I know there's an element of "the Army way" in this story about the continued shipment of chemical countermeasures to US troops in Iraq. Still, it's just the natural tendency of bureaucracies to keep on doing what they're doing until told otherwise--and even then, it's hard to get them to change. (See Graham Allison's Essence of Decision for a classic explanation of national security, based on the natural behavior of large bureaucracies.)
Certainly, bureaucratic inertia is part of the explanation, and the organizational culture ("the Army way") of the US Army may have played a part. I'd bet that an equally important factor is poor leadership. For a long, long time, the people at the top of the chain of command continued arguing that hidden caches of unconventional munitions must exist. Many Army officers were unwilling to incur the wrath of the civilian leadership by doing anything that might be seen to contradict the "as yet undiscovered WMD" thesis. Bureaucracy might grind on, but in this case, a lot of people may have let it do so.
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