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This Naval Academy Professor thinks so,

With the rise after World War II of the Reserve Officer Training Corps programs at universities around the country, the academies now produce 20 percent or less of the officers in each service, at an average cost to taxpayers of nearly half a million dollars per student, more than four times what an R.O.T.C.-trained officer costs.

The institutions are set on doing things their own way, yet I know of nobody in the Navy or other services who would argue that graduates of Annapolis or West Point are, as a group, better than those who become officers through other programs. A student can go to a civilian school like Vanderbilt, major in art history (which we don’t offer), have the usual college social experience and nightlife (which we forbid), be commissioned through R.O.T.C. — and apparently be just as good an officer as a Naval Academy product.

Instead of better officers, the academies produce burned-out midshipmen and cadets. They come to us thinking they’ve entered a military Camelot, and find a maze of petty rules with no visible future application. These rules are applied inconsistently by the administration, and tend to change when a new superintendent is appointed every few years. The students quickly see through assurances that “people die if you do X” (like, “leave mold on your shower curtain,” a favorite claim of one recent administrator). We’re a military Disneyland, beloved by tourists but disillusioning to the young people who came hoping to make a difference.

Read the full Op-Ed here.

As a graduate of a service Academy I sympathize with the professor, it seems that not only do service academies produce burnt-out cadets, but often professors as well.

However, the problems he describes are not new ones, they’ve been happening at all the institutions for years now and debated thoroughly among cadets, midshipmen and faculty.

In fact, I’ve often wondered if many of these issues haven’t always existed in some form, inherent in the design of the system itself, but soon forgotten by former grads who are quick to assure you that “things were different when I went through…back when it was hard.”

In a somewhat paradoxical twist, elite academic institutions by their nature are often prone to the very thing they preach so adamantly against – mediocrity.

Here’s William Deresiewicz, a former Yale professor writing in 2008,

In short, the way students are treated in college trains them for the social position they will occupy once they get out.  At schools like Cleveland State, they’re being trained for positions somewhere in the middle of the class system, in the depths of one bureaucracy or another.  They’re being conditioned for lives with few second chances, no extensions, little support, narrow opportunity—lives of subordination, supervision, and control, lives of deadlines, not guidelines.  At places like Yale, of course, it’s the reverse.  The elite like to think of themselves as belonging to a meritocracy, but that’s true only up to a point. Getting through the gate is very difficult, but once you’re in, there’s almost nothing you can do to get kicked out.  Not the most abject academic failure, not the most heinous act of plagiarism, not even threatening a fellow student with bodily harm—I’ve heard of all three—will get you expelled.  The feeling is that, by gosh, it just wouldn’t be fair—in other words, the self-protectiveness of the old-boy network, even if it now includes girls.  Elite schools nurture excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate student I know calls “entitled mediocrity.”  A is the mark of excellence; A- is the mark of entitled mediocrity.  It’s another one of those metaphors, not so much a grade as a promise.  It means, don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.  You may not be all that good, but you’re good enough.

Now, there are plenty of differences between Yale and the Naval Academy, but I draw the parallel simply to point out that the “march toward mediocrity” is not  something unique to the service academies.

Where people are likely to get agitated is that, unlike other schools, the taxpayer is paying for the education of cadets and midshipmen.  Like any good stockholder they should always be asking, “where’s the value?”  Why spend half a million per cadet if they’re no better at the end of it then an ROTC or OTS grad?

At this point I’m not sure that I have much of an answer.  I’m glad that I went to USAFA for many reasons and certainly feel that I received a top-notch education, however can I say that I’m better than I would have been had I gone a different route?  Who knows the answers to questions like that?  Not me.

So my friends, many of you reading this were classmates of mine at USAFA, what do you think? Did going to the Academy make you a better officer than if you had gone to a school like Vanderbilt?

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General James Mattis, head of Joint Forces Command, showed once again that despite public perception, the Marines remain the most intellectual branch of the armed forces.

Riffing on John Boyd’s “people first, ideas second, hardware last” mantra yesterday during a recent talk, Gen Mattis questioned the type of system the military has created in which members in the field are unable to make decisions without first running it through higher headquarters via complex communications networks.

Do we rely too much on our technology?  Mattis says,

“We must be able to operate when systems go down… It is much more important for officers to get comfortable operating with uncertainty rather than to keep grasping for more certainty.”

———–

“What are we creating today with our command-and-control systems?” Mattis asked. “I don’t think we have turned off our radios in the last eight years. What kind of systems are we creating where we depend on this connection to headquarters? While we want the most robust communications, we also want to make sure we can operate with none of it.”

———–

“Mission-type orders rather than bandwidth are the key to the future,” he said. “We need officers who can operate off a commander’s intent, understand what the boss several levels above wants, and carry them out to suffocate the enemy’s hopes.”

Technology is a necessary part of maintaining our strategic competitive advantage, but only when we are its master, not the other way around.

We now have more access to data, communication and information than at any time in history, yet the great superpower finds itself wallowing in two wars against vastly under-resourced opponents like a T. Rex in a tar pit.  The U.S. military has developed its technology, but has it lost its ability to think?

The always entertaining William Lind, in a piece for The American Conservative entitled, “Rage Against the Machine” wrote in 2003,

I often lecture to young people, college grads, usually on military topics.  They are adept at the information technologies, having imbibed them as their mother’s milk.  The problem, to put it bluntly, is that most of them cannot think.  They cannot think because of information, not because of a lack of it.

An Amish friend of mine, David Klein, put it well as we talked under the trees of his Wayne County, Ohio, farmyard this past summer.  Using information technologies, he said, is like trying to build a car by reaching blindly into a vast dumpster and using as parts whatever comes to hand.  That is how these young minds work.  They cannot grasp any sort of intellectual order or framework.  All they have ever encountered are bits and pieces of this and that, spewed randomly out of some cosmic, universal vending machine.  It is not simply that things do not make sense; these young people have no concept of things making sense.  As Ortega warned would happen, they have become technologically competent barbarians.

Again, an earlier generation of conservatives would have understood.  When life is, in effect, an endless process of interruption, thought, as we traditionally knew it, becomes impossible.  Western thought is linear, but “information” is chaotic.  More, thought requires being alone with your thoughts, something the technologically dependent can neither attain nor abide.

War will always be a contest of minds – technology is useful, but it is a tool, not the strategy – do you hear me Air Force?

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“The private sector has flattened and streamlined the middle and upper echelons of its organization charts, yet the Defense Department continues to maintain a top-heavy hierarchy that more reflects 20^th Century headquarters superstructure than 21^st Century realities.”  - Defense Secretary Robert Gates, May 8, 2010

Sounds eerily familiar….

“Does the number of warships we have and are building really put America at risk when the U.S. battle fleet is larger than the next 13 navies combined, 11 of which belong to allies and partners?  Is it a dire threat that by 2020 the United States will have only 20 times more advanced stealth fighters than China?”

No coincidence that his May 8th speech was given at the Eisenhower Library echoing the President’s prophetic  farewell address where he warned against the, “acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

See the rest of Secretary Gates’ speech here.  Well worth the read for anyone interested in seeing the brewing storm coming over Versailles on the Potomac.

Further reading:

“Gates Calls for Paring of Military Bureaucracy” – WSJ (h/t Timothy Thompson)

“America’s Defense Meltdown” by Winslow Wheeler

“Lessons in Unsustainable Futures: GM and the DoD”

“Rethinking the Military’s Organizational Structure”

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A recent review of David Kilcullen’s upcoming book, “Counterinsurgency” included a section in which the author claims, “Rank is nothing: talent is everything.”

This brings me to a question that I’ve been bouncing around in my head for the past couple years, “is the military’s organizational structure/rank system outdated?”

The answer is absolutely, yes! Valdis Krebs explains,

When change was slow, and the future was pretty much like the present, hierarchical organizations were perfect structures for business and government. The world is no longer predictable, nor are solutions obvious. Old structures are no longer sufficient for new complex challenges.

Businesses have noticed the changes and are adapting. From GE’s boundaryless organization to Toyota’s amazingly flexible supply web, agility and adaptability are the mantra. Unfortunately most governments are not as quick and creative. Instead of the out-of-the-box thinking found increasingly in the business world, governments are busy shuffling boxes on the organization chart.

John Robb channeling John Boyd makes the case the war is essentially a contest in decision-making. This means in the case of the U.S. military, an outdated organizational structure is bad…very, very bad,

Let’s start with an assumption: War is a contest of minds. Therefore, the process of using minds — decision-making — is the core process upon which all warfare is built. Weapons, tactics, methods, systems, organizations, strategies, etc. are all derivative of this fundamental framework. Therefore, a narrow view of warfare is that it is a race to make decisions that optimize these derivatives within the restrictions imposed by access to resources and the other side’s attempt to do the same (friction).

A more expansive view is that all decision making processes exist within the abstract mental models we use to understand the (complex, uncertain, and complex) environment we live in. Unfortunately, these models are at best flawed approximations that only get more flawed over time. So, we may conclude that warfare is in large part an ability to use decision making, in particular cycles of analysis/synthesis, to create new/revised mental models that are closer approximations of the environment’s true nature.

Is the current organizational structure of the U.S. military, one consisting of rigid hierarchy and ever-increasing layers of bureaucracy the one best suited for making decisions in a dynamic, complex, globalized world? Not even close Robb explains,

Even under the most ideal conditions, its dubious whether the US military’s decision making loop (the sum total of the intellectual product of the entire military bureaucracy) can even closely approximate the requirements of the rapidly evolving global environment we currently find ourselves in. In short, we are falling behind ever more every day.

In the amount of time it takes information to travel up through all the levels of the chain of command, then back down, the situation has already changed. Each level of hierarchy makes it more likely that the organization will fail to adapt in time.

What we need is to go back to the drawing boards and emphasize decentralization, a promotion system that cares more about the quality of ideas rather than length of service, bottom-up solutions and direct lines of communication between the lowest and highest ranking officials (cut out the execs, middle-men, large staffs that filter out certain pieces of upsetting information before it hits the ears of the commanders).

So smart ones, I realize it is 10x easier to point out the problem then it is to come up with viable solutions. How does the U.S. military begin moving towards a more effective, relevant organizational structure? Is it a lost cause, is the bureaucracy too far gone to reverse direction? Maybe so, but I’d like to hear your thoughts.

***Update to Post 4/30/2010***

Here’s a Harvard Business Review post on 21st century leadership

The hierarchical model simply doesn’t work anymore. The craftsman-apprentice model has been replaced by learning organizations, filled with knowledge workers people that don’t respond to “top down” leadership. Seeking opportunities to lead, young people are unwilling to spend ten years waiting in line. Most important, people are searching for genuine satisfaction and meaning from their work, not just money. For example, Medtronic’s 38,000 employees are motivated by the company’s mission of “restoring people to full life and health.”

——-

The challenges businesses face these days are too complex to be solved by individuals or even single organizations. Collaboration — within the organization and with customers, suppliers, and even competitors — is required to achieve lasting solutions. Leaders must foster this collaborative spirit, eliminating internal politics and focusing on internal cooperation. After becoming CEO of IBM, Sam Palmisano transformed IBM’s long-standing bureaucracy into an “integrated global network,” shifting to “leading by values” and breaking down silos that kept people from collaborating.

The ultimate measure of effectiveness for leaders is the ability to sustain superior results over an extended period of time. Organizations filled with aligned, empowered and collaborative employees focused on serving customers will outperform hierarchical organizations every time. Top-down leaders may achieve near-term results, but only authentic leaders can galvanize the entire organization to sustain long-term performance.

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Even people who know nil about counterinsurgency are quick to speak of the illusive quest to “win the hearts and minds.” It has a beautiful simplicity to it…just show the locals how great we are and they’ll turn their backs on the enemy, game over. As usual though, reality has to spoil the party with its complexities and all.

It’s not that “winning the hearts and minds” of the locals is a poor goal, but we must manage our expectations of what it’s actually going to look like.

Warm embraces of gratitude with Afghan elders around a campfire of burning poppy plants with Lee Greenwood’s faint voice somewhere in the background is probably just not in the cards. We are foreign invaders no matter how you sugar-coat it.

If we’re to operate effectively on the moral level of war (arguably the most important in 4GW) we must have a realistic view of how we are seen by others. We may think our good intentions are quite obvious how dare anyone question them, but the Pashtun father who sees his toddler vaporized by an errant drone-fired missile probably has a decent rationale for challenging this notion.

Mr. Aaron J. Henninger is a lecturer on the topics of Public Affairs and Strategic Communication at the United States Air Force’s Air War College. He wrote the following mind grenade in the fantastic op-ed below. The full article can be found here.

Certain organizations have either a stigma or a perception that precludes them from carrying out specific tasks or actions. I charge that a fielded military force cannot successfully or with any degree of longevity, carry out military occupation and enact a successful public relations campaign. The messages go beyond being mixed and the long-term visuals are far too compelling than any press release or photo-op.

What if 9/11 conspirators were to have walked through NY during and after the attacks to attempt community relations? As horrific and absurd as this might sound, that is how we are perceived in some corners of the world, in the aftermath of airstrikes and destruction, attempting to persuade or engender good will.

Our efforts lack any and all sensitivity to the historical underpinnings of the West’s relationship with the Middle East. One photo-op cannot undo a thousand years grievance or mistrust. As a government we must understand and accept this reality.

What we would term as “good images”, are often times generated more for self-flagellation of the US population at large than the indigenous, effected population.

Messages of, ‘We are your friend, we are here to help you’ set against a backdrop of Humvees and .50 cal machine guns is disingenuous at best.

Check out more of Mr. Henninger’s outstanding work at his blog, on the DEFENSE.

For another post-9/11 mind grenade, see an earlier post on David Foster Wallace here.

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On Afghanistan, waterboarding and COIN:

1) A fascinating paragraph from Robert Kaplan’s latest article on Afghanistan in The Atlantic (h/t Andrew Sullivan):

The very prospect of some success by July 2011 increases the likelihood that U.S. forces will be in Afghanistan in substantial numbers for years. In effect, the proficiency of the American military causes it to be overextended. British Major General Richard Barrons, a veteran of the Balkans and Iraq now serving in Afghanistan, told me he learned during the most depressing days in Baghdad that “the long view is the primary weapon against fate.” If you are willing to stay, you can turn any situation around for the good. But that is an imperial mind-set, with its assumption of a near-permanent presence, which today’s Washington cannot abide, even as its own strategy drives toward that outcome.

2)  On Waterboarding: here and here (caution: disturbing)

3) Getting Close to the Afghans:

Our distance from the population, and the enemy’s proximity, encourage the people to alert the insurgents when our troops approach. They encourage the people to keep quiet about IEDs, which are now powerful enough to kill passengers in our best armored vehicles. Force protection measures thus result in less protection for our troops.

The risk aversion among American commanders has many sources. Fear of casualties and doubts about our purpose in Afghanistan cause segments of American society to pillory units that sustain large casualties, and to ignore units that cling to large bases and accomplish little. Talk of troop withdrawal dates discourages leaders from taking short-term risks for long-term gain.

Part of the blame lies within the military, which has often promoted risk-avoiders ahead of risk-takers, and has undervalued other attributes of vital importance in counterinsurgency such as creativity, sociability and empathy. The extent to which American units collaborate with Afghan security forces and obtain assistance from the population depends primarily on these attributes, and it varies widely.

On millenials, the economy and the coming anarchy (light reading, I know, sorry Linda):

1) The Dropout Economy a.k.a. when Millenials get tired of paying for the broken system created by the baby boomers and decide to opt-out. (h/t Shlok Vaidya)

Look at the projections of fiscal doom emanating from the federal government, and consider the possibility that things could prove both worse and better. Worse because the jobless recovery we all expect could be severe enough to starve the New Deal social programs on which we base our life plans. Better because the millennial generation could prove to be more resilient and creative than its predecessors, abandoning old, familiar and broken institutions in favor of new, strange and flourishing ones.

Imagine a future in which millions of families live off the grid, powering their homes and vehicles with dirt-cheap portable fuel cells. As industrial agriculture sputters under the strain of the spiraling costs of water, gasoline and fertilizer, networks of farmers using sophisticated techniques that combine cutting-edge green technologies with ancient Mayan know-how build an alternative food-distribution system. Faced with the burden of financing the decades-long retirement of aging boomers, many of the young embrace a new underground economy, a largely untaxed archipelago of communes, co-ops, and kibbutzim that passively resist the power of the granny state while building their own little utopias.

2) Britain ‘four meals away from anarchy’ (h/t John Robb)

…at least there’s always music, check out this sweet visualization - Rock ‘N Roll Metro Map

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As I’m reading my second Boyd biography, “The Mind or War: John Boyd and American Security” by Grant T. Hammond (my first was this),  I’m trying to absorb more of the things that made him an innovator and a leader.  It’s obvious that he was incredibly intelligent, motivated and creative, but there seemed to be an underlying outlook on life and his career that carried him through the times when things got rough, but one that also put him at odds with the status quo.

This section of the book singles out a large portion of his unique perspective on life, one that made him quite a controversial figure in the halls of the Pentagon:

Along the way, he set out to implement his personal credo — philosophic and strategic — in everything he did, every job he held, and every decision he could influence.  Simply stated, it was more important to do what was right than to be promoted…On active duty, Boyd delighted in finding the very best officers the Air Force had (Air Force Academy graduates, promoted below the zone two or three times and thus several years ahead of their contemporaries) and challenging them.  They were the epitome of company men, team players who wouldn’t rock the boat and who wanted desperately to become Chief of Staff of the Air Force.

One such example was Jim Burton, then a lieutenant colonel recommended to Boyd by a colleague because he was bright…Burton would go on to occupy a critical post in Test and Evaluation and to blow the whistle on rigged tests in the Army’s procurement of the new Bradley Fighting Vehicle.  He recalls the Boyd “To Be or To Do” speech as follows:

“Jim, you are at a point in your life where you have to make a choice about what kind of person you are going to be.  There are two career paths in front of you, and you have to choose which path you will follow.  One path leads to promotions, titles, and positions of distinction.  To achieve success down that path, you have to conduct yourself a certain way.  You must go along with the system and show that you are a better team player than your competitors.  The other path leads to doing things that are truly significant for the Air Force, but the rewards will quite often be a kick in the stomach because you may have to cross swords with the party line on occasion.  You can’t go down both paths, you have to choose.  So, do you want to be a man of distinction or do you want to do things that really influence the shape of the Air Force?  To be or to do, that is the question.”

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When high ranking officials seek to find out the “truth on the ground” they often discover the task much more difficult than expected.  It is usually not because the front-line personnel don’t know what is going on, but rather, few are willing to risk speaking candidly if they know the information will be viewed negatively by leadership.

This is unfortunate as it leaves leaders with a false sense of security.  “…but they said everything’s going great.”  It is something which goes on in many organizations, but the military rank system seems to exacerbate the issue.

There is an unnatural aura around the shiny pieces of medal on people’s shoulders that seem to act as a force-shield, blocking out reality and striking fear in subordinates.  Obviously not the intended effect (at least not most of the time), but one that exists nonetheless.

Tim Harford, author of The Undercover Economist recently wrote an article in the Financial Times admonishing us to “Listen to the Bearers of Bad News.”  Here’s a snippet:

One of Friedrich Hayek’s obvious-once-pointed-out observations is that society is full of local knowledge, often of a subtle nature and only fleetingly exploitable.  That is one reason why decentralised market processes tend to work well.  When a hierarchy has to exist, Hayek’s insight is the reason why bosses should want to receive truthful assessments of what is going on the shop floor (they don’t) and subordinates should be happy to provide them (they aren’t).

What makes matters worse for any organisation is that the same dynamic is taking place at every level.  Each middle manager is a fresh obstacle to the flow of truth up a hierarchy of wastebaskets.  Sensible managers try to let information flow freely, but many are happy to reinforce the barricades for their own peace of mind.

The results of barriers to communication can be catastrophic.  H.R. McMaster’s influential study of decision-making during the Vietnam war, Dereliction of Duty, is packed with examples.  The joint chiefs of staff were warned by their chairman, Maxwell Taylor, that Lyndon Johnson did not like “split advice”. Johnson’s defence secretary, Robert McNamara, argued that government would be ineffective if department chiefs were to “express disagreement” with the president.  Not disobey, but “express disagreement”.  Johnson trusted McNamara implicitly and relied too heavily on the advice of a man he praised as a “can-do fellow”.   Isolating himself from dissent, the president made a series of disastrous decisions.

The new television series, Undercover Boss, has made a name for itself by finding a creative way around this barrier to truth.  CEO’s of major corporations “dress-down” as low-level employees in their own companies to uncover the truths that would otherwise be relegated to talks around the water-cooler.

I posed the question on Twitter the other day,

“wondering what would happen if Generals pulled an ‘undercover boss’ and dressed up as civilian contractors working with the military?”

I think they might be surprised how different their military looks.

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Here’s an excellent photo essay showing the human costs of war (h/t The Strategist)

AND…

Here’s how much Iraq and Afghanistan have cost us according to a few different sources:

The Congressional Research Service estimates the total cost of both wars to be just over $1trillion.

CostofWar.com estimates Iraq at over $700billion and Afghanistan at $255billion for a total of just under $1trillion dollars.

To give you better perspective that’s $1,000,000,000,000.00

Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes say the official costs are actually quite deceiving and estimate that the total costs of Iraq alone are closer to $3trillion dollars. He talks about it here at Big Think.

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In a recent Washington Independent article, Spencer Ackerman asked the all-important, but seldom asked question, “Why Should Defense Spending Be Sacrosanct?”

It’s not popular to ask this question, especially if you’re a congressman because in doing so you’re bound to be labeled as not supportive of the troops.  However, the present course of the DOD is completely unsustainable. And in our current economic state ($12 trillion in debt and counting) I, like Ackerman and others, find it odd that there has been no serious talk of freezing the gargantuan DoD budget. In 2008, the US military spent more than the next 46 highest spending countries in the world combined (see here).

The spending problems come from personnel costs on one side — full retirement benefits for members who serve 20 years of active duty (most retire in their 40′s and now live well into their 80′s and beyond, a.k.a. 40 years of retirement pay), rising healthcare costs, salaries, housing pay, etc.  Equipment costs on the other — planes, bullets, tanks, UAV’s and an aging fleet of …well, almost every weapon system you can think of.  Just to send one combat troop to Afghanistan costs the taxpayer $1 million a year.

Almost everyone close to the organization knows we’re plowing ahead like a drunk driver headed for the cliff, but no one seems up to the task of fixing it.  Worse yet, much of the leadership seems bent on simply increasing spending rather than fixing a broken system.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates is making a noble effort, but the military-industrial complex is a three-headed monster, devouring every plan formed against it through strategic lobbying, creative bookkeeping and a view of the world based more on fantasy than reality.

Ackerman cites an October assessment from the CSBA’s Todd Harrison who compares the DoD to GM, explaining (emphasis mine),

Another similarity between the two is that both organizations are in a period of disruptive change in the competitive environment. In GM’s case, its market share rapidly eroded as gas prices climbed higher, the economy slowed, and consumers turned to smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles. GM found itself building a fleet of SUVs and trucks that consumers did not want and could not afford. Similarly, DoD now finds itself saddled with a number of weapon programs whose capabilities are ill-suited for the types of conflict the military currently faces and whose costs have risen beyond what the Department can afford. Many of the new weapons being funded today are optimized for middle-of-the- spectrum conflicts—that is, conventional, military-on-military conflicts such as Operation Desert Storm in 1991. But adversaries are well aware of the United States’ overwhelming advantage in the middle and are instead moving to either end of the spectrum: irregular warfare on one end and high-end, asymmetric warfare on the other. The challenge for DoD, as it was for GM, is that the competition is adapting faster than it can keep up.

The last sentence is key, “…the competition is adapting faster than it can keep up.” Much of it has to do with the huge, inflexible, bureaucratic organizational structure of the DoD as compared the nimble, decentralized, open-source structure embodied by al-Qaeda and affiliate organizations. One bans twitter, facebook and gmail while the other uses the internet train to organize its cells all over the world.

Changing the DOD’s organizational structure is one thing, putting a freeze on the defense budget is another and one that may be a bit more realistic. However, none of this is bound to change anytime soon if we insist on keeping our country in a state of perpetual war.

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes … known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. – James Madison, Political Observations, 1795

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