On Military Bureaucracy
Domenick Rowe Friday, 15 February 2002
Domenick Rowe speaks with Don Snider, professor at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, about professionalism.
Tell us a little about your career as an Army officer, and specifically what drove you to conduct your current research?
What I did in my military career laid the foundation for the research. I saw the Army, as I went through a 28-year military career, have higher and lower periods of professionalism. These periods ranged from being very professional—going into the Vietnam war, for example—to a quite unprofessional Army, as when we came out of the Vietnam war. It was rebuilt over the next ten to fifteen years and became the highly professional Army that participated in the Cold War, Desert Storm, and Panama. Since then I've seen it decline again, and my interest after witnessing this was: "How do armies ebb and flow in their abilities to do what they're supposed to do as professions?"
Which is?
Which is to continue to develop the expert knowledge of warfare and embed that in humans who will put it into practice. There were two research projects leading up to this third one, from which the book was published. The first one was on the current state of military culture. We finished that in 2000, publishing Military Culture in the 21st Century (Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2001). And then there was another study on the civil-military gap, a study run out of Duke University, and the publications from that are still coming out right now. I was a member of the research team in both studies. Those two studies provided the encouragement for what we at West Point decided to look at, which was the military as a profession, which hadn't been done for about 30 years.
Now, a significant theme of your research seems to be the tension between professionalism and bureaucracy, correct?
Yes, basically. It's somewhat of a distinction without a difference, in that both characteristics exist in the same organization. In the military, of course, there's the fact that it is both a hierarchical bureaucracy, but also, in the essence of what it is supposed to do for society, a profession that creates expertise in warfare.
Well, let me begin with your last comment. You assert that the present situation in the Army is one where the bureaucratic element dominates a small but vague conception of professionalism, and that this must be reversed. This reversal, you say, must be incorporated into the current transition the military is undergoing, with the end result being an Army whose professional nature dominates a small but important bureaucratic element. Could you elaborate more on the relationship between bureaucracy and profession?
Well, I think all professions have pockets of bureaucracy within them, particularly large professions like medicine, dentistry, psychiatry, etc. The key to this when you have an institution with two different characters is for the strategic leaders of the institution to determine clearly which character is dominant and why, and to make sure that the professional character is dominant, or it will tend to be conformed by its alternative. It's just not clear that there will be institutions where these two characters are in perfect balance, with those parts that should be bureaucratic being bureaucratic, and those parts that should be professional being professional.
In most of the cases we've looked at, history indicates that it takes a very concerted effort by the strategic leaders to keep large organizations that tend towards bureaucracy truly professional, which means keeping them focused on the following three areas: "Do we have the right expert knowledge, for now and five to ten years in the future?; are we developing new knowledge, prioritizing it, and is our product going to meet the client's needs?"
The second big question is, "Are we embedding that knowledge in humans who are going to go out and practice it with the client—do we have the right developmental concepts and processes to embed this expert knowledge in our professionals?" So, expert knowledge, developmental concepts, and then the third thing that you need to keep the right balance is that the strategic leaders need to constantly manage jurisdictional competition. A lot of people want to serve the client. The client gets to choose from a lot of entities, some of which may be a profession, some maybe want to be professions, and some may be non-professions. So, if a profession wants to exist over time in relationship with the client, it has to have a place to practice its work (which is what jurisdiction is) and it has to manage those jurisdictions—which is hard work; it's a very competitive environment for professions, much like businesses. That's a fact that is poorly understood by most civilians who look at the military—they think of the military as a big bureaucracy that it just lumbers along without competition from other organizations.
Speaking of expert knowledge and jurisdiction, in your book you incorporate into your thesis Andrew Abbott's notion that all professions compete in areas such as these. How similar are the other branches of our military to the Army with respect to the main thrust of your argument: professionalism?
Even though we didn't study them, I believe that what we found to be true about the Army profession is likely also be true about the other two military professions. The point I'm making here is that I think what we found in the Army would be found by a reasonable set of researchers looking at the other military professions. I think they're all dealing with roughly the same environment; they're all formed into a bureaucratic mold in roughly the same way.
On what level should a revision in the nature of the Army be linked to similar revisions in the other branches? In other words, should each branch of service approach this issue internally, or is an overall military revision more desirable?
Insightful question. My basic take is that OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] is going to make some mistakes if they treat the services too much alike, which they have been doing for the past 8-10 years. The way I describe it is that they're basically homogenizing them, and that's really ill-advised because the nature of war is that it's still fought within three significantly different domains. I don't think it's been demonstrated yet that the expert knowledge of how to execute war in those three domains is converging to the point where you can consider them all one. The fact is, I think you can make a reasonable argument that if you map the expert knowledge of the three military professions, it's in fact diverging, becoming more detailed. Land warfare as opposed to aerospace as opposed to maritime warfare are all increasingly different, given what technology allows us to do in each area.
Understandable. You focus mainly on the current state of the Army profession and its officership. How does the current state fit into the larger context of American military history, and what might we learn regarding a solution to the current problem from historical models? For instance, you mention several times that the Army underwent a revision of its bureaucratic/professional model during the post-Vietnam and Cold War era?
I teach a whole course on this—how do militaries change. There is a rather significant and consistent pattern of activities that successful innovations and adaptations have manifested. Without going into all the details, I think I can point out a couple of things that will help you understand what I am saying. Most militaries start changing seriously when there is a major change in the external security environment of the nation. The military leaders, irrespective of the political leaders, determine that this change is of such a magnitude that they have to understand and be able to execute new military tasks. An example of this is after we acquired the responsibility in the Philippines of protectorate, the Navy looked at the Pacific Ocean and said "This thing is 8,000 miles across—we don't have a ship that can get half-way across there, so we're going to have to capture islands for bases." That means our Marines were going to have to do something totally different than they've ever done in the little wars of Haiti and Guatemala. All of the sudden, the Marine Corps started this 20 year process of becoming an amphibious force. And they weren't even done by the first time they used it at Tarawa.
So there are consistent patterns; they're not all in the same sequence, but they do involve an external security environment, assessment of new missions, and the selection of internal junior elites who will advance inside the profession and develop new theories of victory, new ideas of doing this new mission. The way they overcome the bureaucratic inertia is that the senior officers have to make sure that these younger elites have a way to the top. Somehow you have to get through this 10-15 year period. Now, the way we did it in the post-Vietnam period was that the external security environment was back to Europe, and the Arab-Israeli War of '73 was the shocker that got everybody's attention. We finally learned that if you can be seen on the battlefield you can be hit, if you can be hit you can be killed. Those two tenets were fundamentally different than any other which armor warfare had ever faced.
So, for the next 15 years, the centralized command selection process for battalion and brigade commanders ingrained a group of people who understood that they had to fight the combined arms fight. And it was a training revolution, honestly, that led to the new Army—not a bunch of technology and hardware. It was a change in the way the Officer Corps thought, as well as how they practiced warfare, and then they got to doing it and they were wonderfully proficient at it. That training revolution, the National Training Center at Irwin, none of those things existed before we went through this really revolutionary period of change during the post-Vietnam period. So that's the kind of pattern of activities. There's about seven items that we've isolated, at least that I've isolated in my studies which I think are consistent items that occur in each transformation.
You mention that today the American military finds itself confronted with a different set of missions, primarily OOTW [Operations Other Than War] such as peacekeeping. What effect does the fact that our military is first a bureaucracy have upon the effectiveness of U.S. intervention in foreign affairs? In what ways would a military conceived of as a profession avoid or counteract these effects?
Well, this is a really sticky point, because it's not clear that it does. In other words, when you're using the military at very low levels of military force, they're really not practicing their profession. So, where it really hurts you is when you leave that level, of peacekeeping or whatever, and you go to fight a major war and you don't have the skills to do it. We don't know yet, because we haven't fought a major war after having done a decade of this casualty-averse, risk-management intense—what we're calling stability operations—in all different forms. Now some of the stability operations are great preparation—it's not like this is all bad. But some of it certainly isn't, and the part that clearly isn't, is the part that has to do with the behavioral patterns of the leadership. Do we want risk-averse behavior? Do we want people who are more concerned with filling out checklists and looking over their shoulders, or do we want people who are prudently audacious when they get in combat?
I think it remains to be seen whether this is a cost in our foreign policy. All we've done so far is gather empirical data, and documented very clearly that the combat arms skills of captains in particular are declining rather rapidly. Part of this is because we're short officers and we're not leaving them in positions long enough, but part of it also is due to the climate in which they're commanding, which is a very risk-averse climate.
Is there a societal element to this decreasing commitment to professionalism in the military?
Yes, there really is, and again this is another one that is very sensitive to people. It's pretty well documented in some of the literature that I read, labor market literature and the literature of what's called autonomous professionals. Autonomous professionals, young professionals particularly in the high tech community, understand that in an information-based society—and now beyond that in a knowledge-based society and economy—one's individual future is not locked into the future of any company, organization, or institution, it's locked into what one has in one's head. This leads to a different set of loyalties; it's a very individualistic and it's a very self-centered set of loyalties. Now, it's a very positive set in terms of creating a lot of knowledge, but it's private knowledge—it's your knowledge. Military professionals who serve democratic society need to have a high degree of bonding between the leaders of the profession—the Officer Corps—and the institution. The issue is that it's harder for professionals to be professionals today. Largely because of a) the autonomous professional whom I just described, and b) the monopoly this professional has on information is being eroded by the information age. You want a will? You don't have to go see a lawyer, go to a website and make your own. It may sound like a trivial example, but it really isn't. It informs an understanding that the relationship between professional and client has changed.
It's indicative of the greater problem.
Absolutely.
Another question concerning American society. It seems that American society is more wary today than they have been in the past of the military gaining more freedom to restructure and redefine itself. Do you have anything to say on the threat that current American society and popular opinion might pose to the first step of your solution, which is for the Army to garner more freedom from the Federal Government in order to undertake the revisions you believe are necessary?
No, because I don't view the required freedom to be all that great. I'm simply trying to get the military to step above some of the bureaucratic stuff that's tumbling down from Congress and the Department of Defense. Of course, they'll have to do that by openly negotiating with them; you don't just drag your feet or play bureaucratic politics. It is the case that the Army is now dealing with an immense amount of tinkering and micromanagement from the bureaucracies above them. It's good to keep in mind that above the military are two immense bureaucracies: the committee structure of Congress, and the planning-programming-budgeting (PPB) system of OSD. That's all they are, immense, resource-allocating bureaucracies. And they are absolutely unrelenting in their demand of time and energy from Army leaders, and tend to bind them into the budget cycle mold. This has nothing to do with expert knowledge, and only marginally to do with developing professionals.
So you're saying that the pressure of these two major bureaucracies hanging above the military influences it to become more like them, that is, more bureaucratic?
Oh yes, absolutely—it's just forming them into a bureaucratic mold. Because it controls all the timelines, the submissions, how everything is to be done, and of course if you don't do that you don't get any resources, and if you don't get any resources it doesn't make a difference whether you're trying to be a bureaucracy or profession or a man on the moon—you can't do it.
You mentioned the clergy earlier. Do you see the Army profession as a calling, in the same way one might view the clergy?
Yes I do.
What does this say about the declining officer retention rates, and the many military personnel who view their service as a mere transitional job, rather than a lifelong career?
Well, we'll welcome them, and then we'll happily bid adieu to them. In other words, there will be a lot of people who come into the military with no intention of staying, and that's why we have an internal labor market. Everybody comes in through the bottom and then works their way up. I'm certainly not defending that—I'd like to have more lateral entry, but, that said, we always will have a largely internal labor market. Since we are a hierarchical organization, the vast majority, about 97%, will not make it to the top, so a lot of people are going to get out. They can come in, make a good contribution, and go back to the nation as a better citizen. But those who are the true professionals who want to stay and serve and are called to it, those are the ones that I'm interested in.
In your book, you noted that a coherent value and ethics system is imperative in reviving the notion of the Army as a profession. What role, if any, should an officer's religious/spiritual convictions and beliefs play in such a system? Also, could the diversity of such beliefs, coupled with their deep influence on each individual solder's value system, prove to be an impediment to the development of a singular, professional ethic for the military?
Very good question. What I'm referring to there is the professional ethic: a consistent professional ethic and one to which the vast majority of officers can reconcile their own personal belief system. And that answers the second question. Every individual serving in a profession which has an ethic to its practice has to reconcile their own personal belief system with the ethic of the practice. If you can't reconcile them you shouldn't be there. Now, I don't think it is difficult for people of faith-based individual ethics to reconcile that with the professional ethic of the military. They both are immensely altruistic and service-based. There are many, many similarities. There are also some huge differences, but, that said, I think it is possible for the vast majority of individual officers to make that reconciliation.
Taking a specifically Christian example, there's the notion of loving one's enemy. How does a Christian officer interpret that as being a soldier whose job it is to dispense violence?
Well, some people can reconcile it and some can't. In the Christian faith there are four central views about the role of the military and the participation of Christians in that military within a democratic society. Three of these four views can be reconciled; one, the pacifist tradition, cannot. It is a non-violent, non-confrontational tradition. In its wisdom, Congress decided that the Army would not commission officers in groups or classes; every commission is administered individually. If an officer thinks that he cannot take the oath, then he's morally obligated not to take the oath. And if his faith-based religion calls for that waiver, that's what he should do in my judgment, rather than accepting the commission, entering the service, and then later becoming a rabble-rouser who will not participate in the killing that is inherent in any war... But those are points of individual prescription that have to be answered individually.