One common complaint about defense acquisition is that the services won’t coordinate their needs and consider the bigger, “joint” picture. Certainly there is something to that. The services organize, train, and equip the forces provided to the Combatant Commanders who must make them all work together.
However, the narrow-focus of parochialism is simply a reality of our bounded rationality. A parochial view is one that is highly informed about one area of concern but limited in strategic vision of others. That is good and natural. It is up to defense leadership to carefully weigh the parochial evidence brought before them and make the necessary tradeoffs.
With that, here’s Rickover defending parochialism in the excellent book, The Rickover Effect. In the early 1950s as Rickover was trying to get the first nuclear submarine constructed he tied up a large portion of the nation’s high-temperature stainless steel. The Air Force wanted him to release some supply to make fighter aircraft available for the Korean War. Rickover responds to the request presented by his subordinate Lou Roddis:
Roddis, you want me to take a statesmanlike position, to rise above my parochial viewpoint, to consider the good of the nation as a whole, and perhaps the good of all humanity, is that it? Well, I’m not going to do it. You’re not in a position to judge just how urgent or important their need really is. Neither am I. What I do know is that I have been ordered by the president of the United States to have a ship ready to go to sea by January 1955, and I intend to do my damnedest to make that happen.
If the president and the secretary of defense, who have responsibilities for both programs, ask me to back off, I will. But all we know at the moment is that some staffer thinks it would be easier to get the stainless steel from me than to do what I did and go out and find it. Well, he’s going to find it’s easier for him to get a shovel and dig it out of the ground than to get it from me.
Great article