Leaving

LEAVING....Tom Ricks has a great, if depressing, story today in the Washington Post about Lt. Col. John Nagl — former Rhodes Scholar, co-author of the Army's new counterinsurgency manual, a Gulf War platoon leader and all-around rising star — who has just left the Army to join a new national security think tank. Why is he leaving? "It's not the strain of repeated deployments," he said, but "a belief that I can contribute perhaps on a different level — and my family wants me to leave."

Nagl is a significant loss for the Army, but he's far from the only one, as Andrew Tilghman points out in our cover story this month. Young, talented officers are leaving the Army at their highest rates in years — and the reasons are more complicated than you might expect. Read the whole story here.