By Nathan A. Ballinger
If everything is important, then nothing is. – Patrick M. Lencioni
I’ve spent enough years as a senior noncommissioned officer in the U.S. Army to know I’m supposed to care about almost everything. Leadership drags me into the amorphous “we,” “they,” “them,” “those people,” and – on rougher days – groups with names not suitable for professional print. It’s my job to care about troops, mission accomplishment, standards, and more. I am willing to break ranks on this topic, though.
The Army cares too much about too many things. The collective list of cares in the Army is a sprawling mess, particularly with standards piling up like unread field manuals, data obsession choking leaders’ judgment, and evaluation culture twisting priorities. I’m no oracle that speaks for all of “us,” but I’ll say it plainly: the U.S. Army needs more apathy. The fixation on things that don’t matter is strangling organizational effectiveness, and it’s time to cut the fat.
Standards: The Overload
Standards are the Army’s foundation. Since 1775, they’ve shaped soldiers – minimum bars to clear and lofty goals to chase. Such things aren’t just good; they’re essential. The Army’s identity as a fighting force flows from both. Soldiers know where they stand by what their leaders demand. Likewise, that same soldier knows what to do by what their leaders aspire to. But here’s where it goes sideways: the Army has let so-called standards metastasize. The Army has too many rules and too little clarity.
I argue the Army has standards that leaders can’t all name, standards that leaders quietly ignore, and standards that leaders enforce only when someone else is watching. Take uniform regulations. They matter – until you are fighting a war and nobody cares about your boot blousing or your hands in your pockets. When standards multiply beyond utility, they stop being a foundation and start being quicksand. The Army is sinking under the weight of the rulebook, and that is pulling focus from what the force is supposed to do.
Standards: Some Shouldn’t Exist
Not every standard deserves to exist. Some do, such as marksmanship, physical fitness, and punctuality, for example. These tie straight to warfighting and the Army’s core mission: to fight and win the Nation’s wars. But if a so-called standard doesn’t sharpen that edge, why should an organization or its leaders care about it? Every rule is a tax: on leaders to set conditions, on soldiers to comply, and on the whole system to enforce. The more standards soldiers and leaders concern themselves with, the less energy there is for the fight.
Leaders know this in their core, having seen it for years. Think about grooming policies. Yes, hygiene and uniformity matter, but does a man’s mustache extending beyond the corner of his mouth or a woman’s hair being shorter than 1/4 inch really lower lethality? Consider the hours wasted on the obsession with parking vehicles in line in motor pools. Does a ruler-straight parking line deter, defeat, or destroy the enemy?
Don’t forget the normalized expectation of sign-in sheets or attendance trackers for training events, briefings, or other similar things. Organizations seem to care quite a lot about who attended the mandatory event, but not necessarily about whether anyone learned anything. These are not hypothetical scenarios. These are daily drains across the force.
In 2018, the Army saw the light with initiatives like “Prioritizing Efforts—Readiness and Lethality.” These directives slashed administrative waste, such as mandatory online courses that taught nothing a squad leader couldn’t effectively tell a soldier in ten minutes. Soldiers briefly felt it: less busy work, more purpose. But what happens all too often when you don’t remove all the cancer? The metastasizing continues.
New rules sprout like weeds, and these weeds choke out the field of valid focus. Imagine the countless, baseless standards that could vanish with a pen stroke if leaders at all echelons asked one question: Does this make the Army better at war? If not, it’s gone.
Verifiable Data: Numbers Over Trust
The Army is drunk on data right now. Commanders, staffers, and leaders are all mute without numbers to support their stories. Imagine a commander telling their boss the unit is ready for their planned mission without a slide deck. Forget that the mission was known months in advance, and the trust and responsibility supposedly inherent in commanders. No stats? No credibility.
It’s not hard to see why. The world is in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and the internet is a data firehose. Used effectively, data will enable the Army to be more agile and predictive in sustainment, personnel utilization, and equipment utilization. However, this access to data also has downsides. With a few clicks, commanders and staffers can pull metrics on everything—PT scores, maintenance logs, and even the number of soldiers who are current on their annual, ineffective, online training.
This expectation of data availability has bred a monster: distrust. The Army doesn’t take a commander’s word anymore. Can something be considered valid without supporting data? A staff sergeant’s assessment gets sidelined based on what the spreadsheet says. Experience, intuition, and gut instincts forged in years of leading troops are all suspect without dates, percentages, and a red, amber, or green chart.
The expectation of such data does not hold in the future fight. The Army is preparing for a messy, disjointed, and dispersed fight with limited communications. Employing mission command may be what enables it to fight and win. The current daily grind betrays that concept. The access to data has built a norm where stats supersede experiential expertise. The Army must trust commanders to lead, even when the data is thin. Apathy toward the numbers could free soldiers to focus on the fight.
Evaluations: Scorecards Over Substance
Evaluations are another care military leaders have overfed. When the report card eclipses the work, the tides can be misleading. Leaders of all types are guilty. Too many leaders focus on their next stripe, growing wings, or becoming stars to the detriment of perfecting their assigned tasks. This type of evaluation culture is counter to effectiveness. That’s not leadership; it’s careerism.
Bill Walsh, the 49ers’ coach, cracked this code as he told the organization he did not care about wins. He told his team he did not want them to care about wins either. From the receptionist to the quarterback to the water boy, he drilled one thing: do your job well. His point was in the title of his book. If you do your job well, The Score Takes Care of Itself. That mindset turned the 49ers into three-time Super Bowl champions under his leadership.
Walsh’s philosophy fits the Army perfectly. If every leader simply focused on their job without concern for their rating, organizational execution would hum. Additionally, evaluations would take care of themselves. Apathy toward evaluations does not mean slacking; it means trusting the work to speak for itself. Leaders have to stop staring at the mirror and start staring down the enemy.
The Power of Caring Less
Apathy is a dirty word until it is wielded right. I am not pitching total detachment. I propose precision: care fiercely about what matters and let the rest slide. The Army is a machine – over-tune it, and it will stall. The Army is over-tuned now, bogged down by standards that don’t matter in war, data that drowns judgment, and an evaluation culture that twists priorities. Strategic apathy is the fix.
Start with standards. Axe the ones that don’t serve the mission. If it’s not about winning wars, it is noise. Next, learn to trust both commanders and data. Trust commanders over dashboards. A leader’s call, backed by experience, beats a color status chart any day – especially when the shooting starts. Finally, evaluations. Worry about the work, not the write-up.
Apathy is not weakness; it is strength. Caring less about the trivial frees soldiers of all ranks to care more about the fight. Loosen the screws. Ditch the excess. Get back to the mission. Apathy, done right, isn’t surrender. It is liberation.
Nate Ballinger is a Sergeant Major in the U.S. Army and currently serves as the Vice Chair for the Department of Force Management at the Sergeants Major Academy. He takes great pride in his children and baking skills.
