Trapped! The Seven Habits of Underperforming U.S. Military Services

Chris Kolenda’s article is a well written article. While implementing his recommendations would prove difficult, it is a difficult journey worth embarking on. Some have legitimate concerns that creating unity of effort among our elements of national power could potentially pose a threat to democratic governance. I respect that argument, but offer the balance of power the Constitution created between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of our government creates sufficient friction and restraint to prevent a threat to democracy. If you agree with that, it seems logical that after our democratically elected leaders decide upon a policy, the objective should be focusing on creating maximum efficacy to achieve the stated policy goals. Instead, it often seems we intentionally create a dysfunctional level of friction between defense, state, intelligence, and other elements of national power. Leaders of these organizations are subordinate to our elected leaders and those elected leaders should hold them accountable to pursue the policy objectives in a way that best benefits our national interests, not their organizational interests. In simplistic terms, it would make sense if all the elements of national power were in the same boat and rowing in the same direction.

Chris identified seven habits. To get more depressed I combined a couple of them to describe further our dysfunction. The Babel trap habit defined as government agencies lacking a common strategic language. The Occupy trap habit defined as when war is allowed to become leaderless. Combining these two habits points to the core of our problem (strategic bankruptcy). He writes that no one below the President really leads our interagency efforts and that, “Unity of Effort has become a large camouflage net that masks incoherence, bureaucratic infighting, and strategic incompetence. The whole is less than the sum of its parts.” This means we fail to clearly draw lines between policy, grand strategy, big strategy (whole of government for a particular war or conflict), military strategy, and tactics, and align our efforts in a way that ultimately achieve our policy goals. Leadership is failing at all levels above the tactical level. How many times have we read stories from great soldiers, marines, USAID workers etc. on how they won the fight in their village? Yet the sad reality is their tactical successes didn’t add up to achieving our policy goals. I have seen it repeatedly; where at the pointy end of the spear our troops and civilians create unity of effort and achieve great things. That changed when you got to Kabul or Baghdad, and changed even more for the worse when you get back to D.C.

What took me a long to learn as a knuckle dragger is that we don’t win wars at the tactical level if we don’t have good leadership at the operational and strategic level driving the train. Instead, we simply have hundreds of tactical successes that sadly add up to little. I believe in getting flatter and powering down, but powering down means those empowered have been given appropriate objectives that ultimately and synergistically contribute to achieving our policy goals. Somebody needs to drive the train, otherwise we simply spin in place expending great energy and treasure to no discernable end.

He provided six recommendations, I’ll comment on two. Recommendation five is “include measures of success in policy and strategy documents.” This is about assessing our assumptions, versus simply congratulating ourselves again and again. He writes, “When indicators point to progress but the situation is worsening, both the indicators and the strategy are probably flawed.” Bravo! Recommendation six is, “policy makers need to better articulate intelligence priorities and requirements.” This supports recommendation five, as he suggests collection and analysis should also focus on policy assumptions, not just our adversaries. Overall, I think this a great article.