The US military's broken bureaucracy

Phil Carter is the guy I trust on Iraq and on the US military. His blog, Intel Dump, (unfortunate name) includes a record of his recent tour of duty. He volunteered to return to Iraq after finishing his law degree -- driven by patriotism and a powerful sense of obligation. He's smart, informed, and thoughtful.

Now he's turned his analytic skills to figuring out why the senior military leadership has been screwing up recently. He sees a systemic problem ...

It's time to fire a few generals. - By Phillip Carter - Slate Magazine

... In Iraq, where I advised the Iraqi police, I saw this reverse filtration system (whereby excrement is added to the final product, instead of being removed) in action. Reports on police readiness were aggregated, generalized, and stripped of their facts as they moved up the chain of command....

... By the time our reports reached the national level, they contained little of the detail so essential for explaining our progress in standing up the Iraqi police force. This problem exists in many military organizations. Major problems get renamed "obstacles," or "challenges," or some other noun that connotes a temporary delay in forward progress, reflecting the pervasive "can do" optimism of the military officer corps. Staff officers at each level of command refine and insert caveats into reports to ensure they don't rock the boat too much. By the time information reaches a senior commander or civilian official, it no longer reflects reality.

Military bureaucracies (and their civilian brethren like the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency) also do a terrible job of reacting to crises. Large bureaucracies like the Army provide a systematic, uniform, mediocre response to chronic problems. But where time is of the essence, bureaucracies often fail spectacularly...

... Instead of receiving negative information and fixing the root problem, bureaucracies find and apply incrementalist solutions that fit their existing way of doing business. In MBA-jargon, bureaucracies rarely think or act "outside of the box." Whether the context is the Vietnam War, the Iraq war, Hurricane Katrina, or the current mess at Walter Reed, the problem is the same...

But, of course, there are few Pattons left in today's Army, partly because the military has moved away from the tradition of "command responsibility" toward a model of bureaucratic performance. As a lieutenant, I learned that commanders were responsible for all their unit did or failed to do, period. In peacetime, this meant I could lose my job if some soldiers got in a drunken bar fight one weekend or if a sergeant lost too much gear, because I had ultimate responsibility for my unit. In wartime, command responsibility ties in with accomplishing missions: Generals like Patton and Creighton Abrams earned their stars by winning battles, because that is the military's raison d'être.

Unfortunately, this tradition has died. Today, we promote generals and select them for high command even where they fail to accomplish their mission. Commanders responsible for serious breaches of discipline rarely face criminal prosecution anymore and rarely suffer adverse career consequences. Warrior-leaders like Gen. David Petraeus and Marine Lt. Gen. James Mattis do occasionally rise through the system, but they remain the exception.

... Today's decision to sack Maj. Gen. George Weightman, Walter Reed's commanding officer, affirms the principle of command responsibility, thought to be a dead letter after the Abu Ghraib scandals. ...

I think historians will find this same systemic dysfunction ran all the way to the president.