Still not finished this piece, but my initial comments:
-Gen (Retd) David Barno is not really somebody who has
little to no clue on what a general officer actually does.
. He was the overall US Comd in Afghanistan (CFC-A) when I was there in 04-05, so he does have at least a modicum of operational experience (and thus IMHO should know better);
-I agree completely with FJAG that this type of thinking is both cyclical, and IMHO typically US. It's cyclical because every so often we realize that our officers aren't being educated or trained (or both) properly for what we think they should be capable of doing. On our side, you can go back to the Rowley Report of 1969, and lots of stuff out of CDA and other places since. Its typically American, because it proposes yet another "systems" approach to solving an essentially human or social problem, which may actually not have a real "solution". It reminds me of Macnamara's idea of dividing the US Army into a "Support Army" and a "Field Army" (I'm paraphrasing here...), which IMHO was an equally unsound idea; and
-a "general officer", as Royal Drew points out, is exactly that: a generalist. If you look at the most successful general officers in history, you will probably find that very little of their success had to do with any particular aspect of their officer career development process, or their specific knowledge of anything, and much more to do with their character, mental flexibility and decision making skills. This is much the same for CEOs and for senior level public servants. Look at Arthur Currie or Bert Hoffmeister: what "officer career development process" did either of them go through? (They may be limited examples because they were both war fighting generals and not institutional generals, but I think they illustrate the point...)
I would not want to see a CCA who had no operational experience, any more than I would want to see one who had no concept of how to manage the institutional aspects of the CA, either. I spent much of the first two thirds of my military career serving under GOFOs who were all about the "institutional" side (because that's what our system produced) but whose last operational experience was maybe as CO in Cyprus (if they were lucky...). The results were usually uninspiring and sometimes hideous. "Streaming" is IMHO an almost certain guarantee of this kind of outcome.
And please don't try to use the "German example" of the General Staff Officer class to justify the sort of idea proposed in the paper: the German system was designed to produce well-rounded and capable officers who could be both effective commanders
and very good senior staff officers: it was not "either/or".
The Americans already have a pretty damned good PME system(I'm a graduate of part of it): IMHO what happened is that the massive pressures of two wars, combined with all the other extant demands on the US military, caused a focus away from PME as a "luxury" and onto operational duty. The system is fine if is allowed to work properly.