"Worst article evar!"

IN THE NEWS
Normally, I go straight from reading articles in Parameters, the journal of the US Army War College, to recommending at least one of them to whoever reads Arms and Influence. I might still have some recommendations to make, but the first article I read in the winter issue had to be the worst article ever printed in Parameters, one of the most intelligent, useful journals about military affairs.

Last week, I criticized the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), the Department of Defense's once-every-four-years restatement of its governing strategies and principles. Among other problems with the QDR, I said that it read more as if it had been written by management consultants from IBM than the intellectual progeny of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. It shows exactly how modern business-speak has muddled the thinking of the DoD, leading to all kinds of faddish terms and concepts (surge, enterprise-wide, net-centric, etc.) that don't provide clear guidance to the military. As is the case in the private sector, business double-talk deflects discussion away from the  bottom line, which in the case of the US military means, How well are we fighting our current wars? And how well-prepared are we for the most likely ones to come? According to Ryan Henry, Principal Deputy Under-Secretary for Policy, and undoubtedly one of the authors of the QDR, the answer is, Everything's just swell!

Exactly how dumb is Henry's argument? I guess you could measure its stupidity by the number of times you bang your head against the PC monitor after reading the following paragraph:

A year later, in Operation Iraqi Freedom, we did have a contingency plan on the shelf—which we reworked numerous times, taking into account shifting political, strategic, operational, and tactical circumstances. Strategists were able to develop a highly adaptable and dynamic plan, with major changes effected up to the week of the operation. In the course of that campaign the entire department saw, perhaps more than ever, the value of jointness. We learned how small special operating forces can be leveraged to control large areas of territory. We began to exercise the leverage-value of network-centric warfare. In these and other areas, emerging tip-of-the-spear technologies, tactics, and concepts proved to be valuable force-multipliers. Like Enduring Freedom, Iraqi Freedom represented another milestone in the evolution of our military, replete with lessons for the future.

In Henry's world, No plan for the occupation translates into a highly adaptable and dynamic plan. Let's contrast Henry's gee-whiz rhetoric with the section of On War in which Clausewitz's famous definition of war appears:

We see, therefore, that war is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means. War in general, and the commander in any specific instance, is entitled to require that the trend and designs of policy shall not be inconsisten with these means. That, of course is no small demand, but however much it will affect political aims in a given case, it will never do more than modify them. The political object is the goal, war is the mans of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose.

Of course, Henry's forehead-bruising paragraph on Iraq does exactly the opposite of what Clausewitz describes. Whatever the political object in Iraq is, the United States clearly has not achieved it yet. Not only has the political objective remained elusive, but the military means of achieving it are increasingly strained by the way the US government has chosen to fight this conflict. Rather than discuss these uncomfortable realities at all, Henry talks purely about means, as if the United States invaded Iraq to prove the value of "jointness," or "leverage" (another execrable business term) the technologies of "net-centric warfare."

As you keep reading Henry's strange piece of social science fiction, you expect to see some mention of successes and failures against Al Qaeda, the Iraqi insurgency, the Taliban and other groups fighting the new Afghan regime, and other current enemies of the United States. Unfortunately, people who have become true believers in process (in the negative, IBM-like connotation of that word) don't let results clutter the discussion of procedures. Here's an example of just how much process occupies Henry's thinking:

Another lesson learned is that the more formalized the structures that build up around the QDR, especially within individual stovepipes where programs are advocated, the more inertia and zero-sum resistance to change sets in. Proponents for programs in specific stovepipes may become defensive. This can in turn cause certain aspects of the QDR to become a friction-filled process, making it difficult to move forward across a broad front.

Many of the unnamed inertia-heads in this paragraph are probably military professionals who think Henry doesn't know how to fight a war, let alone run a gigantic organization like the Pentagon. Of course, thoughts of his own inadequacy, or the failures of the current approaches to counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, can't bother someone as chipper as Henry, particularly when he's working for a visionary like Donald Rumsfeld. There's no time to waste when there's an important all-day off-site scheduled somewhere to discuss capabilities-based planning, which is basically the opposite of planning:

When he arrived at the Pentagon for his current stint, Secretary Rumsfeld recognized the need for change. He understood that the world of the 1950s was not the world we live in now. Uncertainty defines the strategic and operational environment today. We can’t tell where the next threats will come from or when they will materialize. A planning system based on the prediction of specific threats can no longer adequately address the spectrum of feasible threats to our society. In order to be able to respond quickly to the unexpected, decisionmakers will need a broad range of options. While we no longer can predict specific threats—the what, when, or how—we have clear indications that our security will be challenged in the coming decades. So rather than focus on specific threats, we focus on capabilities.

Again, it's not worth talking about the wars we're actually fighting, when "transformation" is the ultimate objective. Why talk about grubby matters of physics when you can soar in the realm of metaphysics?

If you think I'm being too hard on Henry, here's the Wikipedia definition of management consulting:

Management consulting (sometimes also called strategy consulting) refers to both the practice of helping companies to improve performance through analysis of existing business problems and development of future plans, as well as to the firms that specialize in this sort of consulting. Management consulting may involve the identification and cross-fertilization of best practices, analytical techniques, change management and coaching skills, technology implementations, strategy development or even the simple advantage of an outsider's perspective. Management consultants generally bring formal frameworks or methodologies to identify problems or suggest more effective or efficient ways of performing business tasks.

Doesn't sound too different from Henry's view of the world, does it?

This wouldn't be the first time that management consultants tried to run the Defense Department. The last great advocate of bringing management principles from IBM and General Motors to the Pentagon was Robert McNamara. You don't have to be on the faculty of the US Army War College to know the war to which McNamara famously misapplied business thinking: Vietnam. Both then and now, our enemies could care less about how fine-tuned are the "enterprise-wide" processes in the US government. They're fighting to win a political objective, not to write persuasive PowerPoint presentations. We might want to do the same.

Comments

[bob mcmanus]

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2006/02/greenspan_is_a_.html

Greenspan is a Fox

On a casual first reading of both, the articles of Greenspan and Rumsfeld seem interestingly comparable.

"We have no system, no paradigms, no models! That is our system!"

Instead we have brilliant charismatic leaders? Hmmm...

[Chris Bray]

I tried to read the excerpts you posted, and sleep kicked in. My head did bang against the keyboard, but only due to the sudden loss of consciousness.

Did you see his press conference? The consultant glasses, the consultant hair, the consultant suit, the consultant posture. I think Ryan Henry has a synergistic marketing plan on the shelf that will enable us to increase our market throughput while leveragizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Damn, it happened again!

[Kingdaddy]

Chris, I didn't see the press conference, but your description made me feel as if I were there. Feeling...woozy...

[Nike SB Dunk]

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