One of the saddest things in life

.

... is to see a friend join  a bureaucracy and turn from a person who meant to improve the world into a person who is defending processes that are in the way of improving the world.

I had an orientation week when I began university studies. A senior student led the orientation group and assured us that after a certain amount of studying in the field, we would adopt the way of thinking that characterizes the field. I considered the notion repulsive.

Years later, I agreed. It had changed me, it had changed how I approached issues and questions, what tools and methods I used to find solutions. It was kind of the point of doing the studies, for frankly, I forgot much if not most of the content (details) of the studying within weeks after the tests. The lasting effect wasn't about memorizing details.

Organisations and professions can suck you in, absorb you, assimilate you - and turn you into one of them. It's scary, but it depends whether it's a good thing or not. An organisation that's on the wrong track will pull those who enter it onto the wrong track. An organisation that's on a good track may make very good use of such an assimilation power.

The challenge remains to guide an organisation onto a good track (such as serving the country, not itself) before it guides YOU onto its status quo track. 

This suggests that the secret ingredient of reform may lie in keeping enough of a distance to it. A superhuman ability to resist such assimilation was hardly ever observed.

I wrote a lot about how secretaries of defence should guide the armed bureaucracy onto the path of pursuing the national interest instead of self-interest. Such ministers usually turn into champions of the armed bureaucracy's self-interest within a few weeks.

Maybe a different interaction with a lot more spacing may do the trick. We might tweak the responsibilities, tasks and authorities of the office in order to ensure that a minister of defence is considered by others (and by himself/herself) as first and foremost the nation's first critic of the armed services, not as their organisational leader. Failures and embarrassments of the armed services should not be blamed on the minister if the minister criticised them and punished the underperforming part of the bureaucracy and its chain of command. The minister should not identify as part of the armed services community, but as its worst nightmare - a nightmare that keeps it honest and pursuant of national interest rather than self-interest.

Think of it as leadership by sanctioning failure.

disregard the smile

Maybe you readers would consider it excessive, but I think the uniform dress code should include a "pink ballerina skirt" that the minister could add to the obligatory officers uniform of any part of the armed services for any duration on short notice.

I have a hunch that internal red tape could be overcome real quick if we had that.

We should move to a political culture where we would chastise a minister of defence for NOT 'upgrading' the officer dress code like that if the armed service mismanaged procurement, displayed poor readiness, wasted personnel strength on pointless activities, allowed deterioration of skills, or resisted some novelty for too long. 

That kind of political culture might be just enough to ensure that such failures would simply not happen and the skirt would remain a theoretical possibility.

Meanwhile, every minister of defence in the real world of today would consider it an embarrassment to himself or herself if officers were photographed with pink ballerina skirts over their trousers. There's no good reason for it, but that's how we roll. In the end, the fish stinks from the head, and this head is our political culture; it's in what we expect from the civilian leadership. The rot begins at a very fundamental level. Most people appear to think that a minister of defence should work for the armed services rather than for the country.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

.