Here’s an excerpt from Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 6, Command and Control:
As with decision making, we should decentralize execution planning to the lowest possible levels so that those who must execute have the freedom to develop their own plans. A plan should dictate a subordinate’s actions only to the minimum degree essential to provide necessary coordination unattainable any other way. Ideally, rather than dictating a subordinate’s actions, a good plan should actually create opportunities for the subordinate to act with initiative.
Without question, planning is an important and valuable part of command and control. However, we must guard against overcontrol and mechanical thinking. A properly framed commander’s intent and effective commander’s planning guidance create plans which foster the environment for subordinate commanders to exercise initiative to create tempo while allowing for flexibility within execution of operations. The object of planning is to provide options for the commander to face the future with confidence. The measure of a good plan is not whether it transpires as designed but whether it facilitates effective action in the face of unforeseen events.
While complexity theories have penetrated the philosophy of military operations, attempts to translate the ideas into acquisition policy have been few. Like combat, the development and deployment of technologies is an inherently uncertain and nonlinear process. Central direction by one or a small set of individual minds cannot generate the enormous complexity required for constant progress, or adapt to changing environments.
Here are researchers C.K. Biebracher, G. Nicolis, and P. Schuster summarized the viewpoint in an interesting paper:
The maintenance of organization in nature is not—and cannot be—achieved by central management; order can only be maintained by self-organization. Self-organizing systems allow adaptation to the prevailing environment… We want to point out the superiority of self-organizing systems over conventional human technology which carefully avoids complexity and hierarchically manages nearly all technical processes.
Certainly, DoD’s acquisition governance under PPBE is 100 percent designed to avoid complexity and mission command, as recognized by the excellent Christopher Paparone:
The central idea of Cartesian scientific (or technical) rationality is that objectivity can be verified and that positive knowledge can be determined empirically (hence the concept of “positivism”). The Newtonian-based assumptions behind DOD strategic planning include a belief that predicting pathways to achieving goals will bring finality to solving problems.
PPBE and its associated processes (based in the “logical positivism” that underpins operations research and systems analysis) have become manifestations of a cultural ideology of strategic planning in DOD. This ideology reflects an unquestioned belief in the merit of applying numeric values, or metrics, to cause-and-effect relationships that can be isolated, predicted, and tested in ways that can be reproduced.
… In this light, the unchallenged, top-down framing associated with the PPB in PPBE can create “psychic prisons,” in which organizational power is configured to suppress differences and increase hierarchical dependency rather than to accept variations in professional opinions as part of a collaborative process of cumulative decision making.
Do you want a defense organization that can react quickly, make complex decisions, and accelerate weapons technologies? It is impossible in the PPBE framework, because PPBE is the highest expression of central planning and the reductionist view of science. It explicitly stamps out self-organizing, emergent, and complex behavior.
Traditional management practices based on mission command concepts are the alternative — the paradigm that served the United States well through the 1960s. This is summarized well for acquisition in the concept of portfolio management.
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