[April 22, 2017] Believe it or not, one of my engineer Captains actually said that to me … once. If it’s stupid but works, it ain’t stupid, is one of the many Murphy’s Laws of Combat. While there is some morsel of truth to the “law,” I have a totally different take. Leaders should never fall for it.
There’s a recent variation and it goes something like this; If it’s stupid but works, it’s still stupid and you were lucky. That is correct and I might add that you would be very lucky. It is incumbent upon any leader not to leave important actions and issues to chance. Doing so is a recipe for disaster.
In early 2004, my engineer Captain was given the mission of building a secure Entry Control Point (also called access control point) that would allow controlled and cleared entry of civilian vehicles into our Base. The ECP had to withstand an attack with small arms and by light mortars. The guards were successful at doing just that about a week after the ECP was built. See this YouTube video of an actual ECP briefing, link here.
During my inspection of the ECP, I noted that two mortars were duds that had landed on top of the ECP building’s roof. The roof was made of corrugated galvanized-steel but only one-half the thickness required. He said the roof had worked (somehow preventing the mortar shells from going off) but in truth, we were simply lucky. If either of those shells had gone off, several U.S. soldiers would have died or been seriously injured.
Leadership means taking measures to correct problems whenever and wherever we see them. In this case, since thicker steel was unavailable, I had him add a layer of sandbags on top of the roof as an additional layer of protection. Later we would add another layer of steel on top of the sandbags in what would eventually become a U.S. military standard for protection against mortar rounds of all sizes and small rockets.
When a leader actually takes the effort to look into why something worked (or not) – and were lucky – the real reason is often exposed. At that point, an informed decision can be made. Immediate action is the key. Waiting is a bad option and should be used only as a last resort because an identified risk, not accommodated, is unacceptable.
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