The Myth of Military Agility

There’s a fair chance if you’ve served in the military, or worked in a large corporation, that at least once you’ve been sat in a meeting or briefing playing “Buzzword Bingo” in your own mind. For the uninitiated, the purpose of the ‘game’ is to predict how many current ‘buzzwords’ the briefer will use in the course of his/her presentation – it is normally directly proportional to the extent of their career ambition. ‘Buzzwords’ are words seemingly picked up at random from management / leadership books then used by senior leaders, rather like the 1990s predilection for ‘inspirational quote’ pictures on walls, to add gravitas and credibility to their pronouncements and status. They are subsequently slavishly deployed, sometimes jarringly out of context, by junior/middle ranking officers anxious to impress their masters with their fealty in the hope of securing a favourable report or, important in military circles, patronage and support up the career ladder.

One such buzzword is ‘agility’.

In many respects it’s the perfect buzzword; it is near impossible to define exactly what you mean when you deploy it. Does it mean physical agility – for example manoeuvre on the battlefield or in the air? Does it mean mental agility – the ability to switch between tasks or to think quicker than your opponent – offering a bonus buzzword opportunity for deploying “OODA Loop” as well? Perhaps it means commercial agility – enabling projects to get to contract quickly cutting through the red tape? Does it mean technological agility – the potential to develop and field battle winning tech before your opponent? The beauty of ‘agility’ is that in most contexts it can be any or many of these factors, and seldom are briefers pushed on what they exactly mean by it – normally the response is a room of sagely nodding heads from people all buying into the same concept. Group Think in action.

Why do I think that ‘agility’ is a term that militaries deploy but rarely deliver?

Firstly, militaries are inherently conservative organisations. The rate of change, especially in peacetime, is often slow. A clear example from the 20^th century is the appearance of the aircraft. The Army could see some benefit in the contraption for artillery spotting purposes but raised concerns that the machines would scare horses which, everyone knew were the most important asset on the battlefield. Moreover, learning to ride was an essential life skill for a would-be senior officer, whereas flying was seen as somewhat nouveau and outré. In Naval forces aircraft were also derided; Mitchell’s success in sinking life-expired warships (albeit not under combat conditions) hinted at the vulnerability of this established thinking. The Battleship was considered, at the time, both politically and militarily as the supreme expression of national and maritime potency, and, ergo, the upper echelons of the Navy were full of ‘gun club’ admirals. Mitchell’s vivid demonstration was swept aside by elements of both the Navy and the Army. The former anxious to keep its prestige and battlewagons and the latter fearing that ‘upstart’ aviators may start pushing to be an independent service, reducing Army budgets and influence.

Perhaps the most succinct quote when it comes to military thinking comes from the British military theorist, Sir Basil Liddell Hart, who opined;

 “The only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind is to get an old one out.”

Secondly, unlike the corporate world, where would-be executives often move between competing companies to promote up the career ladder, militaries wholly promote internally. The military career ladder is vertical, without the option for individuals to move horizontally to exploit another company’s gaps or system for a promotion. Over the decades this has led to well-trodden and established routes to the higher echelons and inculcated a risk-averse culture in large sections of the officer cadre. Risk aversion is an anathema to agility. Agility spawns both Risk and Opportunity – if officers sense the risk to their progression, they can be reluctant to grasp an opportunity. Playing it safe, sticking to accepted norms, delivering to target are what get you promoted, as is agreeing with your chain of command and the ‘wisdom’ of their decisions. Given the extended duration of some military programs, officers can invest a significant chunk of career time and capital in a project, capability or belief. Understandably, some are loathed to accept that, sometimes, programs are overtaken by world events and that a rapid change of focus and priority is required. Military personnel, therefore, can remain welded to a process that for programmatic, budgetary, political and career reasons stifles agility.

Thirdly, the military system of patronage and pathways means that at any one time the top echelons, especially in smaller services, are potentially filled with people from the same backgrounds, with the same experiences and beliefs. This can lead to unintentional “baked in” Group Think, which is not conducive to agile thinking. Patton, perhaps the epitome of the fighting maverick, and smart enough in WW1 to grasp the potential of the tank over his beloved cavalry, was always wary of this type of ossification, noting that

““If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.”

Shifting such a group is difficult. People who’ve assiduously climbed the ladder via punching tickets and avoiding risk are unlikely to suddenly become vanguards for change. The ‘system’ is prone to self-replication with ‘like promoting like’, making cultural change a slow process. For decades after its creation, the USAF was dominated by bomber generals and bomber thinking. Only the shock of the war in Vietnam, and a realisation that Tactical airpower was growing in importance, presaged a culture change. After some 3 decades of unbroken ‘Fighter Mafia’ domination, the needs of the post 9/11 campaigns for more Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR), Close Air Support, Special Operations and unmanned platforms jolted the USAF out of its fighter-centric thinking – grudgingly accepting that airpower was about more than just ‘fighters and targets’. With the growing threat posed by a resurgent, bellicose, Russia and an expansionist Chinese foreign policy, the pendulum will doubtless swing again. However, the lack of true agility (political, doctrinal, industrial and technological) invariably leaves a military well prepared to fight the last war rather than ready to contest the next.

It’s not all bad news though. Almost to acknowledge that the military realises it cannot operate in an agile manner, “Rapid Capability Offices” (RCOs) have sprung up in the Pentagon and have now been copied abroad (the UK RAF has recently established one). These RCOs and aligned Project Offices are where the ‘mavericks’ are given a budget and encouraged to take risk, without fear of censure when they fail. A quick flick through the archives of the USAF ‘Big Safari’ Project Office shows an incredible diversity of ideas and a huge number of hastily modified platforms. Some have been enormous successes, such as the Predator, Rivet Joint and MC-12 family. Others less so. But that’s the point – the ability to take risk, to kill-off bad programs before wasting too much effort and to move quickly to cover an opponent’s move without fear of career implications is exactly the stuff that ‘military agility’ is made of. In a world of seemingly inexorable technology advances, the ‘old way’ of specifying, designing, building and deploying systems in a ‘safe’ low risk way may see us defeated in a future war before we’ve even responded, especially in domains such as space and cyber. The likes of Musk, Bezos and Jobs show that agility is not only profitable, but that it is essential and even expected in the modern world.

More than ever, the military needs to stop using ‘agility’ as a buzzword and start realising that its’s increasingly a key tenet of modern conflict, changing doctrine and culture to reflect it.