Reforming Pentagon Strategic Decisionmaking
Strategic thinking, and what distinguishes the good from the bad, has been one of my long-running themes here at OSD. Reforming Pentagon Strategic Decisionmaking, Christopher Lamb and Irving Lachow’s article from an NDU Strategic Forum, ties together some excellent thinking on the subject.
After discussing past attempts to rationalize DoD decisionmaking, as well as the importance of both intuitive and rational decisionmaking processes, Lamb and Lachow lay out the current weaknesses in strategic planning.
To execute its ostensibly rational planning processes, the Pentagon is divided into hierarchical organizational structures that represent relatively narrow bodies of expertise (policy, intelligence, program analysis, acquisition, and budgeting). Within these bodies are subdivisions that further specialize in more narrowly defined subjects. Recently, Pentagon wits have taken to calling their stovepiped organizations “cylinders of excellence,” which is in fact what they are. Their purpose is to build and nurture deep expertise in a narrow body of knowledge. These experts identify issues, devise options and recommendations, and forward them up the chain to senior officials. In this regard, planning and decisionmaking are essentially bottom-up and stovepiped.
In terms more familiar to readers of Dr. Barnett and Zenpundit, the DoD has been emphasizing and rewarding vertical specialization. While Lamb and Lachow never explicitly say so, this vertical specialization comes at the expence of horizontal (i.e. truly strategic) thinking.
The value of these rational decision processes is limited by multiple bureaucratic and human factors. The Secretary and other senior leaders need integrated problem assessments and solution options, but their subordinates have few incentives to collaborate
in order to provide such products. Instead, subordinates are rewarded for developing and protecting their organizational equities. Since there is no incentive to sacrifice organizational equities for the common good, the natural outcome of a formal coordination process in the Pentagon is a least common denominator or consensus product for senior leaders that avoids and obscures the need for tough tradeoffs.
The end result is senior leaders rarely able to devote themselves to their core functions:
-providing strategic direction (by setting priorities),
-making major resource investments (to instantiate their strategic priorities),
-explaining strategic objectives and direction to internal and external audiences, and
-monitoring performance so that they can make the inevitable necessary adjustments.
As Lamb and Lachow sum up,
…strategic decisionmaking remains more personalized, centralized, and idiosyncratic than it should be, devoid of the ability to test hypotheses and see all reasonable alternatives.
Getting this right is essential, since our security environment has become increasingly dynamic and planning assumptions need to be revisited more frequently. Current force structure and training issues can be traced back to out-dated Cold War assumptions that remained unchanged far too long after their relevence had ended.
Lamb and Lachow’s solution to this problem - a Decision Support Cell - warms my heart as an analyst, I worry that it doesn’t address the fundamental issue. They dance around it throughout the article without ever stating it outright. We spend billions on analysis, yet continue to suffer a deficiency of strategic planning, because the DoD as an organization does not reward truly strategic analysis. You get the behavior you reward, not the behavior you ask for (or specify in memos). Lamb and Lachow argue that
Without a change in the overall behavior of the DoD, these analysts will starve on a lack of data and cooperation from the “cylinders of excellence,” and they won’t be able to build their holistic view. [Talking about “a holistic perspective,” by the way, is classic consultant BS. Unless we’re going to be balancing the DoD’s chakras and assessing the Pentagon’s Feng Shui, we aren’t taking a holistic view.] L & L argue that the Decision Support Cell is necessary to help the SECDEF enforce the necessary incentives to create better collaboration, but this dodges the question of whether creating a new organization is the most effective way to enforce new behaviors. Enforcement is a piece of the solution, but without a reformed incentive structure, the entire enterprise reverts to the status quo.Since the cell would have a holistic view of the multiple senior leader core functions, it would be in a position to advise the Secretary on the importance of keeping abreast of these issue areas.
There is another post in here about the role of intuition (per Gladwell’s Blink, which is really just a popularization of Gary Klein’s excellent research), its role in strategic decisionmaking and how to nurture it, but it’s Friday afternoon and the mechanism’s running on empty. Have a good weekend all.
It’s a serious problem. DoD is a top-down hierarchy in a open source world, and they’ll continue to suffer for it.
Comment by A.E — February 18, 2007 @ 1:05 am
Tom around the web
+ NonParty Politics quoted Tom from Hugh’s show, and linked transcript 5 and transcript 6, and linked transcript 4 while quoting the Ten Truths. + ZenPundit linked Putin reality check. + So did Observing Japan. + ZenPundit also linked The…
Trackback by Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog — February 18, 2007 @ 3:40 pm
Yes, it’s an enormous problem that has existed for more than a decade. Many of the issues we currently face in areas such as force structure and training can be traced back the paucity of true strategic thinking and planning during the 1990s.
~W
Comment by Wiggins — February 18, 2007 @ 7:38 pm
Many of the mistakes — process errors — by the senior levels of the Bush Admin are almost identical to those made in the 1960’s in the Vietnam War. I suspect that there are deep structural factors at work, not organizational ones. Just a guess, but if so these solutions will not work.
This effect is commonly seen by attempts to fix weak corporations by changing processes and org charts, when the corporate “culture” is at fault. Large scale personnel changes accompanied by changes in methods are the only proven ways to fix this. There are others, such as the re-education by charasmatic leader (as described in “Up the Organization”), but such folks are rare.
Comment by Fabius Maximus — February 21, 2007 @ 12:34 am
Hi again Fabius,
I agree with Dr. Richard’s point from Certain to Win that many of the problems blamed on a corporation’s “culture” can only be fixed by changing the incentive structure. This is the fundamental change that must occur and it requires committed leaders (I agree with you that such folks are rare). If the desired behavior is not rewarded, and the wrong behavior punished, then Org chart changes, business process improvements and new personnel won’t fix anything.
cheers,
Wiggins
Comment by Wiggins — February 21, 2007 @ 9:37 am
Absolutely agree about the centrality of the incentive structure! Other factors m/b equally important, however.
For example, one can tell much about an organization by the time and effort devoted to recruitment and training units. In the State Dept this has been since WWII a wastebasket (do not know if still so), whereas for the Marines these are high-status jobs.
That’s why the key, in my opinion, is understanding how to transform our National Secty apparatus. Hence perhaps the most important player is MAJ Don Vandergriff, author of The Path to Victory.
Also worth careful attention, imho, is
Drawn extensively on Challenging Transformation’s Clichés, Autulio J. Echevarria II
Strategic Studies Institute
December 2006
http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB746.pdf
Perhaps none of the normal methods of changing organizations will work for us. If 4GW is so effective, pehaps we need a non-violent varient so that we can use it internally on our own institutions.
As in Andy Grove’s advice that organizations should “obsolete themselves.”
Comment by Fabius Maximus — February 21, 2007 @ 10:08 pm
Your point about the emphasis an organization places on recruitment and training got me thinking about the follow-on post I need to write to this one regarding how to train and develop intuitive experts. Lots of connections with Gladwell, Klein and the like here.
~W
Comment by Wiggins — February 22, 2007 @ 4:55 pm