Misaligned incentives

From The Great Mutiny by Christopher Hibbert. Page 56.

The lack of understanding between the British officers and the sepoy was aggravated by regimental life in India being considered by many officers as a kind of purgatory to be endured while waiting to pass on to a higher calling. There were far from enough suitable civilians to fill the growing number of responsible posts in the East India Company's Civil Service; and for many of these posts a man with a military training might well be considered better suited than a civilian, so that regiments were frequently being asked to supply officers for the civil service as well as for the army staff. Since the pay was so much higher - and the chances of promotion so much greater than in his regiment where a capable man might still be a captain at fifty - officers were naturally anxious to accept the civil appointments offered them. And the native regiments became so short of officers in consequence that many of them regularly had seven or eight absent from their full complement of twenty-four. 'Every young officer who comes out now,' one cavalry colonel complained, 'says " my father is a Director [of the East India Company]" and so [on] and so [on], "directly I have passed my examination I shall be off and care nothing for the regiment." And no wonder when the threat of being sent back to one's regiment is held out as a punishment for mis- conduct or misbehaviour.' Sita Ram Pande said:

Any clever officer was always taken away from his regiment, and he never came back for years . . . When he did come back he knew very little about the men . . . I have known four Commanding Officers come to a regiment within a year, and three Adjutants and two Quartermasters . . . It takes us a long time to learn the ways of a sahib and once the men have got used to him it is wrong to have him removed.