Irregular Warfare and Adaptive Leadership
Paul Yingling
When I was a battalion XO in Iraq in 2003, I served with a company commander whose vehicle was struck by an early version of an IED. The fragmentation shattered his windshield and severed his antennas, the smoke and dust obscured his vision and the blast temporarily deafened him. In the first critical seconds after the blast, the commander saw the ubiquitous white pickup leaving the blast area, but didn’t pursue it. His battalion commander was furious, and later harangued the captain for his failure to act. The company commander was crushed; he felt the battalion commander was questioning his courage, and in fact he was.
The battalion commander later complained to me about his company commander’s inaction. He was right on the tactics – in those rare moments when we make contact with insurgents, if indeed this truck contained insurgents – we must capture or kill them. I was less certain about his methods of leader development, so I asked about the company commander’s preparations for deployment. For example, prior to deployment, who had the authority to cancel PT in the event of an electrical storm? He answered, ‘the brigade commander had that authority.’ I then asked him, who had the authority to change the PT uniform, if for example it was warmer than expected? That decision was at the battalion level. This company commander, who only a few months ago lacked the authority to tell his troops to come in out of the rain or take off their hats, was now expected to pursue the enemy unto death.
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As field grade officers, our most important tasks are to anticipate events and empower our subordinates to act wisely and boldly on the decentralized battlefields of the 21st century. The world has changed a great deal in the last fifty years, but the Department of Defense has not. Despite some remarkable accomplishments by those parts of DoD closest to the battlefield, especially here in Iraq, the institutional military has proven incapable of internal reform on the scale necessary to provide for our security. If change comes, it must come through political intervention from the outside in and innovation from the bottom up. The post-911 generation is the most reliable source of that bottom up innovation, if only we will listen to their experiences and invest in their education.
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Why is the institutional military so much less adaptive than combat forces in the field? It’s not the people – service members routinely rotate between the institutional military and the operating forces in the field. Instead, I believe it’s the incentive system.
Combat forces operate under a simple, brutal incentive system – adapt or die. Forces in combat are not by virtue of their location intellectually or morally superior to their counterparts in the institutional military. Rather, their priorities are clearer – when the failure to adapt carries a death sentence, every other consideration – service and branch loyalties, core competencies, organizational cultures – pales in comparison.
The institutional military, largely insulated from battlefield realities and powerfully influenced by service cultures, operates under a different incentive system. Those responsible for acquisition operate under powerful incentives to procure expensive, high-tech weapons, even if those weapons are not the ones combat forces need. Those responsible for organizational design operate under powerful incentives to defend existing force structure from claims by other branches and services, even if the existing force structure does not meet the needs of combatant commanders. Finally and most importantly, military officers operate under powerful incentives to conform to senior officers’ views, even if those views are out of touch with battlefield realities. Unlike combat forces, the institutional military operates under an incentive system that rewards conformity and discourages adaptation. These incentives have been only partially suppressed by battlefield realities. As today’s battles fade into memory, the institutional military’s desire to return to so-called core competencies is likely to reassert itself. Our organizational culture of conformity is likely to allow these arguments to go unchallenged. Our senior leaders are not bad people, but they work in a bad system that rewards the wrong behaviors.
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Second, the most urgently needed reform lies in our system for developing senior officers. Our senior leadership failures have persisted for decades and are systemic in nature; only systemic reform can remedy these failures. Our current system rewards conformity; senior officers select for promotion those like themselves. It is unreasonable to expect an officer who spends 25 years conforming to institutional norms to emerge as an innovator in his late 40’s. If we desire creative intelligence and moral courage from our officers, Congress must create a system that rewards these qualities. Civilian graduate education, especially in the social sciences, humanities, and languages, can strengthen the intellectual caliber and cultural literacy of our officer corps. Three-hundred sixty degree evaluations are more likely than the current system to identify morally courageous and innovative leaders. Our subordinates judge us every day, but we’ve created a system to make sure that promotion boards never hear those judgments, and our officer corps is worse for it. Some fear that 360 degree evaluations will become ‘popularity contests’ but in my experience those fears are unfounded. Troops admire leadership and despise pandering, and have a much better record than promotion boards of distinguishing between the two.
Third, you cannot wait on institutional change to build the adaptive leaders needed for the wars of the 21st century. Real reform will require political intervention; even if the reforms I describe were enacted today, it would take a decade or more to change the organizational culture of the military. You can’t wait that long; you will lead troops this summer. You can take action right now to build the leaders we need for the 21st century. Our leaders have to be smart; you can create leader development programs that focus on critical thinking and unstructured problem solving. Our units have to be adaptive; you can create unscripted, free-play, multi-role player field exercises that replicate the complexity of the modern battlefield. Our soldiers have to be tough; you can show them what tough looks like – step into the combatives pit against your toughest soldier, ruck up under the same weight you’ll carry in combat, and in everything you do soldier alongside your soldiers. Our leaders have to be compassionate; you can create a command climate that recognizes and rewards leaders capable of listening.
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