Resources

First figure out what you've got, then figure out what to do with it. Resources are a means, not an end.

Sep 13, 2024

Square Peg in a Round Hole

They were running out of air.

The oxygen tank in the service module of Apollo 13’s spacecraft had ruptured. Apollo 13 would not land on the moon. NASA’s only goal now was to get the three astronauts on board home alive. With the service module unusable because of lack of oxygen, and the command module being shut down to save power, the three astronauts moved into the tiny Lunar Module (the LM “Lem”), which was only designed for two men for two days. NASA had to figure out how to make it work for three men for four days.

They had enough oxygen, but with three men in the tiny LM instead of the two for which it was designed, carbon dioxide began to build up quickly. Both the LM and the command module had CO2 filters, but they were not compatible, and there was no way to connect them. The team at NASA had only hours before the astronauts died from CO2 poisoning.

This scene is captured brilliantly in the movie Apollo 13.

Watch the clip here:

It was a miracle that the team at NASA was able to Macgyver a solution to this deadly problem in a matter of hours. There are many lessons about leadership and teamwork that can be gleaned by studying the Apollo 13 mission, but here I am going to focus on something rather novel: resource constraints.

The first thing the NASA team did was gather their available resources; they found everything that was available on the spacecraft and then started to engineer a solution. They didn’t come up with an abstract plan and then build a list of resource requirements. Why? Because if their planned apparatus required an unavailable resource, they would have had to go back to the drawing board, start over, and make a new list of resource requirements. If they had followed this process, they never would have been able to deliver the specs to the astronauts in time.

But organizations, especially in the military, often do the opposite when planning. They begin with a plan in the abstract and then determine what resources are required to accomplish the task. While there are practical reasons for this, it often leads to problems. For example, if a required resource is unavailable then the unit has to adjust their plan significantly or start over with a completely new plan. While forecasting resources is an absolute necessity, developing a plan that is reliant on a certain number or type of resources is not.

To make plans more robust, there are often times when commanders can gather required resources first, and then make a plan based on what is available.

Planning Ahead

As a company commander, I was exceptionally lazy. I have always hated having to do the same work twice and I hate forcing undo work on subordinates. So, when I sat down to plan a training progression, I gathered resources first and then developed a plan.

For example, when I was planning my squad Situational Training Exercise (STX), I didn’t start planning until I had reserved the training area and got the ammunition locked in. I also requested aviation support without any plans about how to use them. This seemed obvious to me, but other commanders often did the opposite. One company wanted an urban-style training area for their squad STX, and the commander briefed the battalion commander on their detailed plan for training in an urban environment. They also requested a lot of smoke grenades because you need a lot of them for urban combat. (We’ll revisit the smoke grenade issue in the next section).

But it turned out that the training area that they wanted to use had already been reserved and was unavailable. In fact, all of the urban training sites had been reserved and the company commander had to start from square one. To make matters worse, the battalion was handed a task from higher headquarters that required a significant amount of manpower, and because the company that had planned to use the urban training area did not have a plan for their STX locked in, they were selected for the task during the time that they had planned to conduct their STX. Now their calendar was out of sync and they would have to postpone their training.

As an aside, when I was preparing to take company command, other company commanders told me that one of their biggest frustrations was that their training would often be canceled or postponed because of competing requirements from higher headquarters. But one commander had figured out that the standing division policy was that once aviation assets were locked-in it took the division commander’s approval to cancel them. This was to ensure that aviation assets were protected from last-minute changes which can screw up their required training and maintenance schedule, which is incredibly expensive. By requesting aviation assets for training, a commander could protect his planned training—no one was willing to go to a 2-star general to explain why they were canceling requested aviation assets.

So, when I planned training for my company, the first thing I did was request aviation assets—even if I didn’t yet have a specific plan for how I was going to use them.

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Junkyard Wars

To be clear, I am not saying just request random resources and then work with the random stuff you get. Obviously, you must have some idea of what you need before you start requesting stuff. This is especially true when you have a large variety of available resources. If you want to do a rifle marksmanship range, it doesn’t do you much good to request anti-tank rockets.

Nowhere is this more apparent than on the old show Junkyard Wars. On the show, two teams would build an apparatus comprised of parts from a giant junkyard full of scrap. They would then compete to see who could best complete a task. For example, in one episode, teams had to build a tractor to pull a heavy sled across loose dirt. The team that could pull the farthest in a set amount of time would be the winner.

The show layout was extremely formulaic. Each team made a loose sketch of the apparatus they wanted to build and then scoured a giant junkyard looking for the required materials. Once they gathered their materials they would start building. Inevitably a problem would arise and team members would return to the junkyard to look for new parts. They would be up against the clock to get their apparatus built, and they always finished just in time.

The number of available parts was seemingly endless, so they had to be focused when searching for what they needed. But they also needed to be flexible. If a team made a design that was overly prescriptive and specific, they ran the risk of not finding the exact pieces of equipment that they needed. Most teams that did well seemed to have a loose idea of what they were going to build and then found parts that would do the job.

The lesson from Junkyard Wars as it pertains to resource requirements is simple: have a loose idea of what you want to do, determine the minimum requirements you need to do it, and then focus on getting the resources you need. Once you have the resources you need then you can begin detailed planning and work on putting the pieces together.

Remember, the danger you are trying to avoid is planning in too much detail too early and then being too specific in requesting resources. This was the trap that the company commander in the section above fell into. He wanted a specific type of training, in a specific area, which required a specific resource (smoke grenades). But because that training area was unavailable, the smoke grenades (which had already been requested) were no longer necessary. It was relatively easy to scale back the number of smoke grenades that they needed, but this brings up a number of ethical issues surrounding resource requirements.

Ends and Means

Are resources a means to achieve a certain end, or are they a means in and of themselves? The obvious answer is that they are a means to an end. But for some strange reason, many organizations treat resources as an end, in and of themselves.

It is unethical to treat resources as an end, rather than as a means.

If we look at how resources were distributed during the Afghan war, we can see how foolhardy it was to treat resources as ends. Progress in key areas of the war effort was measured by the amount of money spent! Here are some quotes from one of the many reports from the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR):

“I’d talk to infantry commanders and ask what they need, and they’d say, ‘Turn this money off. We’re having to look for people and projects to spend money on.”
“In too many cases, the amount of money spent became the main metric for success.”
“MONEY SPENT, NOT IMPACT ACHIEVED, BECAME THE PRIMARY METRIC OF SUCCESS: Another result of the broken feedback loop was that budgeting decisions were often not made based on program effectiveness. A USAID official told SIGAR that congressional earmarks and directives have had little to do with the quality of programming. “It can go either way: you can have a bad evaluation and end up having more money for an activity, or else you can have a good evaluation and end up with less money for the activity,” the official said.”
“Perversely, because it was the easiest thing to monitor, the amount of money spent by a program often became the most important measure of success. A USAID official told SIGAR, “The Hill was always asking, ‘Did you spend the money?’ . . . I didn’t hear many questions about what the effects were.” Pressure to do more, spend more, and make quick progress also came from senior agency leadership. Program budgets were dramatically expanded, despite objections from USAID officials who argued that such large sums would prove ineffective and wasteful.”
“The strategy reviews in Washington and Kabul tended to imply that there was little to be done about the escalations in the mission’s scope, as they were necessary to address rapidly deteriorating security. Instead, the pliable variable was resources, which could be quickly increased in an effort to align the ends and means. Indeed, with the necessary political will, the U.S. government could and did obligate significant sums of money in a very short period of time. As one senior USAID official told SIGAR, “The strategy was ‘money expended equals success’.”
“The United States prioritized tangible projects on which money could be spent and success claimed more quickly, over less tangible types of programming with the potential to be more enduring, such as capacity building.”
“The extreme pressure to demonstrate progress, generally measured by money spent, resulted in shortcuts by the United States and its contractors.”