Fuzzy Signals

The Troubles with Command and Control

Okay. If I were to try to glean any lessons from what I've been reading thus far from all the reports and interviews of the Abu Ghraib disaster, I'd say these failures can be attributed to three interacting factors:

1) Organizational problems, e.g. the clumsy and slow process of risky information filtering up through the chain of command structure; the mismatch between putting military-intelligence operatives in charge instead of military police (misaligned roles, incentives, etc.); and what is getting much coverage lately, the extensive use of the private sector, which is not subject to military discipline, to perform key interrogation roles.

All of this will become clear to you after reading "CHAIN OF COMMAND: How the Department of Defense mishandled the disaster at Abu Ghraib" by SEYMOUR M. HERSH, The New Yorker. Hersh, btw, was one of the journalists who broke the Abu Ghraib story, also in this magazine.

Here are some choice quotes:

“Our prerequisite of perfection for ‘actionable intelligence’ has paralyzed us. We must accept that we may have to take action before every question can be answered.” The Defense Secretary was told that he should “break the ‘belt-and-suspenders’ mindset within today’s military . . . we ‘over-plan’ for every contingency. . . . We must be willing to accept the risks.” With operations involving the death of foreign enemies, the memo went on, the planning should not be carried out in the Pentagon: “The result will be decision by committee.”

"By placing military-intelligence operatives in control instead, Miller’s recommendations and Sanchez’s change in policy undoubtedly played a role in the abuses at Abu Ghraib. General Taguba concluded that certain military-intelligence officers and civilian contractors at Abu Ghraib were “either directly or indirectly responsible” for the abuses, and urged that they be subjected to disciplinary action."

"Human Pyramid" © Images.com/CORBIS
Creator: David Ridley

2) Cultural issues within the military that encouraged dehumanizing practices such as taking pictures while torturing. This started before Iraq in Afganistan, and possibly before that.

3) And then when the issue was known, a pervasive mindset problem, starting from the very top (Rummy and Bushy), to suppress and/or procrastinate dealing with bad news, news that doesn't "fit" their mental map or plan. As Hersh reports, Rummy in particular didn't want to hear bad news, and if there was bad news, the best thing to do was to cover it up and hope it would go away.

In our business, we call this "willful wishful" thinking, a particularly bad form of denial combined with an arrogant belief that most events can be controlled and manipulated using the levers of power and authority. This combo is a classic recipe for setting yourself up and the organization (in this case, the United States of America) for being blind-sided by the unexpected, and most crucially, for weak decision-making with a brittleness locked in because decisions were made using only a narrow range of information—the information that only they wanted to see or hear. (This Administration is going to make a great case study one of these days.)

While organizations may have gotten away with this mentality in the past, and still do today, in highly complex and uncertain situations, command and control structures start to break down in their effectiveness. After Sept 11, you would think this lesson was starting to sink in, but when you are dealing with a culture as dsyfunctional as the US military right now, perhaps this will take a decade or more before it really does change.

A copy of the Taguba Report, named after the general who blew the whistle, is found here.

Posted by nicole at May 11, 2004 10:37 AM