Here’s one of the two factors that Stanley McCrystal finds important in a military leader:
… the ability to make a decision with uncertainty. I’ve struggled with years as to whether that is born or developed. I remember asking my father, “How do you tell who’s going to be good in combat?” I was just a brand-new lieutenant asking the old soldier’s wisdom. He said, “One who can make decisions in combat.” I said, “Well, how do you know?” He says, “Until you’re in combat, you don’t know.”
You can tell, as he described, a person who’s trying to drive uncertainty to zero will keep asking for more information. They’ll try to get to mitigate all of the uncertainty out, and of course that’s impossible. Some people just have the ability to live with not having perfect knowledge, and yet, they can accept that and still make decisions decisively.
That was from McCrystal’s conversation with Tyler Cowen. I think that is a good heuristic: if a leader keeps asking for more information to make a decision then that individual is either (1) not technically expert in the domain; or (2) not good at navigating uncertainty. No where is this aversion to risk — and reversion to analysis — more prominent than the acquisition side of the house, as Rickover elaborates here.
Of course, this is in part a response to the incentives. If one makes a hard decision that pays off enormously, he or she is rarely rewarded in proportion to the achievement. But if something goes wrong, then that can ruin a career. But in making consequential decisions, one can receive no blame for having performed numerous studies, involving experts of all kinds, and accepting their decision. Responsibility is obfuscated.
Here’s more from McCrystal on the asymmetry of risk and reward to an officer’s career:
We have a no-blemish habit in the US Army, for example. Even as a young officer, if you get scuffed up a little in your record, instead of someone taking that as “Well, they had a bad experience, and they learned from it,” that’s almost guaranteed to prevent your promotion to high rank. As a consequence, what you tend to get higher level is people who’ve never had any blemishes, which means maybe they’ve not taken enough risks; maybe they’ve lived a little too conservatively. And that’s a real negative for producing a better officer corps.
I think a lot of this dysfunction is caused from excessive rotations and a lack of tenure in a single role. McCrystal argued: “We’ve always celebrated and promoted generalists.” One result of this is poor training of Iraq and Afghanistan troops:
During World War II, in the first year or two, we trained something like 5,200 Americans to become fluent in Japanese, a very difficult language. In the period in Afghanistan and Iraq, I don’t think we trained one-tenth that many, even though we were there much longer. We were unwilling to make the commitment, and it wasn’t just money….
COWEN: What would you do to improve our ability to train foreign armies, which is hard, right? Very different cultures, language problems, gender issues, religion.
MCCHRYSTAL: If you look at places in history where that’s worked well, it takes cultural acuity on the part of the trainers. The idea of US special forces has always been to train teams in the language and the culture and put them in an area, have them very familiar. But we haven’t been able to stay the course very much. We move people around so much. We really don’t have a cadre of people who’ve got real experience in parts of the world that we can use. That’s what you’ve got to develop.
The British used a tremendously effective technique of just small numbers of people seeded, but they were sent for long periods of time. In the northwest provinces of India — when it was British India, now Pakistan — they used to send officers. The East India Company would bring officers in, and their tour of duty — their first tour was 10 years. After that 10-year tour, they would go home for a year, typically, and get married, and then come back. By that time, they had become completely fluent in the language and fluent in the culture.
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