When a wildfire tears through a forest, attention immediately focuses on the negative—how many acres burned, the impact on the environment, and above all the tragic loss of life. What rarely goes noted, however, is the critical benefit wildfires provide. In many respects, wildfires are the most effective way for many ecosystems to rid themselves of the overgrowth that strangles out and prevents new plant life from thriving.

If the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is a wildfire, the Department of Defense's bureaucracy is the forest. As each branch of the service transitioned into teleworking and mission essential manning levels, organizations from the small unit level to the Joint Staff had to triage their efforts to account for the massive decline in available productivity. Unlike many organizations in the private sector, the Department of Defense cannot shutter its doors and reopen once the crisis has passed—the mission of national defense must go on. This provides a unique chance to discover what tasks are essential, and what is overgrowth choking the system.

The Department of Defense should use this crisis as an opportunity to burn off the overgrowth of bureaucracy in a way that would never be possible otherwise. The Joint Staff can reorient on tasks required to meet the National Security Strategy, combatant and major commands can provide new prioritized listings of mission requirements, and units can rework their schedules to eliminate redundant processes and realign personnel staffing to better focus on the mission. If the Department of Defense resumes business as usual when the pandemic passes, it will have missed its best chance in generations to cut back the bureaucracy that operates at the expense of the warfighter.

Burning Out the Overgrowth

According to an annual survey conducted on workplace practices in the United States, workers spend only 43% of their time on the job they were hired to do.[1] As baffling as the paradigm that statistic describes may be, what makes it even more concerning is how the number has trended downward in the six years' worth of data this survey has collected. The corporate culture of the Department of Defense is not immune to the influences that cause this efficiency deficit, but the impacts are far worse than a healthy bottom line when considering that lives are at stake. As an example, United States Air Force squadron commanders have no unified guidance on what their responsibilities are, instead having to draw from thousands of separate—sometimes conflicting—official compliance statements while contending with a myriad of taskers from elements several steps removed from their respective chains of command.[2] Each of these inconsistencies leads to efforts that are not directed towards mission accomplishment, and instead spawn more bureaucratic work to meet whatever intents their higher headquarters dictate.

A monthly meeting at the Joint Border Coordination Center at Forward Operating Base, Spin Boldak, in 2011. (SFC Joseph Johnson/USMC Photo)

To start, consider the humble meeting. The core investment meetings require is time, and time is a finite resource in any organization—every minute spent in discussion is a minute not spent towards other measures of accomplishing a task. Logically, an organization should strive to limit meetings in favor of taking action, yet data shows trends in the opposite direction. The past fifty years had a steady march of increasing meetings across all industries, both in frequency and duration.[3] This might not be an issue if organizations conducted meetings effectively, but evidence points to the contrary. A 2017 survey of senior managers in the United States revealed “65% said meetings keep them from completing their own work” and “71% said meetings are unproductive and inefficient.”[4] When you add this to how “the single most powerful factor in job satisfaction [is] how one feels about the effectiveness of the meetings he or she attends,” the problem grows larger still.[5] The extension of this insight to the Department of Defense suggests an overabundance of poorly run meetings cripples mission effectiveness and warfighter resilience. The shift towards telework and mission essential tasks, however, has resulted in curtailing the majority of meetings, and somehow the mission goes on. Commanders get the specific updates they need on a case-by-case basis, and personnel are able to focus their limited resources on doing their job instead of building briefings and PowerPoint that leaders forget straight away, if they read or see them at all.

This wildfire should trim back position creep as well. Manning levels in the Department of Defense are a sacred cow for many leaders, with any thought towards cuts treated as anathema. When there is a link established between organization size and its leadership’s perceived importance, there is an “incentive for those on top of the organizational ladder to either hire employees and only then decide what they are going to do with them or—even more often, perhaps—to resist any efforts to eliminate jobs that are found to be redundant.”[6] The current environment has forced commanders to understand the bare minimum of personnel necessary to carry out their mission, which can be an uncomfortable realization. Maintaining minimal manning over these past months cut to the root of true requirements for mission generation, identifying positional slack better than a manning study.

Finally, the Department of Defense and the U.S. government must address their priorities in line with the priorities of the National Security Strategy, as the further reduction in available resources due to COVID-19 is forcing a triage of efforts. Experts have sounded the alarm on the mismatch of resource allocations towards defense priorities at the national level prior to the current crisis, but now the knives will come out.[7] When you have limited resources to dedicate towards a larger set of requirements, no amount of chest-thumping and posturing about how requirements are prioritized will change the math. This is the moment to make the hard choices expected of senior leadership and dictate what missions the Department of Defense will fulfill, and what will fall off the plate. From that guidance will flow direction both from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and at the combatant command level down to the units on prioritizing their efforts, and the result will be a more focused, streamlined force ready to address the nation's top strategic priorities.

What Survives and What Grows Anew

Giant sequoias are special in that they routinely survive wildfires, and require them to perpetuate their species. Sequoias of sufficient age develop bark resistant enough to heat that only the most intense wildfires threaten them, while the heat of those fires causes their seedlings to open and germinate. In the same way, the COVID-19 crisis will reveal what missions the nation undertakes, whether the tasks its units carry out are worthy of continuing, and also giving new ways of accomplishing goals a chance to grow across the department.

When the inevitable prioritization of missions comes, the Department of Defense will have two clear piles—missions that absolutely must continue, and everything else. After the pandemic has passed, each pile should have follow-on actions. For the missions that continued, senior leaders must work both within the U.S. government and with our partners across the globe to determine which are true sequoias standing on their own strategic importance versus those propped up artificially by stakeholders. As for the missions that senior leaders pushed off, a different discussion is required: should the Department of Defense resurrect the mission, or should the Department of Defense leave it behind? These two actions are the most critical post-pandemic steps for the Department of Defense to consider because an immediate resumption of all previous missions will result in the same environment that led to the bureaucratic overgrowth to begin with.

The teleworking environment has revealed multiple methods by which the Department of Defense can improve its functions. While data is still coming in specific to the mass teleworking spurred by COVID-19, previous studies can apply to many information-age jobs relevant to the Department of Defense. Certain customer service constructs benefit greatly from teleworking, while positions reliant on creativity also receive a boost.[8] Granted, teleworking should not and cannot be the solution for every job, especially those that benefit from face-to-face communication and those specific to combat operations. That said, we are witnessing the greatest telework experiment conducted on a global scale in history, and individual units should record their lessons and implement what makes sense on a permanent basis when things normalize.

Perhaps the most intriguing possibility open to the Department of Defense is how pandemic schedules have revealed the futility of tying specific hourly schedules towards mission accomplishment. The eight-hour workday stems back to compromises between workers’ unions and industry owners during the 19th and 20th centuries. Obviously, the modern world has evolved dramatically from the timeframe of laboring for double-digit hours a day in coal mines, yet we stick to the same hourly practices when it makes no sense to do so. Research repeatedly shows that arbitrarily setting hours for work does more to hinder progress than to enforce it.[9] Since the Department of Defense does not pay by the hour, any financial compensation argument is irrelevant. Therefore, the only thing that matters is whether personnel accomplish the mission, something that has absolutely nothing to do with a set amount of hours directed towards it. Combine that with how human beings have a finite amount of willpower and directed attention to use on any given day, and an eight-hour workday can be actively harmful to productivity.[10] Leaders can use this time to see how much work actually goes into maintaining their core mission sets and adjusting work schedules accordingly, giving airmen, soldiers, sailors, and marines time back for training, personal improvement, resiliency, and family.

The Wildfire Will Pass—What Comes After?

As the saying goes, never let a good crisis go to waste.[11] This pandemic is a wildfire that continues to burn through the Department of Defense's overgrown bureaucracy. Once it passes, senior leaders must decide whether they want to return to the inefficiencies of meaningless work, positions held out of feudal posturing over mission needs, and a belief in all missions having equal prioritization, or embrace the opportunities provided by the inferno. By demonstrating a willingness to end unnecessary missions and prioritizing the remainder, embracing new methods of virtually enabled work structures, and adjusting work schedules and environments to enter the 21st century, at last, the Department of Defense can grow back from this crisis healthier than ever before.

Jake Alleman is a U.S. Air Force officer. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

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Header Image: A fire burns intensely near Tomerong, Australia, in 2020. (Rick Rycroft/AP)

Notes:

[1] Workfront. n.d. State of Work 2020, Accessed May 6, 2020, https://www.workfront.com/campaigns/state-of-work.

[2] John A. Ausink, Miriam Matthews, Raymond E. Conley, and Nelson Lim, “Improving the Effectiveness of Air Force Squadron Commanders,” 2018, Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation.

[3] Steven G. Rogerlberg, Cliff Scott, and John Kello, 2007, "The Science and Fiction of Meetings," MIT Sloan Management Review (2007): 17-21.

[4] Leslie A. Perlow, Constance Noonan Hadley, and Eunice Eun, "Stop the Meeting Madness,” Harvard Business Review (2017): 62-69.

[5] Rogerlberg, Scott, and Kello, “The Science and Fiction of Meetings,” 17-21.

[6] David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 35.

[7] Rick Berger and Mackenzie Eaglen, “'Hard Choice' and Strategic Insolvency: Where the National Defense Strategy Falls Short,” War on the Rocks, last modified May 16, 2019, https://warontherocks.com/2019/05/hard-choices-and-strategic-insolvency-where-the-national-defense-strategy-falls-short/.

[8] Nicholas Bloom, James Liang, John Roberts, and Zhichun Jenny Ying, “Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment,” Quarterly Journal of Economics (2015): 165-218. See also, Diego Battiston, Jordi Blanes I Vidal, and Thomas Kirchmaier, “Is Distance Dead? Face-to-Face Communication and Productivity in Teams,” Center for Economic Performance, London School of Economics and Political Science, 2017, CEPR Discussion Paper No. 11924.

[9] Steve Glaveski, "The Case for the 6-Hour Workday." Harvard Business Review, December 18, 2018, https://hbr.org/2018/12/the-case-for-the-6-hour-workday

[10] Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2016), 98-100, 145-154.

[11] Rahm Emanuel, “Rahm Emanuel on the Opportunities of Crisis,” The Wall Street Journal, November 19, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mzcbXi1Tkk