TRADOC promises no Kriegspielpolizei—Some Thoughts on Bureaucratic Insurgency for Effective Counterinsurgency

Defense News alerted us today regarding a directive, from way back in August, from the US Army's Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) regarding "unauthorized games". I don't complain about the delay; I certainly hadn't noticed this either. This link takes one to the actual letter, which instructs (slightly edited here) that

the Army cannot afford Training Aids, Devices, Simulators, and Simulations (TADSS) that provide singular solutions or cannot be integrated with other TADSS in the integrated training environment. We also cannot afford to have money diverted from other programs to support procurement of non-program of record, school-unique TADSS and high licensing fees.

Defense News queried Dennis Tighe, the official who drafted the letter, about just how draconian headquarters might get. "We won’t," he usefully acknowledged, "have a TADSS Police going from post to post." Rather, TRADOC just won't be paying the bills. If a local commander wants something unique, he'll have to pay for it from his local operating account. And actually back in August, Defense News reported how Heidi Shyu, the Army's procurement chief, had a minor fit about how the 3rd Infantry Division had tried to obtain intelligence analysis software from Pallantir prior to its deployment to Iraq. The division's headquarters staff seemed to prefer that product, but the Army Department had an Officially Approved Solution.

These sentiments are easy to understand, specifically in light of pending sharp budget cuts. But they also stem generally, I think, from the strong centralizing and rationalizing tendency of the American military bureaucracy. As such, I argue that it would be indeed inadvisable to hope that local posts would actually stop seeking local solutions.

That's because, as Adam Grissom of RAND noted in his widely-read 2006 essay "The Future of Military Innovation Studies" (Journal of Strategic Studies, vol. 29 no. 5), plenty of brilliant military ideas come from "bottom-up" innovation. These are initiatives of the troops to figure out deckplate solutions to their problems without immediately involving higher echelons. He recounts a collection of historically memorable instances outlining the phenomenon: no one, for example, thought that the German 88 was an antitank gun until a rather stressed Luftwaffe battery commander had to use it that way. He then laments the general lack of attention that these processes have received by historians and policy geeks. But today, opportunity for bottom-up innovations may have improved with the development of further electronic tools of what Eric Von Hippel has called "democratic innovation" (see his book Democratizing Innovation, from MIT Press in 2005: a free PDF is available here). That is, we all have microcomputers on our desks, quite a few of us can write code, and ideas can be shared rapidly by electronic means.

An excellent example, and of relatively recent experience in the US Air Force, is that of Falconview, the desktop computer mission planning system. The story is covered well in Jon R. Lindsay's article "War upon the Map: User Innovation in American Military Software," published in 2010 in Technology and Culture (vol. 51 no. 3). Falconview's first forerunner, FPLAN, was substantially written by two USAF A-10 pilots in 1981 on a TRS-80. They had no authorization from headquarters nor any funding; they just started writing code on their own time. The next development, ODD, was written by two Utah Air National Guard F-16 pilots in the late 1980s. The subsequent release of Windows 3.0 in 1991 immensely helped: one of the officers who wrote ODD teamed up with some engineers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute to create the much more user-friendly Falconview. For several years thereafter, the tool was popular, but not universally adopted. Then in 1996, the crash of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's Air Force transport at Dubrovnik provided the needed impetus: the accident investigation board concluded that Falconview in the cockpit would have saved all thirty-five aboard. The application was taken up widely and rapidly, and thereafter significantly extended by a group of officers with good programming skills. And in a now-classic move, FalconView became an open source project in 2009.

There are absolutely bigger and costlier alternatives with more functionality, and the US Air Force and Army (amongst others) have been spending big on these for years. And I mean the Falconview and Palantir stories as no indictment of anything particular alternative. It's just that it's important to note that sometimes very solid software products and service offerings come from very small teams with very limited budgets, and that sometimes individual units should be trusted to execute ideas on their own initiative. The resource constraints often focus the attention on solving the problem at hand, and only the problem at hand. To higher headquarters that seems wasteful, but to me it just seems frugal and enterprising.

So, to industry and the troops in the field, I offer encouragement for their guerrilla marketing and development activities. Organizational insurgency is often what's required to get the job done, and perhaps more so when faced with a battlefield enemy (and not just a bureaucratic one) who's running an actual insurgency. If counterinsurgency is a war for corporals and captains, then it makes sense that Aufstragstaktik is a core idea for running the Army—it is supposed to be, is it not? I don't know how successful Palantir will prove to have been with its marketing effort, or even if it has the better product. But I do know that the Army Department and other agencies should be more tolerant of efforts to seek clever and cost-effective solutions locally. Rather than trying to suppress those, I recommend observing, learning which work best, and then publicizing those approaches as potentially school solutions. Now that would be some mission command.
James Hasik +1-512-299-1269 jhasik@jameshasik.com http://www.jameshasik.com