I think there are two major factors leading to the promotion of incompetent personnel to leadership positions. The first one is the bureaucratic nature of perso

I think there are two major factors leading to the promotion of incompetent personnel to leadership positions. The first one is the bureaucratic nature of personnel evaluation, the second being the lack of actual 'real' wars to train the leaders (as sadistic as it appears). _Disclaimer_ : I only have an observer experience of the US Army (I went on tour in Afghanistan in a mixed US/Canada brigade), but my actual employment was in the Canadian Forces. I was on tour when Gen McChrystal was relieved and replaced by Gen Petraeus, and also when (CA) Gen Menard was relieved and replaced by Gen Vance. 1. In the early ranks of officers, promotions are very strongly linked to evaluation reports. Evaluation reports came to be very sanitize and politically corrected documents where you need a load of supporting documentation if you want to negatively score someone. If someone received an hypothetical score of 3 last year, you need very strong arguments if you want to reduce that score the year after. The system is somehow 'humanitarian' in that it believes that no one can become worse over time, and no one is incompetent. Also, there is a lot of 'political' pressure coming from relationships inside the military. I saw first hand some obviously incompetent Captain be promoted to the rank of Major, simply for political reasons. Somebody back in the country had plans back home for this officer, and this promotion was planned ahead of time (the officer had time in rank and was put in the position they were to give them some 'action' cred). Put together with the fact that promotions are expected after certain specific check-in-the-boxes, this leads to the promotion of incompetent leaders on purely bureaucratic grounds. Eventually leading to a wider range of incompetent officers in the pool of Colonel in which Generals are chosen. 2. Recent wars are not related in 'danger factor' to what WWII has been. Nobody's in actual danger of having their family killed/their country harmed if they don't succeed in their missions oversea. Those missions are political disturbance of far away countries. They are, sadistically, good for the troops as they give them first hand experience with real combat - it's essential for an army to always have veterans in their ranks to train other members. If a generation of the army would go without seeing combat actions, the technical abilities of this army would quickly evaporate. In that regard, while recent conflicts provided combat experience to field personnel, they have not been of a large enough scale to train generals. Generals thus can't really become battle-hardened and provide hands-on experience while on tour. Finally, the idea of doing a 'tour' when you're a general, like noted by the article. They come in theater with a vision (but often no general field experience, and sometimes even no field experience at all) and have only a few weeks/months to try out their vision and see what happens, and that's when they're actually on site and not back home dealing with politicians. Then regardless of the outcome, they are relieved and replaced by another general.