Unintended Consequences

Thanks to Colonel Bob Jones for his post on Small Wars Council on the topic of Mindset, which triggered some of my recollections oon the sort of allied subject of unintended consequences and their lingering effects. The Brigade structures he referenced were being adjusted for the Army National Guard and were being formed for the Active Army assistors at the time cited in the Post as a result of the activation of three Army National Guard Brigades for Operation Desert Shield / Desert Storm in 1990-91. The activation of those three Brigades had been resisted by senior Army leadership but was forced by political pressure. In an effort to delay the potential dispatch of the Brigades to the operational theater, the Army elected to rotate all three Brigades through the National Training Center. In the event, the 'war' ended prior to their deployment.

One result of that failure to be deployed as a result of deferring to process as a forestalling tactic was an unintended consequence of little desired Congressional involvement. As I recall, the Defense Appropriation Acts of 1992 and 1993 dedicated 5,000 experienced Active Component soldiers. All captains had to be branch qualified and all NCOs, mostly SSG and above and had to have recent troop experience.

At the time those structures came into being, I was working in a large headquarters and happened to be in the Commanding General's Office when he telephonically questioned a Senate staff member of his acquaintance as to why Congress had passed a rather convoluted law that led to the establishment of the Advisory 'Brigades.' The response was to the effect that Congress wished to ensure that in future wars The Army National Guard Brigades were deployed. The General's response to the Staff person was "Well, you haven't done that. There's no assurance as I read this law that will happen and what you have done is create a bureaucratic nightmare that will waste Active Component Spaces and is likely to be a detriment to the Reserve Components..." or words to that effect.

Thus, a lack of clarity of purpose and a concentration on process and minutia by Congress led to an unintended consequence of massive effort, disruption and cost that accomplished little. Fortunately, after some turmoil and unnecessary costs, that failure was recognized and rectified and today's Training Support Brigades comprised of soldiers from all components resulted in a far better structure.

Regrettably, the other failure cited in that Post has not been rectified. That is the Army Training System using Tasks, Conditions and Standards as the principal individual and unit training methodologies. As Colonel Jones stated in the above linked Post, "...Failure of an essential task is to fail the entire larger task. So any AC army unit (if ever held to evaluation) would have say 2 of 40 subtasks that they must do correctly to pass." That was held to be true at the time; later it was realized that sub task failure need not cause a major task failure but interpretation is still seen as problematic by some.

The process says that we train to standard, and is an effort to provide objectivity by defining 'tasks' down to a pass / fail grade for an easily identified discrete element that may be a task or a sub task or simply an enabling skill with multi-task applicability. What is lost in this is the fact that effective training evaluation most often has to be subjective particularly as numerous sub tasks are frequently combined as they must be in combat. As often, omission of one or more tasks -- or the addition of some not normally included -- may have no effect on mission (or primary task) accomplishment.

There has been recognition that Conditions can vary widely. "Enter and Clear a building" is a task. "Given a structure with a defending enemy element" is the condition, "Enter and clear the building with minimal exposure to enemy fire" is the standard. Whether the unit involved is to clear a two room mud hut, a 20 room mansion, a strip shopping center, nine story office building or the Mall of America can result in significant differences in execution and outcome. It was assumed the evaluator would suitably modify the conditions based on the unit's capabilities and facilities available, but this all too frequently did and does not happen, thus further reinforcing a one size fits all mentality.

The system has admittedly been refined over the years and it now recognizes that many of the early identified 'Tasks' are in fact sub tasks or enabling skills or abilities; that most tasks are performed in conjunction with other tasks and thus that task integration itself becomes a 'Task.' The new FM 7.0 and FM 7.1 continue the process of fixing the process and are great improvements over their predecessors. However, the underlying architecture remains an insidious problem in spite of much improvement.

Improvement is not rectification. The process still forces the Trainer to concentrate on the minimums and lower order efforts. It creates a product that can perform a number of tasks to standard but who or which still may not be able to function effectively in combat.

That we have been as well trained as we actually have been over the past 30 years is testimony to the fact that good trainers have overcome a flawed system. Both yesterdays and today's leaders and trainers deserve a great deal of credit for that. However, the process itself is terribly flawed, is based on 1960s educational technology and was specifically developed to cope with the far lower enlistment and accession standards of 1975, a much trumpeted 'fifth grade reading level.' That old process has some merit for the training of a large conscript Army upon mobilization. We are not now such an Army and are unlikely to be one for many years -- and adequate warning is almost certainly going to be available in event such effort becomes necessary.

Today's accession population is vastly different and far better educated. A very poor 'system' is still being used in spite of major changes in the trained population, in doctrine and in the availability of far more current techniques.

Thus an unintended consequence of adoption of what was at the time recognized by some as a flawed training process is that it further succumbed to bureaucratic inertia and is now hostage to the real -- but manageable -- cost of changing embedded infrastructure including publications and documentation.

These are but three cases of unintended consequences that have had an adverse impact on the Army; a decision to stall Congress, a statute that intended to do something it did not do and adoption of a training process that actually stifles learning, adaptation, innovation and the all critical initiative -- necessities for combat success. All three examples show that reliance on process as opposed to establishing goals or outcomes is terribly flawed -- yet we continue to fret over process...

Fortunately, the law has been changed slightly and the current process is an improvement. Cosmetic changes have been made to the training system and provide some improvement; far better, we are realizing the benefits of Outcome Based Training and we can hopefully we can consign the Task, Conditions and Standard process to the dumpster. The issue should be mission accomplishment ability. Excessive dictation of how to get there is stifling, removes necessary challenges from the purview of subordinate leaders, unnecessarily burdens senior commanders and forces them to interfere with their subordinates to the point of distraction for both. More damaging, we are not inclined to trust our subordinates because we know they are not fully trained. Why do we accept that?

All the foregoing is summed up, I think in this quote from an interview with the author of "The Echo of Battle: the Army's Way of War", Professor Brian McAllister Linn at Bellum, A Stanford Review Blog:

"A final word. The Army is unlikely to win a particular war, much less all wars, unless it starts thinking a lot more seriously about war and a little less about process and procedure."