The management margin: essential for victory[c] - Focus: The Shaft of the Spear

Aerospace Power Journal, Spring, 2002 by Dr. Robin Higham, Dr. Mark P. Parillo

Editorial Abstract: While generalship and technology tend to grab the headlines, an equally important and often overlooked contribution to victory is the effective management of means (forces and materiel) that enables an insightful grand strategy to satisfy ends (national objectives). Professors Higham and Parillo give us a brief history and analysis of this most important topic of warfare.

**********

GENERALLY VICTORY IS attributed to generalship, esprit de corps, greater resources, and so forth. Too rarely is tribute paid to grand strategy and management.

These latter two factors are perhaps more important in the limited wars of the present than in the major wars of the past. Whether that will be so depends upon the philosopher-kings at the top of Plato's pyramid and upon their military advisers charting a wise course and providing for the execution of policy decisions. Ends (strategic objectives) must be connected to means (resources) by an appropriate grand strategy.

The management pattern has to include both the downward dissemination and following of orders and an upward flow of understanding, constructive criticism, and obedience. As an example, in 1993 the chief of the air staff of the Netherlands Air Force had to explain to the civil leadership that in order to keep 72 F-16s operational, he needed 124 machines.

Management and leadership are not the same. The former impersonally carries out business affairs and makes submissions. The latter personifies command or authority. Too often, unfortunately, it is assumed that military leadership includes administrative talents, but this is often not so. Lord Hives, chairman of Rolls-Royce, could still pick up any tool on the shop floor and demonstrate its proper use. How many air marshals can do that? Indeed, until after 1945, how many understood the complexities of the bamboo basket of supply? Or even of the barbed-wire-strand decision pattern? Marshal of the Royal Air Force (MRAF) Sir Arthur Harris's despatch on Bomber Command, 1942-45, makes it clear how much vision and management skill was needed to bring that force to the level of the 1939 dream.

Not only bards and historians, but also businesses themselves have neglected the need to publicize what it took to ready successful armed forces. Ever since the mid-nineteenth century, ever more complex weapons systems have required parallel organizations to make and care for them. The emphasis upon staff work that was made visible by the Crimean War and the struggles of the 1860s-1870s, including the introduction of the telegraph, railways, steamships, and the enormous capacity of the Industrial Revolution, demanded skilled management planning and execution by general staffs from well before mobilization. Yet, both navies in the nineteenth century and air forces in the twentieth resisted the necessity to encompass grand strategy in visions of the future. At the same time, careerism swung in and out of favor, critically damaging technical management by the emphasis upon rank and sometimes irrelevant activities, versus the benefits of long-nurtured experience.

War requires the organization, management, and efficiency of the invisible infrastructure in peace as well as in war. And wars may occur because an underpinning is not in place upon which politicians can confidently erect their grand strategies for stability and peace.

As a direct result of the naval scouring of the Baltic in the Crimean War, the Russians built a railway line to Europe, unreachable by blockade, and also launched 95 new steam warships for ocean raiding against the vulnerable British merchant fleet. At the same time, the British and the French, concerned with their own rivalries, concentrated on the new battleships and so ignored the Baltic in 1863. Thus the Polish Rebellion was crushed. The legacy of La Gloire and Warrior (the first of the new ironclad battleships) was a dockyard revolution which saw private companies building and the navies managing the new technology while neglecting grand strategy. This period also pointed to the risks of waiting until technology was ripe for use, a period we might call "waiting to want," which may extend as long as 40 years.

An analogous case occurred with the development in the commercial world of mainframe and personal computers. At first only corporations could afford the mainframes, but then personal computers appeared that were so powerful that many could use them. Similarly, miniaturization has gone from the Loran of 1945 to the Global Positioning System of today. In the process, companies like IBM, which pioneered the electric typewriter, made their own servicing force obsolete--was this an unintended consequence of progress?

In the airline business it was more efficient to hand-sort reservations until the global computer systems came in the 1960s, bringing with them both a technical-commercial and a social revolution, just as the first of the big jets enormously increased capacity. Yet, historical knowledge of travel patterns by destination, season, and routes remained indispensable. Airlines are a very useful model since they are constantly in competitive war and in combat with nature and humans. These daily struggles give them rapid-march experience of equipment, methods, and merchandising. The military, in contrast, operates in a peace-and-paucity norm, interrupted episodically by peak activity in crisis or war.