Carter Rips "Four-Star Bureaucrats"

The problems at Walter Reed not only show Army surgeon general Kevin Kiley a small-minded, buck-passing jerk, Phil Carter notes, in a dynamite new essay for Slate. (Kiley, now back in charge of the center, was living across the street from some of Walter Reed's worst buildings. And "to this day, Kiley lives in a state of denial, calling the reporting on Walter Reed 'one-sided.'") The center's problems "also illustrate just how bad the Army has gotten at passing information—particularly negative information—up and down its chain of command," Carter observes.

*Typically, subordinate units submit reports on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis to their headquarters. At each level of command, these reports get filtered, collated, combined, and resynthesized. Like the children's game of telephone, the message frequently changes in transmission. The result can be a terribly distorted picture of reality at the higher echelons of command. *

*In Iraq, where I advised the Iraqi police, I saw this reverse filtration system (whereby excrement is added to the final product, instead of being removed) in action. Reports on police readiness were aggregated, generalized, and stripped of their facts as they moved up the chain of command. In one report, I included an anecdote about an
Iraqi police colonel picking his nose to show his displeasure with a new U.S. reporting system for police readiness, a detail I thought illustrated the depth of Iraqi contempt for U.S. bureaucracy. This detail squeaked through, but I earned a sharp reprimand for including it, and I learned to keep such facts out of future reports. By the time our reports reached the national level, they contained little of the detail so essential for explaining our progress in standing up the
Iraqi police force. This problem exists in many military organizations.
Major problems get renamed "obstacles," or "challenges," or some other noun that connotes a temporary delay in forward progress, reflecting the pervasive "can do" optimism of the military officer corps. Staff officers at each level of command refine and insert caveats into reports to ensure they don't rock the boat too much. By the time information reaches a senior commander or civilian official, it no longer reflects reality. *

*Military bureaucracies (and their civilian brethren like the
Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management
Agency) also do a terrible job of reacting to crises. Large bureaucracies like the Army provide a systematic, uniform, mediocre response to chronic problems. But where time is of the essence, bureaucracies often fail spectacularly. On the *NewsHour With Jim Lehrer last week, Kiley tried to deflect blame by calling the mess at Walter Reed "a very large, complex process,"
which required a nuanced approach to bureaucratic, medical, and contractual problems. But such a bureaucratic response misses the point when the bureaucracy itself is the enemy, as it is for the soldiers in
Building 18. Bureaucracies evolve into micro-societies over time and become incapable of evaluating fundamental problems within their own ranks. Instead of receiving negative information and fixing the root problem, bureaucracies find and apply incrementalist solutions that fit their existing way of doing business. In MBA-jargon, bureaucracies rarely think or act "outside of the box." Whether the context is the Vietnam War, the Iraq war, Hurricane Katrina, or the current mess at Walter Reed, the problem is the same. Only decisive leadership
—picture Gen. George Patton with his revolver, shooting a jackass to clear a bridge so his convoy can pass—can overcome bureaucratic inertia to fix the problem.

Carter's solution is sensible, and direct: Hold generals accountable, are fire them if they screw up big.

Today's
decision to sack Maj. Gen. George Weightman, Walter Reed's commanding officer, affirms the principle of command responsibility, thought to be a dead letter after the Abu Ghraib scandals. But this termination is only a first step. Every commander between Army Secretary Francis Harvey and the wounded soldiers being treated at Walter Reed bears some blame.

The Army would send a powerful message if it reviewed everyone's performance to determine whether any others were derelict. Lt. Gen.
Kiley, Maj. Gen. Weightman, and their staffs may run the best medical facility in the world, but they failed as commanders, and they must be held accountable. Instead of tinkering with its bureaucracy and creating panels to study the problem, the warrior-leaders in the Army should simply step up to fix this mess. The men and women at Walter
Reed have sacrificed so much for us; we owe them nothing less in return.