When Beancounters Attack

Here is a perfect example of an organisation that is destined to fail. The internal administrative processes are now destroying the organisation's ability to do its job, and more importantly, destroying the morale of the people supposed to do the work. In any organisation that is insane, in the army that is fatal, both to the people concerned and to the institution.

The last time 1st Lt. William Rebrook IV saw his body armor, he was lying on a stretcher in Iraq, his arm shattered and covered in blood. A field medic tied a tourniquet around Rebrook's right arm to stanch the bleeding from shrapnel wounds. Soldiers yanked off his blood-soaked body armor. He never saw it again.

But last week, Rebrook was forced to pay $700 for that body armor, blown up by a roadside bomb more than a year ago. - advertisement - He was leaving the Army for good because of his injuries. He turned in his gear at his base in Fort Hood, Texas. He was informed there was no record that the body armor had been stripped from him in battle. He was told to pay nearly $700 or face not being discharged for weeks, perhaps months

There has been a lot of talk, both publicly and among some of my American colleagues, about the task that the US military has been set in Iraq. Increasingly that talk has migrated to what it will mean to "break" the army and what it will look like when it happens.

However that may play out, this story is a perfect example of why it is happening. If the management of the organisation have so utterly lost touch with its operational and human demands, its information flows have already failed, its contractual relationships are poison and its chains of command and responsibility are dysfunctional.

Going to war has simply put all of those already broken systems into the critical path.

Update: I should add that, from an Organisational Tao perspective, this outrage is just a symptom. The culture of the US Army has to have shifted to the point where this process, the loss of the body armour, the demand for payment and the receipt of that payment, the accounting for it, presumably under some code for payments for lost armour by soldiers invalided out, all of that had to be acceptable to a significant number of people.

Somebody got a promotion for coming up with a system that refused to accept that wounded soldiers and their equipment are treated with a single focus, saving the life. Nothing else matters on the battle field.

People who don't get that, at the most fundamental level of intellectual processing, are now making decisions throughout the Pentagon and the political architecture. The same quality of decision-making is being applied to all kinds of problems in the organisation. I would bet that they are being driven by political cadres like FEMA's Mike "heck of a job" Brown and "great job" Chertoff and NASA's uppity little twerp George Deutsch.

There is very little difference in Australia, where the major qualification for high office continues to be an appalling memory and being "out of the loop" in the first place.