Haft of the Spear

In fact I recently asked a proponent of a widely known system for wiring the battlefield how they planned to avoid allowing the system to become this generation’s great-squad-leader-in-the-sky. The somewhat sheepish and half-hearted reply was: “education.” Based on the item above (which we know happens more frequently than we care to think about in both war and business) we’ve got a long way to go. Not good news standing alone, but consider this: if mid-careerists are fleeing the service, that theoretically leaves O-5s and up who “don’t get it” and kids who get it but see what kind of reaction “it” gets from seniors to carry us through the next 10-15 years. When today’s seniors retire we’ll be into roughly the 3rd decade of the info age with a military led by people who have done their best to misuse and abuse information technology, and a force that drastically under-performs with the tools it has because they have never had any top-cover.

Well, “never” might be too strong a word because clearly there are mavericks in this age just as there has been in others (H/T Bob):

Adm. Stavridis pointed out that publishing no longer has to be done on paper. “Get out there in the blogs. I’ll see you in the blogosphere,” he stated. He also emphasized that writing doesn’t have to be long articles. Anyone can start by writing a short response in a blog. “Start small and think big.”

For practitioners, “publish” has always been something of a dirty word. “Who has time to research and write; I’ve got a day job!” And that would be true today if publishing still meant months of library time, weeks spent finding an outlet, still more weeks editing, and in the end an audience realistically measured in the dozens. Publishing also has the stink of “academic” on it, which in some quarters is as welcome as Bud distributor at an AA meeting.

Today of course anyone can publish (ahem) and while your initial audience might still only measure in the dozens** your ideas spread virally and that nominal audience just might include people of substance who move in rarified circles that you would never have contact with under normal circumstances . Reaching honchos is a nice bennie, but really this is about making meaningful, functional connections as rapidly as possible (social networking for grunts). As was pointed out recently, and as I have experienced first hand, no one has a lock on good ideas and no one wants to pull an Edison and rack up thousands of failures before finally achieving success (especially if people are shooting at you).

I suspect however that the real driver behind our inability to rapidly adapt in this area has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with psychology. Somewhere around the late 80s it was not enough that you ran your platoon or company or battalion; someone at the next level was always sticking their nose into what was ostensibly your business. “Center mass” in a performance evaluation was essentially a career ender. Your PC-quotient mattered more come promotion time than your demonstrated skills and abilities. There was a time when you would be allowed to salvage a nominal s***-bird, but no longer. 20 years in such a system, plus the immediacy that technology brings, has predictably produced seniors who not only cannot let people do their jobs, they’re doing it for them in real-time.

If I had a solution beyond going Marshall on the senior ranks and elevating O3s and O4s to O6 and O7 and kick starting the revolution in military information affairs, well, I would have a much busier speaking schedule.

** You can’t see it in the picture, but Shane’s shirt reads: “More people have read this shirt than your blog.”