If your business model requires you to force people to do something they don’t want to do, you are doomed. - From a seminar I attended

When we debate the virtues of the free market vs. governmental enterprises we should really emphasize the cooperative aspects of the free market more than we do.

This is a blinding flash of the obvious to some of the folks reading this, but it wasn’t obvious to me until very recently. Judging by the arguments I hear or read conservatives make it is not obvious to at least some other folks.

For all of my adult life I have been involved in getting groups of people to work together towards common goals. First as an infantry officer in the Army and most recently as a project manager and process improvement consultant in the information technology field.

I have made some observations about my experience:

Coercion is sometimes necessary, but it is hard to accomplish, unpleasant to do, inefficient and very often unsuccessful. But it really appeals to some folks.

Cooperation often looks inefficient and disorganized, takes patience to create and maintain, but if you can get it, it works really, really well. And cooperation appeals to a lot more people than coercion.

A lot of people who talk about cooperation, really mean coercion.

For cooperation to be effective it does not require everybody to take part; just enough people to get the job done, or make a profit, or support a volunteer fire company, or a museum etc.

I was trying to work this into something coherent but, as usual, the wisdom of my innate laziness allowed me to wait until I found someone who could state things better than I could. Take a look at this:

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/245810/i-market-economy-jonah-goldberg

To which I will add these thoughts:

• Conservatives tend to emphasize the freedom and competition of the free market. Those concepts resonate with us. But, I have noticed that a lot, perhaps the majority, of people, really don’t like confrontation. When we say competition they hear confrontation. And, I have noticed, a lot of people really are scared of freedom. We say freedom and they hear: “alone”. And they are not cowards, idiots or wanna-be serfs. If you have ever been really alone, in the middle of nowhere or even a dangerous somewhere, you probably have had the same feeling. Everybody makes puppy noises sometime.

• Cooperation is pretty appealing to everyone. The most independent and type A among us call it teamwork, or “making a deal” or maybe “being neighborly”. But, as the Jonah Goldberg article and the Leonard Read article he cited point out, they are talking about cooperation. This cooperation can reach such scale and complexity that is beyond the ability of most organizations to intentionally design it.

My conclusion is that when we are talking about how to best organize ourselves to meet our needs and solve our problems we should emphasize the superior cooperative aspects of the free market as much or more than the need to preserve our freedom and the benefits of competition.

Whenever someone says “We need to do something!” and proposes a giant new federal program to do it. We should say: “We should do something and we think it is better to rely on cooperation rather than coercian” and point to some real life examples of how the big government programs like the one proposed have been costly, coercive and ineffective in contrast to cooperative enterprises, whether for profit or non-profit.

A quick example. When Hilary Clinton put together her health care proposal back in the 90’s, one of the most effective arguments against it was when someone did a count of all the times the bill provided for jail time, fines, loss of licenses or other coercive mechanisms. That is all a lot of people needed to hear. Yeah universal “free” health care sounds great until people understood the unavoidable coercive nature of any such program. The Obam team avoided that problem by selling us a “pig in a poke” when they rushed the bill into law without ever producing an authoritative record of the bill before the vote.

However, in most other cases that isn’t possible. And our constant argument should be (in most cases) “cooperation not coercion”.

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Although I have been registered with Redstate for over three years, I don’t normally post here because I am afflicted with nigh terminal cases of laziness and procrastination; and I have a great regard for Steven Pressfield’s admonition that “no one wants to read your s***”.”

This time I have come across something so egregious and so little remarked elsewhere that I will at least give a howl to the wind about it.

In my previous life; one of my jobs was to teach leadership and tactics to students at the US Army Ranger School.  In this course students are placed in a simulated combat scenario, given a mission to complete and then graded on their units actions to carry out the mission.  In a platoon size scenario, there are several graded positions.  If the student makes one or more major mistakes they fail the mission.  If they fail too many missions they don’t pass the phase and are either dropped from the course or recycled through that particular phase or through the whole course.  

None of these are fun, and in some cases failing the course can be a career threatening event.  Mindful that the Army needs Ranger School graduates, and that a failed student is a loss in training resources, and trying to be fair, the instructors try (even if former Ranger students don’t believe it) to be judicious when assigning a “No-Go” to a student. But, occasionally something would happen (or not happen) that was so bad, so utterly unacceptable, that instructors would fail the entire chain of command for a patrol.  This was a serious event.  The battalion commander for that Phase of Ranger School would have to be informed and the entire instructor chain of command would be involved in a review of the reasoning behind the grade and the facts of the case.  It was not a casual action.

I thought of that when I read a Washington Post article dated December 6, that described the process of creating the new Afghanistan strategy.  In it, there was this account:

In June, McChrystal noted, he had arrived in Afghanistan and set about fulfilling his assignment. His lean face, hovering on the screen at the end of the table, was replaced by a mission statement on a slide: “Defeat the Taliban. Secure the Population.”

“Is that really what you think your mission is?” one of those in the Situation Room asked.

On the face of it, it was impossible — the Taliban were part of the fabric of the Pashtun belt of southern Afghanistan, culturally if not ideologically supported by a significant part of the population. “We don’t need to do that,” Gates said, according to a participant. “That’s an open-ended, forever commitment.”

But that was precisely his mission, McChrystal responded, and it was enshrined in the Strategic Implementation Plan — the execution orders for the March strategy, written by the NSC staff.

“I wouldn’t say there was quite a ‘whoa’ moment,” a senior defense official said of the reaction around the table. “It was just sort of a recognition that, ‘Duh, that’s what, in effect, the commander understands he’s been told to do.’ Everybody said, ‘He’s right.’ “

It seems that for 6 months (March – Oct) the Operational Commander (GEN McCrystal) had one understanding of the mission he had been given and the Sec Def and Nat Security Advisor and Commander in Chief had a completely different understanding of the mission. 6 Months!

This is not trivial stuff.  Everything starts with the mission. Unless the mission is correctly understood by all involved, there is no chance of a successful outcome, barring a fortunate accident.  It is like pulling out of your driveway and driving your car for a couple hours before someone tells you what your destination is. By that time you may not be able to get there from here.  Except that in this case you are not driving your car, you are leading tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians in a life or death enterprise that will have a major impact for good or ill on dozens of countries.

Think about it this way.  What if President Roosevelt, via GEN Marshall, had given this directive prior to D-Day:

“Hey Eisenhower, Take half a million guys, Go swan around in Europe for 6 months, start sometime in June, let us know how it goes, we’ll get back to you after the holidays.”

Not good, right?

That is why this is the type of thing that would earn a “Chain of Command No-Go” for Ranger students and indeed, it is something that the military expects young soldiers two years out of high school to be able to master before before becoming Corporals or Sergeants, let alone Generals.  Leaders are expected to communicate the unit’s mission to their troops clearly and to take steps such as brief-backs of their subordinates and informal sampling of the unit to make sure that everyone understands it.

I am shocked and worried that something like this could happen.  I hope that the Washington Post account is wrong.  I hope that it some sort of face saving spin, or a clever ploy of some kind.  Heck, I hope it is the cover story for some grand nefarious alien plan to usurp control of the National Command Authority.  At least then I would know that someone had a clue!

What scares me even more is that the general tone of the article is that this is a “good” thing!  You know, we finally found that pesky fuze that caused the warning light to come on.  Now, she runs like a top! Again, I hope this is just spin, but I fear it is not.

Now, understand that I do not blame President Obama or GEN McChrystal.  As the article points out, McChrystal had written orders signed by the National Security Advisor (and presumably reviewed by everyone in the chain of command) telling him what his mission was.  He was correct.  And while I am not a fan of  President Obama, and he is ultimately responsible as Commander in Chief, I do not expect him to be a master of the military command and staff process.

That is what all the Generals and Secretaries and Advisors are supposed to do.  The fact that they didn’t, tells me that something is seriously wrong.  And fixing that is President Obama’s responsibility and it is the responsibility of the relevant oversight committees in Congress.

The rest of us should watch and see if it happens.