“It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.”
~ Machiavelli, The Prince

This column is about why the things I’ve been complaining about in the last several columns (such as our soldiers’ preposterous loads) are unlikely to get better.

But first, a story, a true story as it happens, and, better still, a personal one:

Some people thought there were stars in my future. I had my doubts, but some people seemed to think it likely. Not everyone was like my uncle who predicted, when I was three or so, that I’d either end up on the faculty of the War College or hang in an elevator shaft at Leavenworth.¹

There came a day, early 1988, I was on my second company command, of three,² and I was shooting the crap with the brigade commander in his office. Though I’d started my military career with considerable ambition, I’d been ambivalent about stars for some time by then. Still, it was a very amorphous thing. I couldn’t have told you why I was losing interest. I’m not even sure I understood that I was. Eventually, I realized that my brigade commander (Annapolis, oddly enough) was trying to mentor me into stars. “You need to do this, Tom, then you need to do that. Then you need to…”

And it all came clear, an epiphany, a blinding flash of the obvious, and I said, “Sir, I don’t want to be a general.”

“Wha… what… WHAT!?”

Yeah, it was kind of news to me, too.

Anyway, I stood up, walked across the office to his LCE tree,³ and took his kevlar helmet in my hands, brim (they had brims, back then) facing away… “Sir, do you remember General Meyer?” I asked.

“Shy Meyer? Chief of Staff of the Army Meyer?”

“Yes, sir, him.”

“Sure.”

“Sir, Meyer was a reformer. He had a bag full of good ideas for improving the Army. I counted 37 once, about half and half trivial and important. I may have missed some.”

“Yes, so?”

Then I turned the helmet around to point at him the two silly bits of glow in the dark tape on the camouflage band around the helmet. “Sir, of all that, of all Meyer’s reforms, this is all that’s left. Everything else is gone. In a matter of a few years – it’s only been a few years since he retired – it’s as if he never existed.”

“You know, you’re right.”

“Yes, sir, I know. So what, sir, would be the point of becoming a general, if — even if I rose to be Chief of Staff of the Army, which would never happen — I could not possibly have a good and lasting effect?”

That, by the way, with a little input from Mohammad (PBUH), is in good part why I eventually ended up turning to writing. Just because my ambition for personal advancement foundered on the shoals of realism doesn’t mean I stopped caring.

“It’s a jungle out there.”
~ Rodney Dangerfield

Rodney didn’t know the half of it.

Let me describe for you la jungla; the jungle, the real, deep, dark, triple-canopy, perpetually dusky except when darker than three feet up a well digger’s butt at midnight, rain-drenched, monkey-howling, homicidal vampire mosquito blood-draining, ant highway-building, black palm-stabbing, scorpion-crawling, skin fungus-breeding and, last but by no means least, chigger-infested jungle.⁴

Almost nothing grows at ground level but big tree trunks. After all, no sun to speak of gets through except where people have carved roads, or carved out slash and burn plots to farm.

Almost all the nutrients are up in the trees, rather than in the soil, which is the other reason people have to slash and burn. The rain is immense and the sun is intense.

Overhead, the branches intertwine, in layers – up to three of them, hence the name, “triple canopy” – to keep all the sun for themselves. Each of the trees had formed every other tree adjoining it, limiting its shape and scope, even as those adjoining trees limit its.

You want to change the jungle? Go ahead, cut a tree down at the base. Alas, it doesn’t fall; all those intertwined branches keep it in place for quite a while. Okay, send your engineers into the trees; cut those intertwining branches; use a piece of heavy equipment to pull a tree down.

What happens then? A new tree grows into the old spot, very quickly. The other trees will also fill in the gap a bit. But they do so more or less evenly and the new tree grows into the same basic shape as the old. Then the branches start intertwining. In a short time – short as time is measured in the eternal jungle – you couldn’t tell that anything ever changed at all.

If you want to change the jungle, you must raze the jungle or poison it over a broad area. And even then, the objective conditions – rain, sun and soil, plus seeds in the ground – pretty much guarantee that a new jungle will grow to replace the old one, eventually, even as a new tree, almost indistinguishable from its predecessor, grew to replace the one you cut down.

A bureaucracy is a jungle.

An army is largely a bureaucracy, as is a navy, marine corps, or air force. As is a department or ministry of defense (or defence), that oversees them.

And that is why reform fails. Chop the base from a section of bureaucracy. Yep, the other sections it deals with will hold it up for quite a while. It might even grow new roots because no tree is as resilient as a bureaucracy. Look at it more carefully and see where it’s being held up. Cut those intertwining branches first and then cut it off at the base and haul it down. The other bureaucratic departments just expand to fill the gap and, since they do so imperfectly, a new bureaucracy, almost indistinguishable for the old, grows in the place of the one you (think you) got rid of. Even, then, though, no bureaucratic capability, if that’s quite the right term, has gone away. Neither has the expense.

And even if you razed it completely, did away with the whole Department of Defense and all the branches, and then tried to rebuild it in some better form, the environmental factors – mission, money, personnel, the country’s whole ethos and world view, politicians and press, to name a few – all would work together just like seeds, sun, soil and rain (and not obviously any more intelligently than those, either) to recreate exactly what you thought you got rid of. Eventually.

Although since worldly permanence is an illusion, or more likely a delusion, the time between now and eventually can be quite valuable. So… anybody have a large quantity of bureaucratic and departmental herbicide?

__________

¹ Imagine my relief when I got orders to Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania and realized I would not, after all, have to hang. Oh, yeah, it’s true, the hangings were done in elevator shafts.

² At 371 mo-fos, counting me and the sergeant major but not the colonel, this company was nearly a battalion in itself. With attachments I used to go over 400. It was a lot of fun, actually.

³ Just about all commanders have these, a homemade framework of 2x4s to hang your sweaty helmet and your wet, stinking load bearing equipment on to a) dry out, and b) be easy to get to, to put on.

⁴ The Army is trying to pretend that it’s resurrected the Jungle School in Hawaii. It’s preposterous nonsense.

^{Tom Kratman is a retired infantry lieutenant colonel, recovering attorney, and science fiction and military fiction writer. His latest novel, The Rods and the Axe, is available from Amazon.com for $9.99 for the Kindle version, or $25 for the hardback. A political refugee and defector from the People’s Republic of Massachusetts, he makes his home in Blacksburg, Virginia. He holds the non-exclusive military and foreign affairs portfolio for EveryJoe. Tom’s books can be ordered through baen.com.}