I‘ve long felt that–after several decades of maintaining a peacetime military–Pentagon bureaucracy has become as great of a threat to our Armed Forces as terrorists or insurgents. Looking for a related reference, I stumbled upon a section of Robert Kaplan’s Imperial Grunts that I think most succinctly illustrates the inherent harm in sustaining bloated headquarters and command staffs. Speaking on the 5th Special Forces Group and their amazing successes in Afghanistan, Kaplan writes:
The relationship between 5th Group and the highest levels of Pentagon officialdom had, in those precious, historic weeks of autumn 2001, evinced the flat bureaucratic hierarchy which distinguished not only al-Qaeda but also the most innovative global corporations… The captains and team sergeants of 5th Group’s A-Teams did not communicate to the top brass through a yawning, vertical chain of command. No, they weren’t even given specific instructions. They were just told to link up with the indigs (in this case the Northern Alliance) and help them defeat the Taliban. And to figure the details out as they went along. The result was the empowerment of master sergeants to call in B-52 strikes. The 5th Special Forces Group was no longer a small part of a massive defense bureaucracy. It had become a veritable corporate spin-off, commissioned to do a specific job its very own way, in a manner of a top consultant. The upshot was that con-ops (concepts of operation) were approved orally within minutes, whereas now in Afghanistan, two years later, it took three days of paperwork, with bureaucratic layers of lieutenant colonels and other senior officers delaying operations and diluting them of risk, so when attacks on suspect compounds finally took place, they often turned up dry holes.
