In Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World General Stanley McChrystal (with Tantum Collins, David Silverman, and Chris Fussell) describes a new, 21st-century conception of organization for large, complex activities involving thousands of individuals and hundreds of major sub-tasks. His concept is grounded in his experience in counter-insurgency warfare in Iraq. Rather than being constructed as centrally organized, bureaucratic, hierarchical processes with commanders and scripted agents, McChrystal argues that modern counter-terrorism requires a more decentralized and flexible system of action, which he refers to as "teams of teams". Information is shared freely, local commanders have ready access to resources and knowledge from other experts, and they make decisions in a more flexible way. The model hopes to capture the benefits of improvisation, flexibility, and a much higher level of trust and communication than is characteristic of typical military and corporate organizations.
McChrystal proposes an organizational structure that is more decentralized, more open to local decision-making, and more flexible and resilient. These are unmistakeable virtues in some circumstances; but not in all circumstances and all organizations. And arguably such a structure would have been impossible in the planning and execution of the French defense of Dien Bien Phu or the US decision to wage war against the Vietnamese insurgency ten years later. These were situations where central decisions needed to be made, and the decisions needed to be implemented through well organized bureaucracies. The problem in both instances is that the wrong decisions were made, based on the wrong information and assessments. What was needed, it would appear, was better executive leadership and decision-making -- not a fundamentally decentralized pattern of response and counter-response.
One thing that deserves comment in the context of McChrystal's book is the history of bad organization, bad intelligence, and bad decision-making the world has witnessed in the military experiences of the past century. The radical miscalculations and failures of planning involved in the first months of the Korean War, the painful and tragic misjudgments made by the French military in preparing for Dien Bien Phu, the equally bad thinking and planning done by Robert McNamara and the whiz kids leading to the Vietnam War -- these examples stand out as sentinel illustrations of the failures of large organizations that have been tasked to carry out large, complex activities involving numerous operational units. The military and the national security establishments were good at some tasks, and disastrously bad at others. And the things they were bad at were both systemic and devastating. Bernard Fall illustrates these failures in Hell In A Very Small Place: The Siege Of Dien Bien Phu, and David Halberstam does so for the decision-making that led to the war in Vietnam in The Best and the Brightest.
So devising new ideas about command, planning, intelligence gathering and analysis, and priority-setting that are more effective would be a big contribution to humanity. But the deficiencies in Dien Bien Phu, Korea, or Vietnam seem different from those McChrystal identifies in Iraq. What was needed in these portentous moments of policy choice was clear-eyed establishment of appropriate priorities and goals, honest collection of intelligence and sources of information, and disinterested implementation of policies and plans that served the highest interests of the country. The "team of teams" approach doesn't seem to be a general solution to the wide range of military and political challenges nations face.
What one would have wanted to see in the French military or the US national security apparatus is something different from the kind of teamwork described by McChrystal: greater honesty on all parts, a commitment to taking seriously the assessments of experts and participants in the field, an openness to questioning strongly held assumptions, and a greater capacity for institutional wisdom in arriving at decisions of this magnitude. We would have wanted to see a process that was not dominated by large egos, self-interest, and fixed ideas. We would have wanted French generals and their civilian masters to soberly assess the military function that a fortress camp at Dien Bien Phu could satisfy; the realistic military requirements that would need to be satisfied in order to defend the location; and an honest effort to solicit the very best information and judgment from experienced commanders and officials about what a Viet-Minh siege might look like. Instead, the French military was guided by complacent assumptions about French military superiority, which led to a genuine catastrophe for the soldiers assigned to the task and to French society more broadly.
There are valid insights contained in McChrystal's book about the urgency of breaking down obstacles to communication and action within sprawling organizations as they confront a changing environment. But it doesn't add up to a model that is well designed for most contexts in which large organizations actually function.
What struck me most in this article was the misconception of what occurred in Vietnam and Iraq. The Vietnam War is seen as screwed up by nearly everyone because they focus on Vietnam. But the war actually had two underlying realities that couldn't be seen. The first was that Soviet forces massed tanks in the Warsaw Pact, threatening to overrun Europe. The western response was to develop airmobile tactics. Thus western civilization depended on the execution of airmobile warfare rapidly against a Soviet invasion. Vietnam primarily served to train and gain experience for the command structure and responsible leadership of airmobile operations. The U.S. Marines, who had no role in Europe, pursued an entirely different approach in keeping the DMZ region safe (except, of course, during the TET 1968 attacks).
ReplyDeleteAt the same time, the early days of Vietnam were concerned with the Chinese forces threatening Chiang Kai Shek. The development of the Taiwan regime needed money and support, including the seventh army cut off in what became the Golden Triangle, so named because the Nationalist Chinese there utilized opium shipped down the Mekong to fund itself. That is why the U.S. centered its operations next to the Mekong in Saigon instead of near Hue, the actual capital of South Vietnam.
Similarly, no one seem to remember that the Iraq regime of Hussein was under a severe economic embargo that was about to be removed when the Bush administration attacked. The evidence is clear that the impetus of that invasion for the Bush oilmen was to keep Iraqi oil out of the world market. They disbanded the Iraqi army and let the country descend into chaos precisely because they needed that chaos to keep oil off the market. There is this thing called Occam's Razor which says that if many perplexing things can be made logical by one perspective, then that perspective is probably correct.
General Stanley McChrystal? Say who, what, when, where? How many wars in vastly poor countries does the guy get to lose and still be given our attention?
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It's only Toffler at army. Not Hong New under Sun
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