| When I first went to Afghanistan in 2008, I was probably the most hated soldier by coalition troops in the whole country. All I was tasked to do was sit in rooms and tents with a moleskin and my little Japanese ball pen workhorse, writing down stuff while coalition commanders were talking about plans, hyping each other up and bragging about who had more tactical success than their counterparts. Nobody knew who I was or what I did in their strategic meetings. I just sat there, no eye contact, no yeah or mehs, no comments, no interruptions. Whenever they were done with the meeting, I got up, thanked them for their time, wished them a good day and went outside to sit down somewhere else, thinking some more, and then I went to work. Back in the day, the coalition had a problem with having too many hammers but not a lot of scalpels. For a hammer, after a while, everything starts looking like a nail, and with air superiority, the hammering went fast and hit hard. So it was a quick way to make a name for themselves and collect medals and a pay raise. Most of the time, those tactical decisions resulted in short and long-term strategic failure. For example, it was easy to kill a Taliban commander with an airstrike, but the result was that the twenty or so commanders he had overseen and kept in check went on a spree of violence against locals and coalition troops alike in pursuit of the succession of their predecessor. So someone very smart in the upper echelons of the coalition decided to implement the tenth man rule. It basically said if nine men look at the same information and arrive at the exact same conclusion, it is the duty of the tenth man to disagree. No matter how improbable it may seem, the tenth man has to start digging with the assumption that the other nine are wrong. 8/10 times, I did find those short or long-term strategic errors in the planned tactical operations, and whenever I did, everyone who was with me in the room that day had to prove why I am wrong and their approach is right. 9/10 times they couldn’t. You can imagine those people all have giant egos and do not like it if someone outsmarts them, so they got rid of me by the end of 2009. Officially, I was pulled to sit in more boring rooms with boring people. Inofficially, I was told by a General that commanders were about to revolt because I was undermining their morale and they would often question themselves and their planning, instead of acting quickly and decisively, which would slow down their "efficiency" and the efficiency of the campaign. When you look at the timeline this article showcases and think about that the inner circle of the President got replaced by yes men and a Secretary that wants a more deadly and less "woke" force that simply does what the Commander-in-Chief tells them without thinking for themselves, I wonder if the current situation the US has maneuvered itself into is because of the complete absence of soldiers that do what I did 18 years ago. Outsourcing the strategic thinking process to a technology that is wrong 35% of the time by design is maybe the biggest strategic long-term failure the US military ever did. I see why this is necessary because replacing competent minds with loyalists above else makes this a viable approach. Dumbing down the US Military and every position that has access to the President that could intervene stupidity looks less and less like an unintended consequence of the Secretary’s "rebuilding" of the military and more like an intended goal. In my humble opinion, this doesn’t serve the American people nor the good men and women that serve their country and whose life is relying on people taking the time and effort to dig in with the assumption that everyone in the room, including a President, is wrong. I’m retired, so all I can do now is point my fingers at idiots and tell you guys, look at this idiot and what he is doing. But I no longer have access to rooms where big decisions are made and rely on your ability to make good decisions who you give the power to annihilate whole continents and whom not just like the rest of the normal people out there. We live in interesting times. |
(If nine of us) "look at the same information and arrive at the exact same conclusion, it’s the duty of the tenth man to disagree. No matter how improbable it may seem, the tenth man has to start digging on the assumption that the other nine are wrong." [1]
[1] https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/world-war-z-transcript/...