I have no proof that DIE-based promotion priority had a bearing on the magical thinking Afghan withdrawal plans. (We've seen years of magical thinking in military planning--the LCS, Zumwalt-class destroyer, etc--and plenty of specialized trade-offs that assume that you can know which cave to shoot a small missile into.) But it seems at least possible.
In an environment where politics matters most--well, CYA killed a lot of people at Chernobyl. I suspect that we'll soon suffer worse things than the Afghan debacle, even if we try to flush the brass and suits tomorrow morning. There are undoubtedly plenty of other places where our plans have little to do with reality.
In our less powerful future, how can we train and promote people who'll keep their eyes on the ball and test their theories? Who won't believe every "transformative technology" pitch that comes their way? Of course there's the reverse problem--fighting the last war and believing bigger battleships will always win in the end is a way to lose. Still, things like the Zumwalt suggest that we don't have enough believers in iterative improvements. Maybe a machine shop course in which officer candidates make improvised weapons, repeating with improvements during the course. And maybe another to focus on the dangers of using stupid metrics (McNamara again). Find a way to honor the men who find the flaws in the plans in time to fix them.(**)
(*)"The poor of America have not had the opportunity to earn their fair share of this nation's abundance. They can be given the opportunity to return to civilian life with skills and aptitudes which will reverse the downward spiral of human decay". The book says McNamara was pushing this before the recruiting crunch, so he may actually have believed it.
(**)That may be impossible. There's a bias that regards coders as productive for a company's bottom line and testers as a sometimes necessary evil.
No comments:
Post a Comment