Strategic adaptive planning in the US military, or "a study in banging one's head against the wall"

When I was a child, I received a piano as a gift from an elderly neighbor. I was excited to begin playing, but my mother told me she wouldn't pay for lessons until I demonstrated a commitment to the piano by playing it regularly. But every time I sat down to try to play, she would tell me to stop pointlessly plinking on the piano.

This comes to mind when I reflect on the state of our military today. Many critical business processes, from strategic planning to project management, have come from the Department of Defense. However, when business adopts a military practice, it gets changed and morphed to meet business objectives, and before long becomes an iterative, adaptive process. Meanwhile, the military languishes with processes that don't adapt to new realities.

Paul Masson gave a great illustration of this issue with Col. Ed Hatch of the USAF.

A few decades ago, the US' only enemy, for the most part, was the Soviet Union. In much the same way that corporations could make twenty year strategic plans, because their markets weren't expected to change much, the military historically takes 18-24 months to develop contingency plans, which then sit on a shelf and don't change when conditions change. This made sense before the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the hands of tiny despots all over the world. After spending so much time developing contingency plans, if there was a crisis, the contingency plan wasn't implemented, but a whole new crisis plan was planned and executed, as the contingency plan was too far out of date to be useful. Not only is the process too long, but the strategic plans across governmental and military units were never coordinated, causing tremendous confusion, inefficiency and conflict. How do you manage strategic planning across 4 armed forces and a NATO alliance?

The military is addressing this problem by transitioning to what they term an Adaptive Planning and Execution System (APEX). This system would create continuous, living plans, rather than fixed contingency plans, augmented with crisis plans.

So today, a national security strategy is developed with each new administration. (This replaces the simpler defense plans of decades past.) From that is developed a national military strategy. The national military strategy needs to be translated down to 69 individual strategic plans for different sectors of the military. Sectors can be geographical, such as Europe or South America, or functional, such as transportation and joint forces, and of course, four are the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines -- who have all the money and power and ability to get things done.

It's funny, having worked exclusively in the private sector, some things that seem obvious to me are brand new concepts to the military. In talking to Paul, he was concerned about the fact that they hadn't developed risk management and disaster recovery into their strategic planning. When I told him that those aren't strategic issues, per se, but operational control issues, he said that such delineation never takes place in the military, and if it's not in the plan it's not going to get addressed. Wow. They have a long way to go. It's great that portions of the military are reaching out to the private sector, trying to figure out what they can learn, and how they can perform adaptive planning better.

But they have barriers I could never imagine. When they start to implement a new idea, and begin working through the initial plan, a defense contractor will try to get the partially developed plan, take it up the chain of command, have it decreed ineffective and incomplete, and get it shut down. Defense contractors look at outreach to the private sector as a threat to their livelihood, and will do whatever they can to either control it or kill it. Col. Hatch spoke of situations where he's had to bury a contract, so that defense contractors wouldn't find out about it. One defense contractor found out about it, and secretly bought up all the IP, so the project couldn't move forward without the defense contractor. This happens ALL the time. Whenever they identify a solution in the private sector, a defense contractor tries to shut down the innovation. While Col. Hatch likes working with private industry, who don't have skin in the game, or a vested interest in a particular solution, defense contractors are not impartial. Defense contractors think anyone in private industry DOES have skin in the game, because private industry doesn't guarantee that money is going to the defense contractor.

Efforts to modernize the military's strategic planning are continuing, but the barriers are almost unfathomably huge.

I never did get piano lessons, and my folks eventually sold the instrument -- no one had ever learned to play it. I hope things work out better for our military.