If you are short on time, scroll down to the section called “Nature of the Environment” and just read that—it will only take about 2 minutes. Please come back and read the rest later.
Chem Lights
When I took over as the new platoon leader for 1st Platoon, Fox Company, 51st Infantry Regiment, the platoon was preparing to transition from conducting operations in the urban environment of the city of Kandahar to conducting operations in the rural districts of the province. Having just come from a platoon that had operated in a rural area, I was well-schooled in the nuances of warfighting in the Afghan countryside.
I knew from experience that the most important drill we needed to master was the react-to-IED drill. I knew how it needed to be done, and I wanted to make sure that this platoon knew what to do if we hit an IED. I took them out to a big open area inside the FOB and told them to drive in circles. I had them drive in circles for about 10 minutes until I got on the radio and said, “lead vehicle has hit an IED and has not radio communication.” As I suspected, the second vehicle in the convoy immediately pulled around to the front of the vehicle to maintain security, while the third vehicle pulled around to the side to cover the area where the platoon was most likely to take small arms fire. They then dismounted their troops and formed a 360 degree perimeter while the platoon sergeant moved to assess the damaged vehicle. It was exactly what the manual said they should do and exactly how they had executed this drill in the city.
Once they were complete, I had the platoon gather around me and I said, “You will never do that again.”
They all looked very confused, they thought they had done fine.
I continued, “The fighters out in the country never put out just one IED. They always put out multiple ones, and they want us to move our vehicles around and hit more.”
One of my NCOs piped up and said, “Sir, that’s not what doctrine says!” I looked him dead in the eyes and said, “doctrine will get you killed, sergeant.” I then looked at the group and said,
“here’s what we’re going to do: all soldiers are going to carry at least one red chem light and one green chem light on their chest in their kit. If one of you hits an IED you are going to lose your radios and everyone in the vehicle is going to be concussed. Whoever is conscious will assess the situation. If everyone is basically okay and there is no need for immediate assistance, grab a few green chem lights and throw them out one by one. This will signal to the other vehicles that everything is okay. We will go slowly and sweep the area for IEDs as we work our way up to you. If people in the vehicle are really hurt, throw out red chem lights. The vehicle directly behind the struck vehicle will pull up directly behind the struck vehicle and simply hop from his vehicle to the struck vehicle and do an assessment. The other vehicles will clear an HLZ for a MEDEVAC helicopter. Any questions?”
No questions were asked.
“Good.” I said, “Let’s practice it.”
And so we did.
SOPs
I am hesitant to call my chem light solution a Standard Operating Procedure (SOPs). I never thought of it that way, I didn’t call it that, and neither did anyone else. It was just the way we were going to do things. We rehearsed it multiple times, I covered it in every patrol brief, and we added red and green chem lights to our list of pre-combat checks which was written down…in the Tactical SOP (TACSOP) that was handed to us from the squadron. The squadron-dictated precombat checks and other SOPs were made at Fort Bliss, before the squadron arrived in Afghanistan. The squadron had never been to Afghanistan and the contents of the TACSOP were based on what the unit had learned in training and in previous deployments Iraq. They didn’t know about the chem light system because they had never needed it, and so there was no requirement to carry chem lights.
During that deployment to Afghanistan, the platoons and squads of the brigade quickly learned from trial and error how to operate in the unique environments Afghanistan. The platoon that I had just taken over had very effective SOPs for doing raids in urban environments, but they hadn’t had any experience operating in the rural districts. Their Standard Operating Procedures were no longer standard, they were deadly. The same would have been true for a unit coming out of the rural districts trying to operate in the city.
In this essay, I am going to explore the idea of SOPs and propose some criteria about when to create them and how I think leaders in the Army should approach them.
Conditions
During the Global War on Terror, army units constantly moved in and out of theater. Whenever one unit replaced another unit it was called a Relief In Place (RIP). We use the same word to describe individual replacements in garrison or deployment—when one commander replaces another commander, we call their handover process a RIP. During the individual RIP, the outgoing commander hands over everything he knows to the incoming commander. This generally includes the Standard Operating Procedures for the unit, including the Tactical Standard Operating Procedures, or TACSOP.
I have seen many TACSOPs during my time in the Army. In fact, almost without exception, every unit I have been in has been in the process of re-writing its TACSOP. I have not yet been to a unit where the TACSOP has been around for a decade and everyone knows it and uses it. I am sure there are some units like this, I’ve just not seen them. Even now while I am serving on a division staff, the pre-existing TACSOP was scrapped and has been in the process of revision for the past 8 months or so. The new TACSOP is a dramatic improvement over the 600-page monstrosity that came before it. As a division staff, we have been making steady improvements since I arrived (not because I arrived).
I recently sat down with a former member of the division staff, and we began talking about how the unit was doing. We quickly found out that the way the staff functioned just two years ago is completely different from how it functions now. I explained to him that we got rid of the old TACSOP and our planning process could not be more different than the one he described. He was annoyed if not furious. He blurted out, “But you guys don’t understand! We were such a good staff! We excelled at every single wargame without exception! Why are you guys going and changing everything?”
I get his point. It’s frustrating when something that you worked so hard to create in an organization gets changed by an incoming group. This is especially true if that organization begins to decline. Why couldn’t they just do what you did by following the same playbook, the same processes, and maintaining the systems that you built? “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” After all, isn’t that the purpose of an SOP? To maintain continuity in the organization across time?
But if that were true, why is it that SOPs never seem to be followed or are always being changed or updated?
The answer is simple: organizations are not comprised of processes and procedures, they are comprised of people.
The rate of personnel turnover has an incredible impact on the staying power of SOPs. The nature of the operating environment also has a significant impact on the useful of an SOP. In organizations with low personnel turnover that operate in stable or semi-stable environments, SOPs can be highly effective.
Keep these two conditions in mind as we move forward through this essay:
Rate of turnover
Nature of the environment in terms of complexity
Turnover
Most military organizations have extremely high turnover rates, especially at the top. Commanders are replaced about every two years and NCOs are constantly moving in and out to become drill sergeants or recruiters, or to pursue other assignments. This constant churn of personnel means that the way that most military units function is heavily dependent upon the personality of the commander. One commander might like long meetings with few trusted attendants where they deep-dive into one or two topics. Those entrusted to attend this meeting do not want to lose that trust, so they will hoard information to take to the meeting, so they never look like they don’t know what’s going on, and then withhold from others what was said in the meeting. This tilts the organization in one direction.
But the next commander might like short meetings with large groups that go over a lot of topics in little detail. She might like others to sort out the details and then just get desk-side briefs on individual topics directly from people that are working on the projects. This might create a more open environment where people are sharing and collaborating. That will tilt the organization in another direction.
Now it may sound like the second commander is superior, and if we go along with the bumper-sticker style leadership advice that floats around we might think this is the way to go. But here’s the problem. What happens when the second commander takes over a functioning organization, where people are used to doing business the first way? The people and processes all have to change. SOPs that were geared to the personality of one commander now have to be revised to meet the wants, needs, and desires of the new commander.
And of course, the constant churn of commanders means that as soon as the organization gets used to doing things one way, a new commander will come in and do it again. This problem is compounded when you realize that everyone else in the organization is also coming and going all the time.
So, it’s no surprise that no one seems to know what the TACSOP says.
And yet we harp on constantly about the supposed importance of SOPs. And we dedicate hundreds of man-hours writing them and changing them. But what are we to do? Get rid of SOPs?
Nature of the Environment
I have a lot of issues with McChrystal’s book Team of Teams, a topic I am sure I will cover in another newsletter, but he argues correctly that different environments call for different organizational structures. He uses Fredrick Winslow Taylor as an example of someone who excelled in organizing workers for optimal performance in very static environments, like making steel. Under “Taylorism,” each worker had a set of steps that they had to follow in precise order, and each worker had one role to play in a larger process. This made things highly efficient.
But, McChrystal argues, the world has changed so much that this kind of top-down organizational structure with rote processes is no longer applicable in our world that is dominated by Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity, known as VUCA. As an aside, I hate the term “VUCA” and I think McChrystal’s thesis about the “changing nature of the world” is totally wrong, but again, that’s for another time.
The point here is that rigid SOPs, like all standard ways of doing things, don’t do so well when the environment is constantly changing. The best example here is the battle drill “react to contact.” Every ROTC cadet and basic trainee learns this battle drill. It is very simple. When the enemy shoots at you, one team suppresses the enemy with a high rate of fire while the other team runs to outflank the enemy. It sounds great and it can be great. Cadet Caroe excelled at this in ROTC. 2LT Caroe excelled at this at Ranger School. 1LT Caroe excelled at this as a platoon training at Fort Bliss.
But, dear reader, no sh*t there I was in Maiwand, Afghanistan on a dismounted patrol taking machine gun fire from an enemy 600 meters away. And before we could even try to move to the flank, those little bastards jumped on motorcycles and drove away before we even got close to them. The “react to contact” battle drill works great in the woods when the enemy is 50 yards away, but it don’t work so good fighting insurgents. Not to mention the fact that trying to flank was way too dangerous because those sneaky f*ckers would put IEDs all over the place hoping that we would try to flank them.
So, 1LT Caroe quickly discovered that firing back at insurgents with 60mm mortars in direct fire mode is waaaaay better than trying to follow the battle drill.
No one told me that, I just had to figure it out.
Fast forward to company commander CPT Caroe leading his company on a movement to contact training mission at Fort Carson. CPT Caroe had learned in combat that mortars are kinda awesome and that he should use them every chance he got. So during the training mission, when one of his platoons had the enemy in its grasp and was about to assault to wipe them out, he stopped the attack and said, “let’s call for mortar fire!” Well, that took about 10 minutes and, not surprisingly, the enemy got away. I snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
Oops.
The point here is that in war things tend to change—the terrain and weather change, the people change, and the enemy adapts their tactics. In this type of environment, rigid standards and processes can hamper you more than they can help. We’re not making steel in the Army, we’re making it rain steel.
But Not So Fast
In highly dynamic environments, you have to be really selective about what things are going to have SOPs.
Some things still need to be standardized. I once heard a lecture on Youtube by General Perkins who was talking about why we have standardization. During the talk he said, paraphrasing, “Yes, people need to take individual initiative, but we can’t wait around for every individual soldier to self-actualize and determine the best way for them as an individual to call for artillery fire.” This is a good point. But let’s hold up a procedure like call-for-fire against our two necessary conditions for a standard to be effective: personnel turnover and the complexity of the context.
It doesn’t matter who you are in the Army, you’re going to call for fire the same way. I don’t think there has been any change in the way that we call for fire since I was a wee lad cadet. Personnel turnover doesn’t matter in this context. This is how everyone in the whole Army does this one specific thing no matter where you go.
And the way you call for fire doesn’t really depend on the complexity of the environment. You can call for fire on a static defensive position in eastern Europe the same way you call for fire on mobile insurgents in the Hindu Kush. The observer gathers the relevant data and relays it to his headquarters. That headquarters processes the data and send it to the guns to prosecute the target. This is Taylorism at its finest. It doesn’t matter how complex the battlefield is, the procedure itself is very narrowly focused on doing one thing regardless of the complexity of the wider environment.
Turnover agnostic? Check. Low complexity context? check. Make an SOP.
RIP
We began this essay by talking about RIPs and how they tend to focus on handing over the systems and processes of the unit, which are either ruthlessly discarded or zealously held onto by the incoming commander. But when I was a company commander, I didn’t really have that many systems and processes in place, it all just, kind of, happened. Just like when in my Ranger School story in Focus Part 2 , I was just doing things that felt natural—I never did anything because that was the way it was “supposed to be done.” For example, (if you want some real heresy) I never had a regular training meeting. That’s just between you and me, though, okay? They might go back and fire me retroactively if they find out I never held a training meeting. For my civilian audience, a company commander not having a training meeting is a level of treason equal to having stormed the Capital on January 6th.
But I digress, during my RIP with the captain who was replacing me, what exactly was I handing over? We didn’t have systems and processes that could be codified. We just did stuff and did it really, really well. The best thing I could do was guide him in how to use the company. After the change of command inventories were done (which were done way ahead of schedule) we still had almost two weeks before the incoming captain was supposed to take over as the commander.
So, instead of just having him watch me sit in my office doing commander things all day for two weeks, I said, “why don’t you just take over now and I’ll just sit around and help you solve problems as they come up?” This is not how this is typically done, and the incoming commander was a little hesitant, but I convinced him. “Look,” I said, “the decisions that have to be made now are going to impact you weeks and months down the road. It’s a total waste for me to make these decisions for you.” He acquiesced.
Everyone was a little uncomfortable at first. Platoon leaders would come in to ask me a question and I’d point to the incoming commander and say, “ask him.” They were hesitant but they directed their questions to him. We were starting from scratch, so the incoming commander had zero context about anything that we were doing and didn’t know how to answer most questions. I would explain the context, what I thought were the risks and benefits of certain decisions, and what things to consider when making a decision. Then he would make a decision. I walked him through all of the tools I used, gave him my opinion about who to trust on the battalion staff, and told him what I thought were the strengths and weaknesses of the leaders in the company.
That was the best RIP either of us had ever done.
Personality
Most organizations, in the Army and in the private sector, are driven by personality not by procedural continuity.
It is a well-known fact of start-ups that companies are never the same after the founder leaves. Apple started crumbling after Jobs left, and only bounced back after his return. Amazon has started to decline after Bezos left—have you noticed shipping times are increasing? On the other hand, some companies get better. The McDonald brothers could never have made McDonald’s what it is today—Ray Kroc did that. People, especially leaders, are what drive an organization forward. Sometimes they do this by implementing new standards and processes, sometimes they do this by eliminating rigid standards and processes. It just depends.
The personality of a leader has a drastic impact on an organization, more so than any particular system or process. Rough and immediate transitions from one leader to the next can cause an enormous amount of disruption in the organization. When it came to my RIP with the incoming commander, it wasn’t that we needed to transfer any specific SOPs, it was that we needed to transition the organization from my personality to his. I also wanted to help him shape his perceptions and tailor his actions to the context of the company. The best way to do this was to simply be present during the first two weeks of his command. The leaders of the company weren’t just handed a new commander. They watched the transition happen gradually over the course of two weeks and adjusted. I also helped the new commander not make any blunders or jerk the unit through a rough transition. I helped the leaders accept their new commander and helped the new commander accept his new company.
And, as I mentioned earlier, systems and processes themselves are often driven by the personality of the commander.
Let’s use Dieu de la Guerre as an example. Napoleon fundamentally changed the way that armies operated all over the world. The corps system and the emphasis on speed and combined arms, among other things, had dramatic impacts on military operations. But these were not simply procedural changes that came from first principles—they came from the personality of Napoleon himself. Warfare wasn’t just his job, it was his artistic expression. Read this passage from Steven Englund’s masterful Napoleon: A Political Life,
Lending itself poorly to similes, war is too ultimate and multiform an activity to be captured by theory. The successful pursuit of war requires talent and practice, neither of which ensues from a study of theory and history. Napoleon had certainly read widely on war (notably du Teil, Guibert), but he never maintained that doing so provided him more than points of reference or a convenient way to describe campaigns after the fact. Napoleon, for all that his own practice of war set records for originality…did not contribute any new theory of war…Bonaparte throve in warmaking…his older more aristocratic opponents were pros with solid reputations, but war was their metier, not their self-expression and their meaning…they did not exist on a permanent knife-edge of despair and elation, in a state of nervous exhaustion, even if hidden behind apparent calm. War was an important job for them, but not their titanic personal struggle, the imposition of their very selves.
Englund goes on to argue that it was Napoleon’s personality and psychological hold over his soldiers that were his true genius.
Organizations can survive with good standards and procedures alone, but when they compete directly against a Napoleon, or a Bezos, or a Jobs, or a Ridgway, they are doomed.
As discussed earlier, SOPs can be helpful depending on the context. But no procedure or system will ever be as good as the people who implement them. And when the people who implemented the procedures leave, new procedures are almost inevitable.
Emergent v. Designed
At the Command and General Staff Officer Course (CGSOC) I learned about a framework called “History, Theory, Doctrine, and Practice.” This is supposedly the way in which warfare and evolves over time, and it makes intuitive sense. Military thinkers study history and develop a theory, which they codify in doctrine which is translated into practice. But I think that this model is exactly backwards in reality, and the consequence of this is non-trivial.
As we read above about Napoleon, he knew history and he knew about some of the military ideas floating around, but these were nothing more than data points to him. Napoleon did not follow the “History, Theory, Doctrine, Practice” framework, he did what he wanted to do. He acted first and it became the way things were done. Then theory was developed—both Clausewitz and Jomini got their inspiration from l’Empereur—and Napoleon made history through his actions.
In his book How Innovation Works, author Matt Ridley makes the very convincing case that innovation almost never flows from the mind of single genius. It is typically a gradual process of trial and error involving many different people borrowing or stealing ideas from one another. The idea that the process of innovation flows from theory to practice almost never bears itself out in reality. It’s almost always the opposite—people tinker around with things and interact with others and share what they are doing, then other people do the same thing. With all this trial-and-error something usually pops out. The things that pops out is often misunderstood for a long time until people realize its real utility. Oftentimes people are doing things that work with absolutely no understanding about why it works. For a modern example, try to get an engineer to explain the concept of “lift.” Your airplane will deliver you safely from part of the world to another, but believe it or not, no one is exactly sure why planes fly. You don’t believe me, do you? Don’t take my word for it, Check this out.
And if we stay on this flight path of exploring flight, do you think the Wright brothers designed their flying machines based on physical principles? No! They repaired bicycles for a living. They threw a bunch of stuff together and eventually flew through the air. Practice came first, and theory is still catching up.
So, what does this have to do with SOPs?
Most SOPs should not begin from a theory or simply from the mind of creator working in isolation from the thing he is designing the SOP for. On the contrary, SOPs should be derived from the trial and error of real-world experience, and brought to life through repetition. In most cases, SOPs should not be implemented from on high, they should emerge from an organization that tries new things, fails, and learns. They should emerge from the lowest level. And failure to do so can result in some of the ridiculous non-sense that you can imagine.
Watch this absolutely horrendous garbage that the Army was teaching its soldiers in official videos even AFTER WWII and Korea. (It should be cued up to 13:30, just watch a minute or so).
This is the dumbest sh*t I have ever seen, and it still infuriates me to watch. It doesn’t take any special kind of miliary genius to know that you probably shouldn’t stand-up and walk towards an enemy that is trying to kill you. And you don’t have to have that much knowledge to know that walking in a line like that is suicide—all it takes is one guy with a machine gun on your flank to wipe out a whole squad in one burst of fire. One someone with no military experience attempts to create doctrine, this nonsense is what you get. This is SOP by design, not by emergence.
When I imposed my chem light technique on my platoon, I was imposing it on my small group of soldiers based on the context that we were entering in which I had a non-trivial amount of experience. I also didn’t come up with the idea, I got it from one of the NCOs who came up with the idea after being hit with IED and not having any radio contact and knowing that moving the vehicles around was too dangerous. The idea emerged from the unique context of the environment; it wasn’t imposed from the top-down.
The next time you are told to write an SOP, make sure that you either have the requisite experience with the thing you are writing the SOP for, or at least talk to someone. If you can, run some experiments first to see if your initial ideas have any merit.
Closing
In this essay I played around with some ideas around the concept of SOPs. The purpose of this essay, and most of my essays, is to spark your thinking and inspire you to ask questions about the way things are typically done, not to provide you with read-made answers. When should you make an SOP and for what purpose? Why make an SOP at all? I don’t know. My general orientation is to resist making an SOP unless it’s obvious that one is needed. If you have to ask if you need to make an SOP for something, I will say that you probably don’t. And if you have to make an SOP, it should be aimed at solving a problem inside of a particular context and derived from experience with the problem itself.
Hopefully I’ve given you something to think about this week.
Have you read “Bureaucracy” by Ludwig von Mises?
Very quick read and worth exploring.
https://mises.org/library/book/bureaucracy
I’ve just stumbled across your Substack. It’s fantastic. Can’t wait to learn more about your beef with McCrystal.