It only took seven tries (and countless wasted hours), but I finally caught a flight out. This time it was on a Blackhawk -- it had been years since I'd been on one, and I forgot the rush you get from lifting off quickly, the ground only about 6 ft from your face, the "whup-whup" sound of the rotors, and the hot wind hitting you through the open windows. We flew over blue-green water, and it really did remind me of that scene from Apocalypse Now, where the Air Cavalry flies over Da Nang Beach with Wagner playing in the background. "I love the smell of napalm in the morning!" Quick 45 min flight and we touched down.
I'm on another sector visit, this time to the provinces of Dhi Qar and Muthanna, which are sort of in the center of our area of operations. This belt has been fairly quiet in terms of violence, but there have been attacks that flared up recently and a few days ago a soldier was killed in an IED attack during a routine route patrol not far from here. The patrol had elements of the Iraqi security forces mixed in, which is our marching orders as we increase the force drawdown and try to legitimize the Iraqi police and Army who we have been training for the past few years. I can't relate the details, but apparently someone in the Iraqi police element snitched, leading to the patrol being targeted. Things like this make it very frustrating to hear dissatisfaction from both people who want us to stay around and those that want us to leave. For those of you that may think that the military is gung-ho and wants to stick around, I wish you could spend some time here. The planning around responsibly pulling out is not at all haphazard and consumes the waking hours of a lot of people here, whether in terms of what do we do with all our bases and equipment and hazardous materials, to what happens to the civil capacity building projects we leave behind, to probably the most important -- setting up the Iraqi security forces to enforce and defend the rule of law and defeat the insurgency.
Everyone wants to get out of here, but the military leadership has decided that we are not going to just run and leave even if that would be the easy thing. Trying to give up control of how we believe things should be done is probably the toughest thing to do. Even if we have a perfect plan, part of this working is that the plan must be bought in by the Iraqi leaders. Even better, it needs to come from them. That's our primary mission right now, is to be advisors and try not to step in unless asked. It sure is frustrating though.
On this trip, I am spending more time visiting the provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs) and civil affairs troops to get a rounder perspective on how the civil capacity building mission is going and whether we are organized the right way for the Army and the civilians to work together. This is, as we'd say in business school, "soft, squishy stuff", but it's very important and there are lessons to be learned that we can implement to improve. At least I hope so, because I'm spending a lot of time talking to people about it.
I'll give you an example. The PRT teams typically are about 10 people, consisting mostly of subject matter experts, some project managers, and a couple bilingual bicultural advisors. They don't have admin and logistical support, security, or the resources to move around the sector to do their mission. Yet, they administer and "take the lead" for as much as $100M in projects. So, they depend on the Army to partner with them and provide these services. A common sentiment heard from the PRTs are, "We need help from you." In response, the Army sent them what's called a Movement Support Element (MSE). These are about 8-10 soldiers who act as a staff for them and provide logistical support. At one PRT that I met with today, the PRT leaders kept 2 of the 8 soldiers they got and "fired" the other 6. This action certainly must confuse leaders on the Army side who are now scratching their heads saying, "You said you wanted help and now you say you don't want it. What gives??" Instead of just scratching this up to personality or culture conflict, it's helpful to look deeper. The reason the PRT didn't want the MSE was because what they got didn't match what they needed. The MSE, while good in theory, actually was a non-cohesive group of individual soldiers thrown together, without a leader, clear mission, equipment, and worst of all, few specialist skills. So, the PRT had to spend a lot of time explaining to them what to do, only to start losing some of them a few months later. The management overhead was too much of a headache.
So, the simple lesson here is that someone really needed to sit down and spend time with the PRTs to understand where there gap was and then put together a solution that was didn't have a lot of management drag, yet really freed up the PRT principles to focus on doing what they do best -- get the Iraqi leadership to come up with their own ideas and then turn them into feasible projects.
There are lots of other stories around managing expectations... an extreme one being the civilian woman who showed up to her first patrol wearing a skirt and heels, a more minor, but common one being civilian's lack of understanding why the military needs so much information so far in advance. So, another recommendation I am making is to require an inbrief for both soldiers who will be working with civilians and also for civilian PRT members who are coming to work with the Army. The content would be drawn from the experience of what both sides have said most surprised them or what they wish they knew coming in. There is no silver bullet, but I think common understanding of roles and expectations and clarity in a common goal really makes a difference, and where we help is recommending what mechanisms are good tools to make that happen.
I never really had an organizational design background or did much of org change projects, but now I wish I did. It's not rocket science, but after this, I don't think I'll necessarily take lightly some of those challenges.
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