[October 19, 2015] In mid-2006 Coalition Engineers in Iraq were given the mission of protecting military personnel (i.e., soft targets) from incoming missiles and mortars. The task itself was overwhelming due to the number of people the engineers had to protect. Because there had been no thought given to what this really meant or the timeframe in which to do it, the undertaking grew from protecting people to also include military equipment, supplies, and non-essential elements. We called it mission creep.
The mission for the Engineers grew well beyond what it was first conceived to do. When there is no strategy – or well developed concept of the mission – then mission creep is surely going to happen. During the early stages of the Vietnam War, for example, the U.S. was providing only a few hundred advisors. Eventually we provided over 2.5 million troops, billions of dollars, and still couldn’t achieve a strategic victory despite winning every major engagement on the battlefield.
“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” – Sun Tzu
We seem to keep relearning the old lesson that when there is no strategy, any endeavor is will do. Likewise in the Middle East, the U.S. and allies have no grand strategy on how to deal with the violence or, even whether we should be engaged at all in the region. This is where strategic development is helpful and if ideas are discussed and played out in public (as messy as it would be) then all arguments and ideas are on the table for consideration.
There’s a fitting line in an old story that goes something like this, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.”1 Do we know where we’re going in the Middle East? Many scholars and military experts tell us that there is little direction or guidance from the U.S. President’s office or from senior officials among our allies.
I’ve written about Grand Strategy before (see link here) and have made the point that without it there will be mission creep. The reason is that many good leaders will make decisions as best they can in the environment in which they operate. The sum of all these decisions diverts us away from what we should be after. Of course, since we don’t know what we’re after – except maybe the default strategy of “stability” – then all these decisions are deemed acceptable.2
The solution is direct involvement by the most senior leaders early in the decision making process and then throughout. Often leaders are not clear and what they say, and don’t say, will be interpreted in a myriad of ways. The results are often messy, chaotic, and entail unmeasured risks. Mission creep means spending resources wastefully. Oh, and the Coalition engineers in Iraq never were able to build an acceptable level of overhead protection to protect soft targets.
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- From English author Charles Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll in his famous novel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865.
- https://www.theleadermaker.com/leadership-grand-strategy-part-2/