Learning under Fire: The US Military, Dissent and Organizational Learning Post-9/11

In one of the exchanges during a town-hall-style meeting, Specialist Thomas Wilson complained that he and his comrades were rooting through Kuwaiti junkyards to find improvised armor for their military vehicles to protect against bomb blasts and small-arms attacks. "A lot of us are getting ready to move north relatively soon . . . Our vehicles are not armored. We're digging pieces of rusted scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass that's already been shot up . . . picking the best out of this scrap to put on our vehicles to take into combat. We do not have proper . . . vehicles to carry with us north." [Secretary of Defense] Rumsfeld replied: "As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They're not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time."

Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was absolutely correct in his assessment of the basic physics of building, training, and fielding a combat force for war. But his exchange with Specialist Wilson is most-telling; it captures the fundamental dilemma of any military during an inter-war period - are you preparing to fight the next war, or the last war? It also begs the question: How - and how well - did the U.S. military adapt over the course of the war to become "the Army [we] wish to have?"

After September 11th, the U.S. went to war with exactly the military it wanted; it planned to fight the war based on that military's strengths.  The U.S. military that crossed the Kuwait-Iraq border in March of 2003 was the product of the past three decades of evolution, validated and accelerated by the unprecedented success of Operation Desert Storm.  It was a military optimized to bring to bear all of the strengths of high-tech, advanced maneuver warfare that the American military establishment had mastered without equal.  The equipment was state of the art and beyond, the training was the most-advanced in the world, the doctrine was the most mature and integrated it has ever been, and the Soldiers, Airmen, Marines, and Sailors the most capable in the U.S.'s history.   Less than two years after the rapid overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the march to Baghdad was the fastest and farthest any military had ever conquered in the history of military operations.

However, the second half of Secretary Rumsfeld's response is critical - "or wish to have at a later time."  The U.S. and Coalition quickly found itself in an unconventional war almost entirely unlike what it had prepared for and mastered.  The world's most advanced battle tank was not designed nor were the crews trained to repel "boarders" -  Fedayeen irregular fighters swarming the armored columns.  The world's most advanced intelligence and surveillance systems could find a single enemy tank from hundreds or thousands of miles away, but could not determine if the ambulance racing up the street was filled with injured Iraqis or insurgents strapped with hundreds of pounds of explosives. Humvees that could cover hundreds of miles of open desert could not withstand even the most crudely designed roadside bombs.  And almost without exception, the world's most capable infantryman had almost no training or experience in administering a small town in the aftermath of the collapse of the local and national government.

The transformation of the nature of the war in Iraq echoed the necessary transformation of America's understanding of its enduring threat.  No longer a purely conventional threat, the U.S. military came to understand that the enduring mission included significant and sustained counterinsurgency operations.  So, while the story of Afghanistan and Iraq is a complex, multi-faceted drama at the national and international policy level, it is also the story of how the U.S. military undertook one of the most comprehensive retooling of a force while in the midst of an active war since the German Army in 1917.

This retooling on the fly, as it were, is a remarkable institutional accomplishment. Specifically, it took the convergence of two distinct, but interconnected dynamics to force the US military to rapidly adapt to its new reality:  a proactive cadre of junior leadership working hard to solve immediate problems that the institutional military had failed to foresee or adequately address in a timely manner; coupled with a cadre of senior institutional dissidents who shared the same critique of the institution drawn from their own observations and the echoes of the junior cadre's complaints.  Neither one of these dynamics was sufficient itself to force lasting institutional change at the most basic cultural levels - it took activism from both ends of the leadership spectrum to force the middle to change.  In other words, both dynamics were necessary, but neither was sufficient.  The result is a fundamentally reshaped military, particularly the ground forces of the Army and Marines, that is widely credited with making a critical contribution, at the very least, to the improvement of the security situation in Iraq since 2007.

This story may also hint at some key principles for any organization that strives to be a self-learning organization during times of great internal and external stress.  The two active ingredients that overcame institutional inertia, a proactive and empowered junior cadre and a dissident senior cadre, were the happy coincident of leader development and institutional culture colliding with dire requirements born of war.  That the military enjoyed this dual phenomenon at exactly the time and place it was needed was as much an accident as a deliberate result of its institutional design for leader development institutional self-learning. 

So if the premise that either dynamic is necessary but not sufficient is accepted, the question on the table is: can an organization systemically nurture these cadres without causing dysfunctional disruptions?  And since a degree of cultural and procedural consistency, inertia, and measured change is critical for any large organization to sustain over time, can an organization create the processes to identify when the need for change is so great that it crosses the threshold for action?

The following pages start with a brief description of how the military entered the long war post 9-11 and its posture to conduct counterinsurgency operations.  After initial successes in Iraq and Afghanistan, cracks and gaps in capability started to show, followed by ad hoc fixes, and then the institutionalization of those changes as lessons gathered became lessons learned.  The second section draws from these experiences some of the basic dynamics of leader development and enabling organizational change and offers considerations for fostering that self-learning dynamic into the future.

For the military, organizational success does not rest on mastering the basics of a current war, but on doing so while being prepared for the next war.  But the basic truism holds that, no matter how well prepared a military is, the next war will be different than imagined; change on the fly will always be necessary.  If this is so, organizational success must also include nurturing and protecting the critical ingredients for institutional change under duress.

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