This post highlights excerpts from two episodes of POGO’s Pentagon Labyrinth podcast. Both relate to the mindset embodied in the US Department of Defense — how it is organized and how it functions. The first comes from a conversation between Bruce Gudmundsson and Don Vandergriff on the industrial era thinking behind defense training and operations. Vandergriff contrasts mission command from the type of command-and-control practiced by the DOD:
Mission command… in my translation, really is empowerment tactics or the empowerment of subordinates. When mission command is done right, it is a culture, not command and control as the Army defines it, it is a cultural philosophy, in that, you develop subordinates at the highest professional level so when their in a situation when no one’s around, they are willing — and take joy — in making the right decisions. So it’s about highly professional subordinates that are willing to take responsibility and make the right decision based on the commander’s intent. That intent spells out what the vision of success is…
The US military remains an industrial age culture, and what we mean by that is that it’s built upon: what makes good factory workers? It’s being able to follow the rules and follow the processes. Managers could manage that because they had a book in front of them — they had a checklist. We remain that way, without understanding that the intangibles are more powerful than the tangibles.
The concept of mission command in combat operations has much in common with good principles for managing technology development.
Second comes from Chuck Spinney’s discussion on the legacy of John Boyd, where he criticizes the Newtonian philosophy behind the management recommendations in the industrial era:
If you look at modern social sciences, for example, or economics, you can see the legacy of Newtonian thinking in there in the sense that they have reversible systems. One of the biggest problems in economics is explaining how things learn to do things differently. You have the intersection of supply and demand and it goes up or down — that’s basically inspired by Newtonian mechanics…
If you look at the place in scientific history of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, its the 8-ball, because its non-reversible. Everything else — Newton’s stuff — was reversible. And the 2nd Law is irreversible… Maybe it’s the fundamental law.
This understanding of the role of entropy, and how complex order comes from far-from-equilibrium conditions rather than from a static equilibrium, is crucial to appreciating why mission command can achieve vastly superior results.
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