Abstract
This article examines the dichotomy of planning versus thinking. Examining a diverse range of historical factors, the author concludes that planning—with its comfortable certainty—has replaced the troublingly uncertain act of thinking. This trend must be addressed if the Army is to have the best chance for success in the uncertain future that lies ahead.
One Marine officer remembered walking into the Army’s big operations center at Camp Victory that spring (2004) and being appalled. He surveyed the ascending rows of desks, as in a modern movie theater, each with multiple laptops, each with an unencumbered view of several screens displaying troop locations or showing live video from Predator drone aircraft surveilling convoy routes. It was enough to give a staff officer the illusion that he knew what was going on out there.1
The past four hundred years have witnessed a growing emphasis in the military on the importance and value of ‘planning’. However, it is my opinion that this has come at the expense of ‘thinking’. In this article I will outline why I believe this has happened, speculate on the impact of the trend, and suggest what we need to do about it.2
Why Planning Grew in Importance
Planning grew in importance for modern armies due to a combination of operational and environmental factors. Operationally, the military has grown to realise that it faces conditions that are increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. At the same time, the broader environment within which the military exists has also become much more complex, particularly the relationships between the military, society, the economy and the body politic. In the past, soldiering was a relatively simple vocation. Armies were usually small, could be manoeuvred into and during a battle by a single leader, and lived off the land. During the seventeenth century things began to change.
Evolving nation-states increased their level of control over their military forces.3 Armies grew too big to be manoeuvred with ease, and they were too big when static to live off the land. Weapons and equipment became more complex and expensive, and needed increasing levels of technical support. However, even with larger armies and more modern weapons and tactics, the average failure rate for the two sides in a battle remained stubbornly at 50 per cent (except for the occasional Pyrrhic victory).
The losers rarely blamed their failure on the competence of their leaders or the bravery of their soldiers. They blamed the complexity of warfare, a mismatch of technology or the failure of those who planned and managed the campaigns. The winners attributed their success to their warrior ethos, their superb organisation and the professionalism of their leaders and planners. The losers modelled themselves on the winners. The winners believed the good press they wrote for themselves. The professional military staff system evolved, and planning grew to be the ultimate activity for the managers and leaders of armies.
If we look at some of the factors in play over the last four hundred years we can see more clearly why planning has grown to achieve such prominence.
Size. The ‘industrial’ era brought numerous problems for armies.4 As they became bigger, armies caused a range of problems for their leaders. Armies were too big for a leader to view from a single point on a battlefield—communication with dispersed force elements was vital, and that took planning. Armies became too big to be manoeuvred easily on a battlefield—coordinated tactical manoeuvre was vital, and that took planning. Armies were too big to be housed, fed and maintained in a single location—logistic support was vital, and that took planning. Large, permanent, professional militaries grew and needed to be supported through recruiting, training, equipping, accommodating and deploying—and all of these took planning.
Technology. Technology came to be viewed as a guarantor of success. If your army had better transportation, communications and weapons then, other things being equal, an enemy force would generally lose to you in battle. Technological superiority became a key goal of the industrial military. But newer, more complex technology brought with it a range of unfamiliar problems. The potential failure of technology and the huge cost of complex weapons systems was a significant limitation on strategic, operational and tactical freedom. The more expensive, complex and rare the technology became, the less willing armies were to risk losing it through enemy action, physical absence at a crucial time or technical failure. The solution was planning: planning the tactical employment of technology so that the enemy could be defeated without placing your technology at too great a risk; planning the deployment of technology so it would be where it was needed and at the right time; planning the maintenance and technical support of technology so it would not break down at the wrong time.
Firepower. Weapons have increased significantly in terms of rate and weight of fire,5 lethality, accuracy and discrimination. Lethality is obviously attractive because if your army had machine guns then an enemy force armed with spears would generally lose to you in battle. The range and accuracy of artillery has trended upwards, while the terminal effectiveness and discrimination of so-called ‘smart’ bombs and missiles have also improved. The military now has the ability to keep death and destruction at arms length. Thus firepower has become seductively attractive to both military and civilian technocrats.
Firepower ... is the approach preferred by most modern elites. Its attractiveness lies in its abstract and quantifiable nature. It removes the unpleasant need for physical contact and visible violence. The only difficulty is that massive shelling and bombing didn’t work in World War I. They didn’t work in World War II either. They failed in Indochina and Vietnam and were marginally relevant in Iraq. But technocrats tend to reject the idea of linear development. Memory is irrational. Each problem is proper unto its own argument. If someone were to point out that bombs had already been dropped in massive quantities in other places at other times and failed to have the desired effect, the technocrat-officer would simply explain that, until the moment at hand, the explosives had been wrongly used.6
Lethal, accurate and discriminating firepower, however, is expensive and not yet as commonplace as we might wish—its employment requires careful planning.
Society. Societies have become more interested in the pursuit of personal happiness than in the selfless sacrifice of life for the common good. It is hard to imagine any developed democratic society today coping with the allied casualty figures from the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916 (20 000 dead and 40 000 injured) while retaining the ability to function. People in developed societies—quite understandably—want comfort and enjoyment. Comfort and enjoyment require resources. Society’s resources, at least in the short term, are finite and limited. Therefore, the resources given to the military are precious and any suggestion of wastage is viewed with alarm. The way to avoid wasting resources is through planning.
Economy. As a nation we are forced to play the ‘economics’ game: allocating scarce resources among unlimited wants. The military, in most democratic societies, has to compete with growing wants in the areas of health care, education and social welfare. An ongoing trend is to try to squeeze more military capability out of existing (or reducing) budgets. That requires greater degrees of certainty, and planning is viewed as the way to achieve certainty. Even if you can increase the military budget, through persuading the decision-makers that an unanticipated and unplanned-for threat exists, you still need to manage the budget you are allocated. A myriad of governance measures are applied to ensure that every dollar is spent responsibly. The consumption of every scarce resource is planned judiciously to maximise value.
Body Politic. Our political leaders want to be re-elected. Successful military campaigns are viewed as enhancing the popularity of governments. Military campaigns, however, bring with them the risk of casualties and defeat. Suffering defeat and heavy casualties reduces the probability that a government will be re-elected, so losses are unacceptable. Because of this, the military is pushed to ensure that it does not lose. In the recent past we could ensure that we would not lose if we engaged in conventional (force-on-force) conflict with forces that were markedly inferior to our own in terms of equipment, numbers and training. The problem with current military operations is that they are not conventional military operations. The actions of a single terrorist or junior soldier can be broadcast in the media and have strategic consequences. Consequently, military deployments are increasingly planned to minimise risk.
The Prominence of Planning
The impact of the factors outlined above has been to elevate planning to a position where it dominates the military. Planning is (relatively) easy, quantifiable, measurable, and gives the illusion of certainty. This is because many of the elements of planning involve certainty. Many of the components of plans are knowable. Capacities, capabilities, timings in predictable (repeatable) situations—all of these are knowable and can be incorporated into plans. Plans look good and are easily explained and assessed. Success against plans can be measured. Successful planners can be rewarded. All this was understandable during the era of industrial-age armies, but that era is rapidly shrinking in our rear-view mirrors. A continuing devotion to planning is no longer a guarantee of success.
Planning, meanwhile, remains the principal tool of management. Management is very important to the military because it involves doing things right, being efficient and not wasting resources. The problem is that thinking is the tool of leadership, which involves being effective by doing the right thing. To be truly successful the military has to combine both activities, selecting the effective thing to do (through thinking) and then doing it efficiently (through planning). Problems arise when planning becomes a substitute for thinking. The prevailing mindset is that the Army has to be ‘efficient and effective’. This is completely the wrong way around. We need to be effective first before we seek efficiency. The challenge is knowing when and how to transition between planning and thinking.
The Decline of Thinking
Size, technology, firepower, society, economics and politics offer insights into why planning has grown in importance during the last four hundred years, but they do not explain why ‘thinking’ has declined. Before looking at this aspect, however, I need to define what ‘thinking’ is. Dictionary definitions are not particularly useful in informing discussion about ‘thinking’. I propose my own working definition: “thinking is the process through which we apply knowledge, skills and experience to arrive at a decision or action”. If we accept this definition7 then thinking can be viewed as the synthesis of intelligence, education and experience.
I would argue that people in the Army are intelligent, educated and experienced; they are just not as clever8 as they think they are, or are capable of being. The main tool we have for thinking is our brain, and our brains are not as good as we might believe.
Our brains are limited in many ways by inherent weaknesses built into them, and by poor habits of thinking that have developed during our lives.9 The habits of thinking that we develop are often suited to simple, short-term and stable situations.
Failure does not strike like a bolt from the blue; it develops gradually according to its own logic. As we watch individuals attempt to solve problems, we will see that complicated situations seem to elicit habits of thought that set failure in motion from the beginning. From that point, the continuing complexity of the task and the growing apprehension of failure encourage methods of decision making that make failure even more likely and then inevitable.10
The good news is that we can overcome, or at least reduce the impact of many of these limitations. The bad news is that it will take time, effort and support to do this at the levels of individuals, teams and the organisation. There is an old joke: ‘How many social workers does it take to change a light bulb? Only one...but the light bulb really has to want to change.’ For the Army to become a better thinking organisation, to become more clever, it has to want to change. Unfortunately, most people in the Army do not yet see a need for change. Persuading them that there is a need to become more clever is in itself a significant challenge.
Some of the barriers to becoming more clever involve how people regard thinking. During the past ten years I have taken part in many discussions on the subject of thinking. The following points summarise some of the ‘conceptions’ that exist, and some (intentionally) provocative responses to those conceptions.
1. Army people are already good thinkers. I have no particular issue with this statement. The key point to highlight here is: how much better could we be if we tried? Imagine that you are driving along a road. You see a speed limit sign which reads 60kph. Glancing down you see that you are only going 40kph, and you notice that your handbrake is partly on. To make yourself go faster you can push down harder on the accelerator, release the handbrake, or do both. A set of techniques for thinking are available and can be taught, learned and practised. Think of this as pushing down harder on the accelerator. At the same time, all thinking takes place within an environment that either encourages or discourages thinking. Think of this as releasing or applying the handbrake. I believe that very few people in the Army know and routinely use the techniques of thinking, while the environment is generally not supportive of thinking. We are not pushing hard enough on the accelerator, nor are we releasing the handbrake.
2. The Army supports ‘thinking’. Actually, the Army supports ‘planning’ and ‘doing’. We reward observed effort and apparent achievement—regardless of how much better the job might have been done had we really thought about it. People become skilled at defending their own ideas and attacking the ideas of others. While this might appear to be an example of the classical dialectic, it is not. Good quality thinking thrives on debate; the Army thrives on argument. Only as a last resort do we actually ‘think’, and then often badly. The problem is only partly caused by the high operational tempo and the general ‘busyness’ of our work. I believe that a major contributor to the problem is that we do not recognise the importance of thinking. The average soldier puts more time and effort in a month into maintaining or building physical fitness than he or she puts into maintaining or building mental fitness in a decade. Unless the Army encourages, recognises and rewards thinking it will always be difficult to motivate people to want to do it better.
3. Education (school and university) teaches people how to think. Actually, education teaches people how to succeed in education. Education teaches them how to study (with a heavy emphasis on what to study) to pass exams. Education teaches them how to research previous exam questions to allow them to focus their study. Education teaches them how to write essays that their assessors will grade favourably. Many educators believe that education no longer teaches people to think critically, or reflect on the experiences and information that they are exposed to. While the development of thinking skills through education might be improving, it is not there yet. Programs in critical thinking, unless supported by environments that encourage thinking, are doomed to failure. The American philosopher and educator, Mortimer Adler wrote:
The misconception that underlies the now widely prevalent educational vogue is that thinking is a skill that can be acquired in isolation from all the other skills that enable us to use our minds effectively, in the performance of which we are involved in judging, reasoning, problem-solving, arguing, and defending or rejecting conclusions.
Since that is not the case, we should not be developing programs in critical thinking to achieve the educational objective about which we all agree. Instead, we should try to be sure that students are coached in thinking in every course that is taught — taught, one hopes, by teachers who know how to think. Such coaching will, of course, pay attention to the laws or rules of thought that are taught in courses on formal logic, but it will not be regarded as effective coaching simply because students can recite the logical lessons they have learned.
In short, if all teaching required students to think about what is being taught, that by itself would suffice. Teaching that fails to do this is nothing but indoctrination. Learning that does not involve thinking is nothing but the memorization of facts not understood, resulting in the formation of mere opinions, not the possession of genuine knowledge and understanding. To turn out thoughtful citizens and learners—persons able to think well and critically in everything they do, no program of instruction in critical thinking is required.11
4. The Army has an educated workforce. In reality the Army has a workforce with a commendable quantity of academic qualifications, but lacking in the ability (or organisational will) to make the best use of those qualifications. Academic qualifications are seen as both an end in themselves (you have a Masters degree, so now you are clever) and a means to an end (you have a Masters degree, so now we will consider you more favourably for promotion). The true value of education is less about what the qualification does for the person; it should be about what the person does with the qualification. If you finish a degree, frame the certificate, hang it on your wall and get back to doing ‘military stuff’, then you have wasted the education.
5. Our leaders are good thinkers. Actually, our leaders are intelligent, vastly experienced, and very well educated. However, they are frequently lacking in higher-level decision-making and problem-solving skills and techniques. They are flawed human beings like the rest of us. Leaders can accept this reality, or they can believe in their own infallibility. Leaders are most dangerous if they believe that because they are senior to their staff, they therefore (have to) know more (or know better) than their staff. The most able leaders are those who make the best use of the collective talent they lead.
6. The committee system supports high quality decision-making in Defence. The reality is that the committee system does not support thinking. The committee ‘process’ is overly mechanistic and far too busy. Very little actual thinking goes on during committee meetings. Most of the thinking occurs before the meetings and consists of staff officers applying their organisational or individual perspectives and prejudices to try to ‘win’ for their part of the organisation. The participants in the committee meetings are often simply representing whatever argument has been sold to them in their briefing package. Good quality decision-making requires collaboration; the Defence committee system encourages competition.
My hypothesis for the reason why thinking has declined during the last four hundred years is that it has been ‘crowded out’ by the rising prominence of planning. This should be a cause for concern because, in an environment that is increasingly complex and uncertain, plans are of limited value. Only by thinking can we make sense of the issues we have to deal with. Better thinking should lead to better, more relevant plans. Planning should never be used as a substitute for thinking.
The Problem with 'Thinking' in the Army
Effective thinking requires a balance between convergent thinking, through which we seek to identify the best option, and divergent thinking, through which we seek to broaden our understanding of the problem and generate a wide range of options.
The biggest problem with thinking in the Army is a disproportionate emphasis on analysis, the tool of convergent thinking and hindsight. It is not that analysis is necessarily bad, it is just that it is the only thing we do. The American psychologist Abraham Maslow is credited with saying: ‘If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.’ Our (Western) system of education stresses analysis. Our work culture stresses analysis. Our standard approach to dealing with problems stresses analysis. It is no wonder we favour analysis as a style of thinking.
We make mistakes, analyse exactly what went wrong, and then build a better process to avoid making the same mistake again. The problem with this, however, is that experience tells us that it has not stopped us from making mistakes. While we might not make the same mistake again, dealing with an increasingly complicated process pretty much assures that we will make a new mistake soon, leading to a fresh round of analysis and ‘process improvement’. Analysis is the tool for looking backwards and finding the ‘right’ answer. For simple problems, analysis is effective and efficient. In our complex world, however, there is frequently no single ‘right’ answer.
By contrast, synthesis is the tool of divergent thinking and foresight. Synthesis helps us to explore a problem and generate the right questions. It requires us to think about what might be possible, and requires experimentation and the acceptance of risk. Synthesis is not stressed in our education or work culture, and has therefore atrophied. Yet synthesis is exactly what we need to do more frequently if we are to deal with problems that have no ‘right’ answer, and for which every attempt at imposing a solution simply stirs up further problems.
We currently put too much emphasis on telling people how they should do things (having analysed the issue to get the best answer), instead of allowing them to ‘play’ and discover how they might do things (through synthesising a new solution). I do not mean to imply that we should turn everything into a game; rather, we should try to allow scope for people to discover and try out new ideas. There are many things in the Army that absolutely must be done a certain way, such as operating weapons. However, instead of giving a new piece of equipment to soldiers and telling them exactly how, when, where and why to use it, we should consider giving the equipment to the soldiers and letting them discover how to make the most of it for themselves.
How we can Improve 'Thinking' in Army
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.
- Alvin Toffler
Even if you do not accept some of my previous points, improving the quality of thinking in the Army is still a worthwhile goal. If we are to develop the Army’s ability to think, we must deal with two aspects of thinking: education and the environment.
We must educate our people about thinking. This involves making them more aware of their limitations, and teaching them to use a range of tools and techniques to encourage more divergent thinking. Thinking techniques come from a wide variety of sources and can overcome some of the limitations we all have due to weaknesses in our brains’ construction, as well as overcoming the bad habits of thinking developed during a lifetime of exposure to education, training, social and work cultures. Training people to use these techniques is relatively easy and addresses ‘thinking’ by individuals and teams.
Army must develop an environment that supports and encourages thinking. In many ways the environment is the most important, and difficult, challenge. If we train people to use techniques that improve their thinking, but then do not support the use of those techniques within the workplace, we will fail. Changing the environment will take a long-term, consistent effort throughout the Army.
Training Command-Army is currently working to develop a ‘thinking’ approach to training. Instructors will become facilitators, coaches and mentors to students. Students will be encouraged to think more about what they are doing. If the Army is to improve its ability to think, we must all play our part by supporting the application of thinking skills and techniques. We also need to encourage, recognise and reward good thinking.
Endnotes
1 Thomas E Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, Allen Lane, Victoria, 2006, p. 330.
2 This is primarily an opinion piece, based on my interpretation of history, with the aim of identifying broad trends consistent with my argument.
3 MacGregor Knox and Williamson Murray (eds), The Dynamics of Military Revolution 1300–2050, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001, pp. 6–9.
4 John A English, Marching Through Chaos: The Descent of Armies in Theory and Practice, Praeger, Westport, 1996, pp. 17–19.
5 Martin Van Creveld, Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton, second edition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, pp. 233–34.
6 John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, Penguin Books, Ringwood, 1992, p. 203.
7 I propose this as a definition of thinking, not the definition.
8 In the context of this article, cleverness is our ability to apply our intelligence, education and experience to arrive at a decision or action.
9 See: Thomas Kidda, Don’t Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking, Prometheus Books, New York, 2006; and Gary Marcus, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, Houghton Mifflin Company, New York, 2008.
10 Dietrich Dorner, The Logic of Failure, Metropolitan Books, New York, 1996, p. 10.
11 Mortimer Adler, ‘Critical Thinking Programs: Why They Won’t Work’, <http://radicalacademy.com/adlercritthinkingpro.htm>.
