Disruption Leading to Failure is ALWAYS Concealed

Melanie at the Bump points to more of my growing number of rules of Organisational Tao; 9/11 Panel Suspected Deception by Pentagon - Allegations Brought to Inspectors General

Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon's initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog of events on that day, according to sources involved in the debate.    

Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, according to several commission sources. Staff members and some commissioners thought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable cause to believe that military and aviation officials violated the law by making false statements to Congress and to the commission, hoping to hide the bungled response to the hijackings, these sources said.

[...] "We to this day don't know why NORAD [the North American Aerospace Command] told us what they told us," said Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey Republican governor who led the commission. "It was just so far from the truth. . . . It's one of those loose ends that never got tied."

 

1. It was a novel situation, one that the Pentagon may have theorised about, but one in which the status of normality had to be redefined in ways that transformed the perspective of the organisation. The resistance to that is crushing. It does not, and it never will, happen in minutes. Had Microsoft not been a private company when Bill Gates had his epiphany about the net, the board would still be arguing about whether to change corporate focus and direction. Pentagon = MS x 10,000
2. Posse Comitatus says that the military shall not be deployed inside the US. I'd bet that is the role of the National Guard. Instant turf war. Instant conflict of decision making authority. Instant management realisation that on this moment will turn the power and credibility of the organisation for a generation. Instant paralysis.
3. ThePentagon is constructed to deal with opposing armed forces that have to be massed and prepared for action over weeks, if not months; the satellites will reveal that. So all of its processes are designed to respond in slow motion.
4. On the scale of occupied bandwidth within the Pentagon, four jets off course and one slamming into the WTC is a blip; for it to override the rest of the noise, somebody has to put their career on the line to upgrade the status of the information. The someone has to make multiple decisions, some of them life and death, in the face of sudden floods of data coming down the line from the White House and inbound from every other connected source. More paralysis
5. Organisations, especially large ones, create their own internal information worlds, often to the exclusion of information than they receive from the outside world. That would be especially true when the source is unexpected. As I've said, they are autistic by nature, and they don't deal well, if at all, with innovation and sudden change.

On September 11 2001, most of what happened inside the US government was probably predictable from any good theory of organisations. The cover-up of the failures is also expectable, especially given the rush to war in the aftermath; and that coverup continues with the complicity of the corporate media, as Melanie points out, and unlike the Globe's crippled vet story, this one, lifting the lid on a crippled war machine, was deleted from the original report and the leak is tucked away on A3 of the Washington Post.

Nothing new, nothing changes.

Update: for a fascinating look inside that system, check Vanity Fare's 9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes A sample:

NEADS is a desolate place, the sole orphan left behind after the dismantling of what was once one of the country's busiest bomber bases—Griffiss Air Force Base, in Rome, New York, which was otherwise mothballed in the mid-90s. NEADS's mission remained in place and continues today: its officers, air-traffic controllers, and air-surveillance and communications technicians—mostly American, with a handful of Canadian troops—are responsible for protecting a half-million-square-mile chunk of American airspace stretching from the East Coast to Tennessee, up through the Dakotas to the Canadian border, including Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., and Chicago.

It was into this airspace that violence descended on 9/11, and from the NEADS operations floor that what turned out to be the sum total of America's military response during those critical 100-some minutes of the attack—scrambling four armed fighter jets and one unarmed training plane—emanated.

The story of what happened in that room, and when, has never been fully told, but is arguably more important in terms of understanding America's military capabilities that day than anything happening simultaneously on Air Force One or in the Pentagon, the White House, or NORAD's impregnable headquarters, deep within Cheyenne Mountain, in Colorado. It's a story that was intentionally obscured, some members of the 9/11 commission believe, by military higher-ups and members of the Bush administration who spoke to the press, and later the commission itself, in order to downplay the extent of the confusion and miscommunication flying through the ranks of the government.

The truth, however, is all on tape.

Through the heat of the attack the wheels of what were, perhaps, some of the more modern pieces of equipment in the room—four Dictaphone multi-channel reel-to-reel tape recorders mounted on a rack in a corner of the operations floor—spun impassively, recording every radio channel, with time stamps.

The recordings are fascinating and chilling. A mix of staccato bursts of military code; urgent, overlapping voices; the tense crackle of radio traffic from fighter pilots in the air; commanders' orders piercing through a mounting din; and candid moments of emotion as the breadth of the attacks becomes clearer.

Read the rest of it and hang on to your hat, this is in fact how things operate in large, complex, top-down systems. Errors or perception, decision-making, strategy and tactics, instead of being corrected by the chains of command, propagate through the system. This is what we depend on in a world that is chaotic and discontinuous.