in Ranger regiment than we do selecting what I would argue is one of the most consequential leadership positions in the Army, our battalion commanders".

The US Army therefore introduced the Battalion Commander Assessment Program (BCAP) in 2019. The BCAP is designed to deliberately determine an officer’s fitness for command and strategic leadership potential. Based on a four-day assessment, the candidates are assessed on their physical fitness, verbal and written communications, and given thorough cognitive and non-cognitive assessments – culminating in a double-blind senior Army officer panel interview (neither the candidate, nor the panel, can see each other).

A program website exists that gives candidates details of the process and assists in preparation for the BCAP. There is also a range of YouTube clips, such as this one, that provide a detailed insight into the program and helps “demystify” the process for the candidates. The outcomes of this process are twofold; firstly, it provides an objective pool of data that informs the unit command selection process, and secondly it provides the candidates with a range of focal areas that they can use in their own ongoing talent development.

In a recent podcast entitled The Battalion Commander Assessment Program Results Explained, the outgoing Director of the ATMTF, Major General JP McGee, gives an insight into the BCAP’s genesis, results, and trends. Of note, they have observed a ~30% change between those who would have been placed into command under the legacy system, and those who were appointed by virtue of their performance on the BCAP. This is not, however, a process that can simply be replicated in Australia.

The differences in scale between the US and Australian Armies means the BCAP is not a simple “plug and play” solution for the Australian Army. The scale of the US Army allows the flexibility to concentrate a cohort of candidates at a single place in time. For Australia to strip out its candidate pool – most (if not all) of whom are serving in key appointments – even for a week would be a significant undertaking.

There is, however, a window in which the majority of those who will be considered for unit command at some point are together. The Army cohort at ACSC(J) represents those whom the Army considers, at the time, to have the greatest potential for further advancement along the command and leadership pathway. During the year-long course there are several windows that could be used to execute a deliberate assessment program (tailored to Army’s needs), the results of which could then feed into the final course report and form a more robust mechanism in support of the unit command selection process – ultimately ensuring that we have the best possible people in this key leadership position.

Finding and recruiting the right people will likely remain one of Army’s top priorities for the foreseeable future. Given the significant investment in time and money required to get the best people through the door, we need to be equally focused on ensuring that we can keep them. Further optimising Army’s processes for selecting unit commanders is a relatively low-cost/high-payoff approach that will certainly result in greater retention of our hard-won talent.