Thomas E. Ricks's Blog, page 150

Is Army 'Design' methodology over-designed? There are trust issues, too

By Richard
Buchanan

Best
Defense office of mission command

Currently
there is a raging debate in the Force over Army Design Methodology (ADM) which the field has shortened to simply
"Design." Design is being currently
taught to selected officers attending the School of Advanced Studies (SAMS), the War College, and in a general population
Design training course developed and taught by Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH). There
is currently not a single course teaching Design to NCOs and or Army Civilians
other than the course offered by BAH. There is as well a ongoing debate as to whether Design is strictly for
the Strategic and Operational levels and should not be used at the Tactical
level.

If one
researches ADM you will see it defined and explained in ADRP 5.0 in roughly
eight pages complete with terms and charts which attempt to describe the
process. In further research of ADRP 5.0 you will see that the discussion of
Design and military decision-making (MDMP) takes all of two paragraphs. If you
take the BAH course you will be struck by the sheer weight of terms and charts
(and a very large Powerpoint slide deck) all trying again to describe Design.
In ADRP 5.0 section 2-23 you will notice that by doctrine the Army now has a
total of three standalone planning methods all attempting to address the scope
of the problem the unit is facing, i.e. the Operational Environment (OE).

The result
of all of the above is that the Force now perceives Design to be complex,
highly technical (complicated terms and charts with its own language), and
Design can only be conducted by those who have attended the Design training
mentioned above and our Design doctrine has reinforced that perception.

If we look
at the core ADM requirements mentioned in the eight or so pages of ADRP 5.0 one
starts to see mentioned over and over; critical and creative thinking,
collaboration and dialogue, framing (another term for simply communication),
narrative construction, and visual modeling (simply another set of terms for
communication/whiteboarding).

Now the
over designing of Design kicks in -- if in fact the concept of Design demands
communication, dialogue, free flow of ideas, critical discourse -- are we not
suppose to be doing that already inside MDMP? Wait thoug,h as per paragraphs 2-61 and
2-62, Design is conducted independently, in parallel to or after MDMP by the
Commander and selected Staff all under the guise of helping the Commander
understand the OE. Literally a Catch-22 moment.

Just as we
often discuss the Army values and what it means to the Force, Design to has one
key critical element that is missing, just as it is missing in the Army Values.
That is, trust. Steven Covey in his book Speed of Trust wrote that:

There is one thing that is common to every
individual, relationship, team, family,
organization, nation, economy, and civilization
throughout the world-one thing which,
if removed, will destroy the most powerful
government, the most successful business, the
most thriving economy, the most influential leadership,
the greatest friendship, the
strongest character, the deepest love. On the other
hand, if developed and leveraged, that one thing has the potential to create
unparalleled success and prosperity in every dimension of life. Yet, it is the
least understood, most neglected, and most underestimated possibility of our
time.
That one thing is trust. . . . It under girds and
affects the quality of every relationship, every communication, every work
project, every business venture, every effort in which we are engaged.

Likewise,
Col. Tom Guthrie in his 2012 article said that, "If we intend to truly
embrace mission command, then we should do it to the fullest, and that will
require commitment to changing a culture from one of control and process to one
of decentralization and trust."

I think (as I said in my previous BD article) that we in fact do have a serious
issue in the Force -- namely a glaring lack of Trust at all levels and between
individuals.

If we look
at the argument that Design cannot be conducted at the Tactical level -- then we
really do need to ask ourselves why is it not in the MDMP planning cycle? My
answer is Design has always been in MDMP in multiple areas -- Mission Analysis,
COA Development/Decision, Wargaming, and even in the Rehearsal phase.

In Mission Command it is the "art of command" where
the responsibility rests for the commander to lead the development of teams
using Understanding, Visualization, Describe, Direct, Lead, and Assess UVDDLA).
If the Commander is responsible for team building then why is he, per doctrine,
supposed to lead Design independently, in parallel to or after MDMP? What staff
officers are to be pulled out of the MDMP process to focus on Design robbing
Staff sections of their own team leader, when is the Design plan to
resynchronize back to the MDMP process, and which plan has precedence -- the MDMP
plan or the Design plan?

If the commander as the team builder and leader does his job effectively as a leader
should -- that is, building trust, and creating an open dialogue free of fear which
automatically allows critical thinking/discourse -- then Design will occur on its
own and it is not a forced process full of terms and charts that no one seems
to understand.

Secondly,
the debate around Design has opened an interesting discussion -- namely if we
take a Command Post and or a Staff section, there will always be NCOs and/or
lower ranking subordinates. Not a single one of them have been taught MDMP nor
Design and yet they are handling data that has to be transformed into
Information/Understanding as per the doctrinal concept of the Cognitive
Hierarchy. Or they are substituting as reps to Working Group meetings where
MDMP is in progress or should be in progress or they are contributing to
running estimates which also feeds into the MDMP process.

I have often wondered while observing Command
Post operations, WG meetings, or Staff meetings, what do the NCOs/junior
subordinates think about during the ongoing discussions and do they really buy
into the decisions made during those meetings or do they simply nod north and south and go about their business?

Now, we are
having a Force discussion on whether Design does work or not work, what level
should it be used at, should Design planners be additionally trained, should
there be a separate Design planning Staff section, and the list goes on. To
me, these are examples of over engineering.

My opinion
is that Design is the way forward, especially when coupled with Mission Command,
but it must be taught together with
MDMP/Mission Command to all individuals
working in Staffs at all levels and in Command Posts at all levels. In reality,
they do a mini version of UVDDLA MDMP when performing their CP or Staff
functions.

If everyone
who works in a Staff section and/or in a Command Post fully understands MDMP,
fully understands Design/Mission Command and the commander has in fact built
his team using Trust in an open dialogue manner -- then Design/ MDMP/Mission
Command will be able to handle any future ill structured "wicked" problem set.
Until then the Force will continue to tread water.

Richard Buchanan is mission command training facilitator
with the JMTC/JMSC Grafenwoehr, Germany training staffs in the areas of mission
command, MDMP/NATO Planning Processes, MDMP/Design, and Command Post
Operations. The opinions here are his own and not those of U.S. Army Europe,
the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, the U.S. government. But Bobby
Valentine does agree, we are guessing. How did the Red Sox go so wrong in
recent years?

Why boost the defense budget as 2 long wars are finally ending (at least for us)?

That's
the question I asked the other day on NPR's "Morning Edition." Want to know my
response? Very well then, here's the transcript. (And,
in case it is confusing, yes I also did an interview with
the same outfit about my new
book.)

More
thoughts on the subject: I don't understand Governor Romney's insistence that
we need to move to spending 4
percent of GDP on defense. 
I mean, at the height of the British Empire, the British spending on
defense was between 2 and 3 percent of national income. Nor was the size of the
Royal Navy key to maintaining the Empire: It went from about 80 ready ships of
the line in 1817 to 58 in 1835, Paul Kennedy tells us in his wonderful Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery.

Tom makes the rounds

While
we are rounding up my various appearances, here is an exchange I did with the
estimable Mark Thompson of Time
magazine. And here is a very nice book review by
the historian James Jay Carafano in The
National Interest.

The quiet decline of Leavenworth: 33 civilian slots cut, and counting

By a guy at Fort Leavenworth

Best Defense guest
columnist

The big issue at our
institution is the Title X contract length policy -- although Dept of the Army
civilians, we are signed to multi-year periods and then must be reappointed at
the end of our terms. At SAMS the faculty get 5 year periods for
appointment (even though our faculty is as good as theirs). This last
summer the college leadership standardized the 2 year period as the
standing contract length for all Title X faculty now at CGSS (the part of CGSC
that delivers the Command and General Staff Office Course, what used to be
called ILE.)

Previously the maximum contract length had been 3 years, although for a short time a few
folks did have 5 year agreements. There are still some old
Title V/GS instructors around, but as they retire, those billets are
eliminated since they were designated back in 2003 as "overhires"--
even though they were not. From full professor to instructor, the best
one can hope for is two years. Obviously no one wants to have their
contract up for renewal during a time of cuts.

With the move to lower the civilian side of the civ-mil faculty ratio, the Title X reappointment system is an ideal way to cut faculty -- simply
do not reappoint them. There is no tenure, as you know, not even for full
professors. The target goal for faculty reduction at CGSC this last
fiscal year was 33, and we have pretty much met that goal using retirements without
backfills and Title X non-appointments using order of merit lists. The
retirements have all been "voluntary" -- the Department of Military
History just lost Dr. Tom Huber to retirement, who is a big name -- he is the guy
who came up with compound warfare theory, which Frank Hoffman will tell you is
the name for hybrid warfare before Frank et al. came up with hybrid warfare. He
is a loss. The history department also lost a promising young ABD (all but
dissertation) historian who frankly was worried about job security.

In the rest of the building there is much angst over this sort of
uncertainty, and the green suiter instructors are still not showing up
either -- for history they have to be 5x (the military history additional skill
identifier) level of education (i.e., have a masters degree). The army does not have a
lot of those to go around. The college has lost some key non-Ph.D.
level instructors, again, many of them moving on to GS jobs outside the
college. For example, a logistics instructor who headed up the
College's writing improvement program left -- he was a former West point
professor and went to a GS job in another state. One last OBTW,
just learned a colleague in the tactics department is leaving, very erudite and
a great instructor (but not a Ph.D.). Tom, the quality of the faculty is
being harmed by a simplistic and ultimately self-defeating personnel policy
because it gives the Army max flexibility and top cover -- just what its
leadership is used to.

Quote of the day: When facing wicked problems, perhaps just try things out

I was reading "How
Strategists Really Think: Tapping the Power of Analogy," an
article from the Harvard Business Review
(semi-necessary disclosure: I also have an article appearing in
that magazine -- I said I've been busy!) and
was struck by this comment:

Trial and error is a relatively effective way to make
strategic decisions in settings so ambiguous, novel, or complex that any
cognitively intensive effort is doomed to fail. In altogether new situations .
. . . there may be no good substitute for trying something out and learning
from experience.

Tom again: I found the article especially useful for the
section on "How to avoid superficial analogies." The key step, as friend JK
pointed out, is assessing the actual similarity of the two cases, or, as the
authors put it, to "Actively search for differences between the source and the
target."

(HT to JK)

A Centcom official reviews my Atlantic article, and agrees about Tommy Franks

Here is a note from a guy at Central Command in response to
the excerpt from my
book that ran in the
Atlantic. I hadn't before heard his story about
Franks turning over the keys:

With
some minor exceptions your research is 95 percent spot on.

There is
a group of the long term CENTCOM folks of which I am now one -- that have
observed the failures of our senior leadership and came to the same conclusion
as you. That being the General Officer/Flag Officer Corps of the DoD is
for the most part weak, unopposed and sheltered.   

If I had
a dollar for every time someone in this HQ has said: "Can you imagine if George
Patton had received this order?" or "Can you imagine U.S. Grant or R.E. Lee ever
thinking so bizarrely about a situation."

Some of
us have further concluded that we won WWII because of Dresden and Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. Innocent people will die in war. Sad but true. Somehow we've developed this "war can be clean" mentality, because of our
advanced weapons I suppose. This is very unhealthy I think. War is
ugly and should truly be a last resort because of this fact. When Tommy
Franks started showing the laser guided Youtube style videos of rounds going
into bedroom windows in 2003, "we can choose which of the 4 panes of glass you
want the missile to enter thru" a lot of us with Infantry experience were
troubled. When missiles with computers inside them didn't win the war --
the U.S. Army was not prepared for what it faced in the streets of Baghdad. 

The
morning after the statue of Suddam came down -- Tommy was briefing on split
screen the president, Paul Wolfowitz, and Sec Powell (I was in the room).
Tommy briefed the statue bit and praised the 3rd ID -- he then
said "Mr. President, I'm ready to turn the keys over" and after a slightly
uncomfortable laugh from the President there followed an even more
uncomfortable silent pause. You see, there was no one to turn the keys
over to. The State
Department had no plan and the famous "Phase IV" of the CENTCOM plan was a 1
pager (the other 3 phases -- deploy, invade, kill were in the 20 page each ball
park).

In fairness to Tommy
-- he did exactly what the U.S. Army trained him to do -- he deployed planes and
tanks and took ground. He had zero training in anything else. That
is why the invasion by 3rd ID went relatively without a hitch. The U.S. Army had practiced the drive from Kuwait to Baghdad thousands of times
at the National Training Center (NTC), Ft. Irwin over the previous 10
years. 

You learn something every day: What, there were Puritan colonies in the tropics?

As I said, I've been reading Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery, in
which I learned in an aside that the Puritans had tried to start a
colony in Honduras. I didn't know that. In checking it out I also
saw that some Puritans were the first Britishers to live in Belize, aside
from maybe a few pirates and shipjumpers.  

Puritans in bikinis? It just don't seem right. 

Neil Sheehan reviews my new book, and my article in Atlantic tickles Special Ops

My book
on American generalship comes out today. 
Here is Neil Sheehan's review
of it in the Washington Post. He
calls the Vietnam section "the best part of the book." (There also is a review
in the Wall Street Journal by Andrew
Roberts. He likes my writing more than Sheehan does but disagrees with my
conclusions.) 

I've been busy lately. Here is an article
I have in the current issue of the Atlantic.
Special Operators must get their copies early somehow, as I've began hearing
from them about it in the middle of last week. Also, an Air Force general
writes, "much truth in this article and it does not apply just to the
Army. The proclivity to promote non-risk taking, non-controversal, middle
of the road, do-nothings to senior general officer positions from
2008 to 2012 has really affected the Air Force in a negative way."

And here's a good interview that ran
this morning Steve
Inskeep of NPR about the book.  

Navy bounces admiral commanding Stennis strike group in Persian Gulf

This might be more interesting than the usual zipper problem
that affects captains. I can't remember the last time recalled. The reason
given by a Navy
spokesman was "inappropriate leadership judgment,"
which I found oddly encouraging, because it might mean there was a problem of
professional competence, rather just the usual issue of sleeping with
subordinates.

That Marine captain assesses your advice

Our Marine captain who asked for career advice writes to
summarize the incoming he got from youse:

After Tom posted my previous email on Friday, I was taken aback with the
sheer volume of great emails and blog comments on the matter (at last count, 25
emails and 23 comments). I suspect I am not the only Best Defense reader
in this position, so I've compiled some of the general trends of advice that
I've received.

As a first point, almost EVERYONE
recommended taking time off to decompress and relax before beginning school or
work (or at least no one recommended against taking time off). Most
valuable were the comments from former officers who jumped immediately from
their July EAS into an August start for work or school and found it
miserable. The general consensus seems to be that anyone separating from
the military should take two to three months before jumping into the civilian
world to allow for a clean mental and spiritual break. The
recommendations for how to use this time included international travel, bike
trips, road trips, spending time with family, reading, introspection, and
anything else that was difficult to accomplish while on active duty.

After the consensus on taking
some time off, the advice on internships split roughly 50/50 between an
internship in government and the private sector. This split was
interesting and unexpected, both because I never mentioned any interest in the
private sector (although I am interested, as the business school admission may
have indicated) and because I would have expected advice from Best Defense
readers to skew more towards the DOD than it did. Several emails recommended
specifically against any government internships, if for no other reason than to
allow for a cleaner transition from active duty to civilian life. For
those who did recommend an internship in the public sector, Congress was the
clear favorite, with the Senate specifically mentioned as a better option than
the House. Some responses implied that these positions were very
difficult to obtain and that a clearance would not transfer, while others said
the exact opposite. I'm not sure who is correct, so maybe someone with
more experience on Capitol Hill can provide some commentary.