1.2: A Stryker Dies in Diyala
It was a few months later on that same deployment to Diyala when the cost of the Regiment’s culture of PowerPoint came due. The bill was one of their Strykers. One of the local battalions out of Alaska was clearing an area south of Baqubah, past where planted rockets had been spotted.1 By 2008 the military had learned to start any operation of this scale with a dedicated clearance of the route in, followed by keeping persistent overhead eyes on the route back out. After the engineers proofed the infil, and the infantry passed through to begin their search, the regiments’ ISR platoon took over.2 They started looping their small Shadow drone along the dirt road to watch for any suspicious activity.
Typically, this is a very dull task for ISR managers. But today, a couple hours into the search, a Specialist spotted someone moving suspiciously closer and closer to the road.3 The operator zoomed in and even managed to catch the insurgent fidgeting with something alongside the edge. So, the soldier set about quickly doing what he’d been trained to do: building the PowerPoint slide about the event to send up to the higher headquarters. As anyone who’s ever had to fill out one of these sorts of slides knows, they tend to have lots of ancillary details. Your higher headquarters will also kick it back for any infraction, to include nit-noid things like using the wrong shade of blue on a route. The soldier was diligently working on his slide about an hour later when a Stryker drove by the spot on the road. On his screen the road exploded in smoke and silence.
By the grace of God, no one was seriously injured or killed. But the Stryker was a total loss. I learned about the incident later at one of the Regiment’s daily meetings. Everyone was quick to blame the Specialist for failing to act, but he was just doing what he’d been trained to do. The culture of every echelon of his command was to make PowerPoint slides, to fill in templates, and report higher. The culture was not ‘Who else needs to know this? How can we get it to all of them as fast as possible?’. The culture did not treat information as data.
It was an expensive lesson that could have been learned cheap. Instead, it was missed, chalked up to another funny story about an otherwise innocent young soldier. The leadership could have built a culture of information sharing, where the data takes precedence over style. One where the question of ‘which format?’ isn’t about what looks pretty, but what moves fastest and flattest.
The principal problem was the Regiment’s leadership weren’t interested in flat information flows. I learned this first hand when the Iraqi Army launched a division-sized clearance of Diyala that summer.4 The operation had five Iraqi battalions with ANGLICO teams, plus the Alaskan Regiment with their Stryker battalions, and a half dozen Iraqi and US SOF partners all surging around the province.5 Partly in an effort to de-conflict operations, and mostly in an attempt to avoid fratricide, I started compiling a SITREP by reaching out to about two dozen other captains across all the coalition forces for their daily updates. Each night I sent all those captains back the latest front-line traces as well as a brief of the last 24 / next 24 for each unit.6 Or I did until one of the Regiment’s senior colonels found out and called my boss, livid that information was flowing out without coming into the Regiment command first.
Higher commands still need to amass information. As Dr. Jack Watling astutely highlights in a recent podcast, units on the edge still need higher’s ability to combine the local pictures into a complete mosaic. However, the answer isn’t to stovepipe the information up to command, but to get flatter and faster, to enable all the units to edit and see a combined picture. Entering information into PowerPoint slides slows this process down.
There’s a chicken and the egg sort of problem in this, one that was clear in the responses to 0.3 Death to PowerPoint. Is the problem with PowerPoint or with the leadership? I argue the two feed each other. Data illiterate commanders ask for PowerPoint because they aren’t comfortable with working with raw data and new systems. This forces their staffs to use the wrong tool for the job, further discouraging the uptake of data in exchange for PowerPoint butcher shops that slow down the flow of information.
Only the commander and senior leaders can break the cycle. This is why I argued the Army needs to start assessing data literacy at CAP.7 I’m not alone. Last December, Dr. Joanne Lo, SOCPAC’s CTO, put out a call for a ‘Digital ACFT’ as she proposed the need for SOF to relook what sorts of skills ‘operators’ need for the future fight.8,9
The problem is, as my old boss used to put it, ‘the hog will never slaughter itself’. Looking back fifteen years later, it’s hard not to be disappointed how little progress has been made in making these changes. As we left Diyala in 2009, I was given my first chance to lead the change, as commander of an SF detachment.
Intelligence, surveillance, & reconnaissance. Technically that’s anything that can sense anything, but the Army usually uses it for ‘drone’.
Counter-intuitively, Specialist is a very low rank in the Army. A good Specialist does what they are told to do. A bad Specialist does exactly what they are told to do.
The operation was named ‘Operation Glad Tidings of Benevolence’. No, seriously, that was its name.
Air Naval Gunfire Liaison Company (ANGLICO) are small air support teams from the United States Marine Corps. They operate well forward to help coordinate air support. Ostensibly they also can get you naval gunfire, but I’ve never been deployed with them anywhere near the ocean to test this.
The position of the most forward element in a military maneuver.
Command Assessment Program. An assessment run in the fall where the Army evaluates the next generation of the Command Select List leaders among its Lieutenant Colonels, Colonels, and Sergeants Major.
Special Operations Command - Pacific. The Theater Special Operations Command (TSOC) dedicated to the Indo-Pacific region.
Mmm this vignette paints the speed limitations of PowerPoint in a viscerally clear picture. Anyone who has dealt with the need to disseminate information widely and quickly via PowerPoint has felt the tension between the clock and the formatting approvals process. Another clear and concise post. Looking back, what system or process would you recommend for disseminating that ISR data? Aside from a more simple template, is there a program or system you would’ve preferred this information be sent out over? What about your front line trace coordination example: is there a coalition-wide system that existed that this info could’ve been displayed on more automatically than having to compile a SITREP that you would’ve recommended?