Battlefield Lessons

With hundreds of embedded reporters providing 24-7 Real War Right Now, the world is witnessing combat that seems to owe more to Marshall McLuhan than to Julius Caesar. But while the operative word for this war is "new" -- new technology, new tactics, new threats, new challenges to the public consensus -- what we think is new is in fact just this year's version of old methods. Shock and awe? Just imagine being the first sword-bearing soldier on the receiving end of a longbow volley. The M1 tank? Truly impressive, but just the most recent refinement of the stirrup. Special Operations? Today's shadow warriors trace a historic lineage that's at least as old as the land where they now do battle. There are lessons to be learned, but they are more likely to come from Thucydides than from H.G. Wells.

The end state of national security still begins with basic building blocks: planning, training, education, and leadership. The demands of military training and the principles of leadership serve as the subjects of many texts. Less is reported of the meticulous planning that precedes training and of the education that develops leaders who are capable of adapting when plans must change. It may, in fact, be several of those practices that legitimately cross the boundaries of military and business enterprise.

"Don't forget nothing." -- Rogers' Standing Orders for Rangers, 1759

In a world that demands that they take the ultimate risks, militaries are inherently risk averse. Living with this contradiction demands meticulous, exhaustive, and mind-numbing planning. Every step, every move, every piece, every player must be worked into this giant, chaotic, deadly puzzle. That puzzle must be broken down and reassembled again and again. And just when you think you've planned it all, new circumstances arise or someone finds a discarded item in a dusty corner and says, "Hey, do you think we might need this?"

My favorite example is the logistics planner who exhausted himself and his staff by minutely planning the movement of an entire heavy Army division down to the last available pallet on the last available aircraft. He was confident in his briefing to unit leaders -- until the general fixed him with a steady gaze and said, "Dog food?" The officer had neglected to plan for the special meals required for the security dogs.

But why bother with a plan when Carl von Clausewitz -- history's most overquoted and underread Prussian -- tells us that no plan will fully survive the first shots fired in anger? Because that particular cliché is true only to a point: If you intend to ensure maximum flexibility on a rapidly shifting battlefield but fail to plan for basics such as food, fuel, and bullets, your ability to innovate will be little more than a cerebral exercise. Militaries must plan for every possible thing that they might be able to control -- from the mundane and day-to-day to the infrequent and catastrophic -- much as corporations must ensure just-in-time delivery of basic materials while also planning for long-term market trends.

Given such reliance on detailed planning, it seems fair to criticize the military for being fixed and unimaginative. Well, yes, that's fair -- if you're talking about militaries that fail. Scratch the surface of every success, and you will find a careful, thorough, meticulous plan executed by well-educated leaders who are willing and able to adapt and innovate. With such leaders, armies are capable and confident enough to stop on a dime while at a full run under fire and to move in new ways toward new objectives, regardless of the original plan.

"Education is what you have left when all the facts are gone." -- Brigadier General Daniel Kaufman, Dean, U.S. Military Academy

On the morning of September 11, 2001, a West Point cadet ran into the National Security Studies Seminar classroom shouting, "Turn on the TV!" The preplanned class topics for the day? Terrorism, nonstate actors, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The terrible visions on the screen served to reinforce, rather than contradict, the scheduled lesson. In the wake of September 11, as West Point swarmed with journalists eager to know how we planned to carry out what they assumed would be a complete rewriting of our curriculum, the story of this classroom served as the best answer to their queries. That scene was repeated on that tragic day in West Point courses ranging from philosophy to engineering. Cadets and their faculty -- mostly experienced officers educated at the world's top graduate schools -- had begun contemplating a fascinating and horrible array of what-ifs long before they became headlines.