An organization like the cavalry in 1935 is an interesting example. You had a bureaucracy that used the horse to do the job. That was their heritage, value, honor, and dignity. An officer had to take equestrian lessons every day. General Marshall went to the cavalry in 1935 and asked them ‘what are you going to do about blitzkrieg that we see coming?’
They researched that for years. When General Marshall came back in 1939 for the answer, General Hurr’s[?] answer was, ‘we’ve given this a lot of thought.’ They had a lot of analysis, such as a study finding that when you take the horse off the battlefield the IQ of the soldier will go down by ten points. This is how blind we can be to facts and figures if we are too wed to our current values and bureaucracy.
The answer to General Marshall was, ‘the way we’re going to beat blitzkrieg is we are going to put the horses in trailers, carry them to the front line, and because they are fresh will overwhelm the tank, and we’ll be victorious on the horse just like we have for the last thousand years.’ That’s when Marshall cancelled the cavalry. But it took Congress ten more years to stop funding the cavalry. Again, bureaucracy, the way things have always been, and how hard it is to change.
So how do you do it? The answer is that you do not ask the bureaucracy to change, you do not ask the pig to slaughter itself. What you do is find the people that have a natural propensity to be innovating. They have this habit of mind. They have this humility where they can not be wed to what they did in the past. You pull them out of the organization, you don’t need a lot of them, just the right ones. If you have more than 12, then you probably have too many.
You hide them from the bureaucracy. You give them money, you give them freedom, and you give them authorities to tinker and explore and try. You plant many seeds. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Have multiple of these as an institution. You have this engine of innovation that sits outside of the bureaucracy that has to be protected by the top, because if it’s not protected from the top, somebody will see that and they’ll kill it.
That was transcribed from a talk given by the wise LTG Steven Kwast (ret.) at the Air Warfare Symposium — Developing Innovators on the Airman for Life Podcast. This line of reasoning also rationalizes his support for a separate Space Force.
One of the difficulties is the fact that when an organization outside the bureaucracy starts succeeding and needs to scale rapidly, it will have to start bringing in structures and controls that look much like the bureaucracy. Eventually, the scaled organization is regularized.
However, there will be a continuous cycle. To scale a new organization requires downsizing old organizations. The new organization may be innovative for quite some time, but may get replaced itself. Overall, the enterprise is improving by scaling the best and filtering out the worst. It takes more aspects of the market economy.
Ultimately, institutions like the Army, Navy, and Air Force have such a cultural legacy that changing them must be on a much longer time scale. So they are best lean at the staff and HQ level, and allowing for churn at the lab, PEO, or buying command level.
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