Great post on Global Guerrillas today: "From an insurgents perspective (key to understanding the issue), the US military's command and control system is a gift from God."He is responding to a distressing NYT op-ed titled The Next Surge: Counterbureaucracy. According to the author, it took his company an average of 96 hours to get the 11 approvals necessary to conduct operations when the Taliban arrived in a village. 70% of their attempts to act failed because they could not get the necessary approvals.
All of Robb's reflections on the article are good, but here is my favorite:
New communications technology isn't being used for what it is designed to do (enable decentralized operation due to better informed people on the ground). Instead it is being used to enable more complicated and hierarchical approval processes -- more sign offs/approvals, more required processes, and higher level oversight. For example: a general, and his staff, directly commanding a small strike team remotely.
Most operators can relate to this. There's nothing like being on a run-in to a DZ in bad weather and high mountains, within a couple kilometers of known Taliban positions, minutes away from an airdrop... and having half the crew clustered around the laptop trying to obtain the text message from the Combined Air Operations Center approving the drop. I can't imagine what the approval process is like when firepower is involved.
1 comments:
I'm not certain what gets people more excited--firepower or aircraft. I think aircraft always get people excited for some reason. There's always the potential for a crash, aircraft always have an extaordinarily high amount of command visibility, and I think that everyone seems to still be amazed that things flying through the air are completely unnatural. Although this is more so the case when said aircraft is suspended in the air due to the counterbalancing of about five or six simultaneous forces acting upon it.
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