Daniel Starr: Terrorists' Secret Weapon Against Us: Bureaucracy

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April 07, 2005

Terrorists' Secret Weapon Against Us: Bureaucracy

Fred Kaplan in Slate is justifiably outraged at just how completely sluggish and unserious the Defense Department has been about getting more Arabic-speaking linguists for the war on terror. How sluggish has DoD been?

In the three and a half years after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, the United States built a massive arsenal, equipped an equally massive fighting force, and declared victory in a worldwide war over imperial Japan and Nazi Germany.
[...]

Now, three and a half years after Islamic fundamentalists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Department of Defense is three months away from publishing an official "instruction" providing "guidance for language program management."

That's right, three and a half years after 9/11, the Pentagon folk have a plan to make a plan to get more Arabic speakers. They could have taken 10,000 Army soldiers and taught them Arabic from scratch by now. Instead, we have -- not even a plan -- a plan to make a plan to get more Arabic speakers.

How does this happen?

One of the two reasons is the absence of leadership from the top -- that would be Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld: the same man who let us go into Iraq without a backup plan in case we weren't greeted with flowers (argh). But the other reason is bureaucracy.

The Pentagon is an enormous organization. And the bigger the organization, the slower it generally is to do anything new or unfamiliar.

What Fred Kaplan might have added, when he pointed to America's quick reaction to Pearl Harbor, is that back then the Department of Defense had one headquarters staffer for every hundred it has today. One-hundredth the staff -- and a hundred times as nimble.

Incidentally, the CIA has the same problem. Fred Kaplan actually mocked the Iraq intelligence commision's conclusion that the CIA's internal bureaucracy was a major reason for bad intelligence on Iraq, but it happens to be true: if you deliberately designed an organization to suppress rapid development of original thinking, it would look a lot like the modern CIA.

But that's a rant for another day.

Posted by danielstarr at April 7, 2005 11:50 PM

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Daniel Starr

April 07, 2005

Terrorists' Secret Weapon Against Us: Bureaucracy

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