Rhetoric Does Not Match Reality: Is it Too Hard, or They just want to Stay Where We Are Today and In the Past?

This is an ongoing series in support of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth as he reforms U.S. DoD.

While the quote from the 2009 Capstone Concept mentions the importance of “institutional culture” in the embracing of Mission Command, the Department of Defense culture is dominated by a personnel system that runs on out-of-date assumptions and facts. The regulations, policies and laws that guide the personnel system impact all behavior throughout the Department of Defense. Personnel bureaucrats fight the wars of today with practices from the past.

I sincerely believe Secretary Of Defense Pete Hegseth wants to restore the warrior ethic, but until he destroys the foundation of the U.S. military’s culture, its personnel management system, anything he does will be short-lived. Little has changed since Vietnam other than the “names change on the Powerpoint slides but not the substance”. While the names of key players are different, the substance of their policies is not.

As Jörg Muth recently wrote in reference to the 3d Infantry Division’s 5 April 2003 “Thunder Run” into Baghdad:

“The episode shows a command culture that has only gradually evolved from the days of World War II. While the technical knowledge of today’s U.S. Army officers is far superior to that of their predecessors, their leadership capabilities are not. There are exceptions as some of the aggressive officers of the 3rd Infantry Division have demonstrated. Before the second Thunder Run, [Colonel David] Perkins outlined for his officers which decisions were his to make and which ones they could make. That is as close as the U.S. Army has ever come to Auftragstaktik, but Perkins has proven to be an exceptional officer. This most effective and democratic of all command philosophies has, 120 years after its invention, been studied but not yet understood nor yet found a home in the armed forces of the most democratic of all nations.”

As a retired command sergeant major who spent his career in special operations stated, “Soldiers succeed in spite of the system, not because of it.”

For example, standards in officer accessions (how we prepare individuals to become officers), leader development, promotions and attendance to military and civilian education opportunities were recently lowered, and stayed due to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) ideology to meet the need for “bodies” or “spare parts” regardless of their abilities and competence.

Despite lessons that ought to have been learned from the mistakes made in the personnel arena during World War II, Korea and Vietnam, and recently in the campaigns of Iraq and Afghanistan, these mistakes have been repeated during the past 24 years due to being fenced by legacies of the past. In 2010, the Defense Science Board report on the personnel system concluded that the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act (DOPMA) [with “up or out” as its centerpiece] and other policies and regulations “have the effect today of inhibiting the Department’s flexibility and adaptability.”

A 2011 Secretary of the Army Human Dimension Task Force found that the Army’s solution was to balance input with output by pumping up the input, in this case by beginning to demand more from accession sources, raising the percentage of Soldiers who just made major, considering cutting down pin-on time to major, and, one of the worst decisions, sending lieutenants to a combat zone without going to Ranger school in order to fill “lieutenant slots” in battalions deploying to an insurgency war.

In short, despite past evidence of its weaknesses, the conveyor-belt method of mass production of Service men and women and officers ensures only that the quantity of servicemembers remains high; their quality, on the other hand, is compromised by the inadequacies present in these current methods of educating them. The yearly cycle never ends, all rested on out of place theories and manufacturing methods from the past.

This leads the Army and USMC to do two things that undermine its ability to practice Mission Command. Today, and in the future, asking lieutenants to make decisions with strategic implications, while decreasing their development opportunities and the time available to learn the soldierly arts at the small unit level, is a recipe for disaster. However, we continue to move them along this conveyer belt.

During the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army’s and Marine’s solution was to increase the size of the bilge pump rather than to plug the hole that is sinking the ship. Why is this happening in the 21st century? Their manpower and personnel management systems still views the management of its people through the tired old eyes of Secretary of War Elihu Root and turn-of-the-century industrial theorist Frederick Taylor. This was further impacted by the institutionalization of management science by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in the 1960s.

In recent years, the Army has retained officers by promoting them, trying to solve a structural problem by bribing people to stay, hoping that the positive incentive of faster promotions could buy their loyalty, patriotism and the moral strength to go into harm’s way. Yet this kind of appeal to self-interest is precisely the kind of policy that has failed repeatedly in the past and will actually increase the exodus of our “best and brightest” young people, thus jeopardizing the Army’s future. It is based on the dehumanizing assumption that our officers (and noncommissioned officers) are mindless, undifferentiated, replaceable cogs in a machine. This implies that any body of a certain rank will do—so much for highly developed professionals.

A little history will help us understand where this hidden assumption came from. In 1899, President McKinley picked Elihu Root as Secretary of War to bring “modern business practices” to the “backward” War Department. Root was a highly intelligent lawyer specializing in corporate affairs. He acted as counsel to banks, railroads and some of the great financiers of that era. Root’s approach to reforming the American military was to insert the ideas of management science then in vogue into the Army’s ossified decision making process. He wanted the War Department to run like a modern large corporation.

To this end, Root took Progressive ideas in personnel management—ideas such as social Darwinism—and applied them to the War Department’s personnel management. This approach should not be surprising. Root was a product of the big corporations that dominated the Progressive Era and would soon dominate the U.S. government. Root was also a disciple of the management theories propounded by Frederick Taylor. He believed that Taylor’s theories could be used to make the military more efficient.

Fredrick Taylor is one of the intellectual fathers of the modern industrial production system. Perhaps his greatest contribution to production efficiency was to break down complex production tasks into a sequence of simple, standardized steps. This permitted him to design a standardized mass-production line around a management system that classified work into standard tasks and workers into standard specialties. This combination established work standards, and the people who were trained to these standards became interchangeable cogs in the machine. This greatly simplified personnel management in a vast industrial enterprise.

To be sure, Taylorism transformed industrial production, but it also had a dark side: Taylorism treated people as unthinking cogs in a machine. By necessity, these people had to accept a social system based on a coercive pattern of dominance and subordinance and centralized control from the top. Every action and every decision made in the organization was spelled out in the name of efficiency. In theory, the entire regimen flowed from the brain of one individual at the top of the hierarchy.

A complimentary management dogma also emerged during the Progressive Era. This was the theory of “Ethical Egoism,” which asserted that all people are motivated solely by selfinterest. By extension, all people would respond predictably to a variety of positive incentives (money, pleasure, advancement, distinction, power, luxurious prestige goods and amenities) or negative incentives (which took the primary form of a fear of losing the positive benefits, but also of outright punishment and pain).

Easier accessions, faster promotions, no obligation to attend professional courses and quicker pay raises are fully consistent with this theory of human behavior. Taken together, the idea that people are interchangeable cogs in a machine and the idea that self-interest is the only significant motivator of behavior help explain why the Army thinks that increasing its “production” of lieutenants, cutting out necessary training for young leaders and reducing the promotion time to major will solve its statistical readiness issues with deploying units, meet near-term requirements mandated by the Army and Congress for field grades and solve potential retention problems.

The ideas of Taylor and Root dominated management science and War Department circles a century ago, but their ghosts are haunting the Army’s Human Resources Command and the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel (DCSPER) staff. Moreover, the ghosts of Taylor and Root will continue to haunt the Army’s personnel managers as long as Congress shows no interest in rooting out the causes of our personnel crisis.

But Congress and the press are blinded by the sterile promises of another techno-centric analogy—the Air-Sea Battle (“Revolution in Military Affairs on steroids”) and the Marine Corps 2030 Transformation—which is based on the idea that war is a mechanistic process and that machines are the true source of military prowess as U.S. opponents stand in the open (be it massed armies or Chinese naval vessels) all day and let us kill them. It was with this belief that the Army went to war with Iraq. As soon as the troops were out of Iraq and starting to pull out of Afghanistan, the Air-Sea Battle, the specter of Root and Taylor, began to haunt the Pentagon once again.

There are dangers of reasoning by analogy. Used properly, analogies are powerful reasoning devices because they unleash the genius of imagination and creativity, Einstein’s thought experiments being cases in point. But analogies are also very dangerous, because they simplify complex problems and capture our imaginations. Used improperly, they shackle the mind and take it over the edge of the cliff.

Believing that the Department of Defense is like a business, or that good business practices will solve military problems, are examples of misplaced and dangerous analogies. Effective business practices are often very different from effective military practices such as Mission Command. This is particularly true in the area of personnel policies, where the idea of soldierly virtue embodies the ethos of self-sacrifice and where, as Napoleon said, the moral is to the material as three to one.

Numerous studies over the years have pointed out these issues with the American way of war. In 2011, Eitan Shimar stated in Transforming Command: The Pursuit of Mission Command in the U.S., British, and Israeli Armies,

“The American approach [to war] was influenced by Frederick Taylor’s principles of scientific management. They sought to control war through efficient planning and execution processes. Thus, for example, the regulations emphasized loyalty as opposed to independent action.”

Past Joint Chairmen, Army Chiefs of Staffs and Marine Commandants have endorsed a belief in Mission Command and Maneuver Warfare and the necessary accompanying Leader Development as their top priorities. Yet, in reality, again, the names changed on the PPT slides, but not the substance. Little or nothing was done, and even a regression to more control and zero defects especially in the last years of Obama and Biden terms.

To succeed, they must also boldly take on the personnel/manpower bureaucrats to undertake the necessary reforms in regulations and work with Congress to change laws such as DOPMA 1980. To make Mission Command a powerful combat multiplier, they must exorcise the ghosts of Root and Taylor from Human Resources Command and the staffs of DCSPER and U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command.

Next: Evolving Technology Merging with Mission Command: German Integration of the Telegraph and Railroad within Mission Command

Notes:

1. Dr. Tim Kane, Bleeding Talent: How the U.S. Military Mismanages Great Leaders and Why It’s Time for a Revolution (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012).

2. Lieutenant Colonel Scott M. Halter, “What is an Army but the Soldiers? A Critical Performance Assessment of the U.S. Army’s Human Capital Management System,” Military Review (January– February 2012), pp. 16–23.

3. Muth, Command Culture, p. 209.

4. Comment from unnamed command sergeant major to author, June 2010.

5. Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Understanding Human Dynamics, Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, March 2009, http://www. acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports/ADA495025.pdf.

6. Halter, “What is an Army but the Soldiers?”

7. Brigadier General Mark C. Arnold, “Don’t Promote Mediocrity,” Armed Forces Journal, May 2012, http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2012/05/10122486.

8. Ronald Barr, “High Command in the United States: The Emergence of a Modern System 1898– 1920,” in Leadership and Command: The Anglo-American Experience Since 1861, ed. G. D. Sheffield (London: Brassey’s Defence Publishers, 2002), p. 57.

9. Arnold, “Don’t Promote Mediocrity.”

10. David E. Johnson, Commanding War: The Western Origins of American Military Hierarchy (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2004), pp. 157–158.

11. Martin van Creveld, Fighting Power: German and U.S. Army Performance, 1939–1945 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), pp. 178–179.

12. Morgen Witzel, “Where Scientific Management Went Awry,” European Business Forum, no. 21, Spring 2005, p. 91.

13. Dr. Eric A. Sibul, “The Military and the Management Movement,” Baltic Security and Defence Review, vol. 14, no. 2, 2012, pp. 156–159, http://www.isn.ethz.ch/isn/Digital-Library/Publications/ Detail/?lng=en&id=156768.

14. James E. Hewes, Jr., From Root to McNamara: Army Administration and Organization (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, U.S. Army, 1975), p. 14.