CSAF CQ Brown’s desire to accelerate decision making in the Air Force — “accelerate or lose” — seems to not be going as well as hoped. He recently said: “More specifically, current Air Staff decision-making remains cumbersome, slow, allows ‘soft vetoes’ without accountability, and prioritizes compromise and consensus over decision quality.”
Kudos of CSAF Brown for being 100 percent on point, but implementation of his vision will be the real challenge. None of these bureaucratic problems are new, of course. DoD has long faced these problems, and here is some important insight from John C. Ries’ 1964 classic, The Management of Defense: Organization and Control of the U.S. Armed Services.
… there seems to be an inherent conflict between line and staff activities. In the first place, their functions largely overlap. The only way “doing” can be distinguished from planning is to say that doing never involves discretion. In the second place, the staff must be able to justify its existence. But when it gets involved in “doing,” the line challenges this as undermining its authority. To say that a staff does not exercise authority is a difficult proposition to defend.
If the operational officers never accept staff recommendations, staff existence is not justified. When the executive follows staff advice, the legal authority is his, but the judgment is that of the staff. As a matter of fact, this is the very justification of a staff. It is expected to influence the decisions of the executive and the organization. Hence, the staff always exercises authority in the sense of providing judgments for the executives. And when the staff creates counterparts at lower echelons, through which it enforces these judgments, it encroaches upon the authority (legal or otherwise) of lower echelon executives. Since few executives are willing to accept this amicably, the system provides built-in resistance to all new plans, regardless of their merits, for each one is accompanied by a potential threat to the prerogatives of lower echelon executives. This does not bridge the gap between policy and operations; it walls them off from one another. The myth that staffs exercise no authority, thus is necessary and serves a useful purpose. It disguises the contradiction and preserves the principle that each subordinate reports to only one superior.
Even though the general staff system frequently express the sincerest affirmations that operations must be decentralized, the forces in the system pull toward centralization.
It’s hard for me to see how real delegation would be possible without (1) cutting out significant staff functions at all levels from decisions — they can be checkers but not “approvers”; (2) going on a concerted roadshow, hammering the point in hundreds of events/meetings, and using the incentive of reward/punishment; and (3) implementing a portfolio management strategy that gets rid of APBs (acquisition program baselines) — i.e., PPBE Reform.
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