The Flight Deck

Reading this morning’s news and seeing that the Secretary of the Army has now been fired-this following the firing of the Commanding General of the hospital-set me to thinking about how does something like this happen?

I can’t believe that the CG of the hospital got up every morning saying to himself, “What can I do to make my patients miserable today?” What I can believe is that over time, however, the “system” created an environment where this egregious failure to provide for the “customer” could go overlooked for so long.

I don’t know a lot  about the Army, but I do know that Walter Reed, like the other military medical centers is a large “business”.  I am sure too, that the operating budget for the hospital has been cut by a certain percentage each year-that is if the Army is under the same budget pressures as the Navy-as the services have robbed Peter to pay Paul and keep the folks down range supplied. 

I’m also sure that command of Walter Reed is a gem for the Army Medical Corps, and if promotion within the Staff Corps is filled with as much political intrigue and sharking as in the Navy, the best man may or may not have been selected for the position. It is certain though that for any individual to make flag rank in the medical corps, they have to be somewhat well connected.

What I really wonder about is whether many of the changes that need to be effected were really within the CG’s power to fix. Phrased another way, has the Army gone through the same types of “Balkanization” that has affected the Navy’s support establishment?

Like I said, I don’t know a lot about the Army, but I do know something about the Navy. And if the Army has imitated the Navy in its quest for “better business practices” and regionalization, then the ability of one commander to directly make changes in the physical plant of a facility is subject to the mercy of a large group of nameless ,faceless, bureaucrats.

Like I said, I don’t know much about how the Army does business and my dealings with Navy medicine have been, to put it nicely, less than positive. However if the Army has done anything like the Navy the amount of “discretionary” money and authority the CG might have had to effect change may not have been as much as one might imagine.

Let’s look at an example that some of us do know something about-that of a shore station Commanding Officer. Consider the Air Station CO who needs to shake things up quickly at his base. Now in the “bad old days” he had complete authority over all the major departments on his “turf”. He had some broad authority to move money around within his lifelines. Contrast that with the situation today.  A NAS CO does not have the following people working for him anymore: his Supply Officer (works for a supply captain somewhere else), Public Works officer (works for the facilities engineering command and is probably taking his turn in the barrel being IA in Iraq), the housing office works directly for the regional commander, even MWR is not directly his responsibility. The AIMD officer works for one of his tenant commands and even his own Weapons Officer and guy in charge of his magazines works for some “enterprise command” . If he wants to make changes in the base’s computer network, he has to go through the regional Communications entity and any improvements have to be estimated by SPAWAR, blessed by the contractor and have to be vetted against the original terms of the NMCI contract.  Getting new internet drops installed, especially on a classified network can take literlally weeks if not months-assuming he can get through all of the approvals required and can get his regional business office to buy off on all the funding. (The rise of these “business”  offices rates a whole seperate post!) In the bad old days, the CO could order his Supply or Communications officer to “make it happen”-because it was the right thing to do. Nowadays even if a CO did do that to solve an emergent problem, you can bet he has probably violated more than a couple of financial regulations since the budgets for those departments that used to be his, have migrated to someone who is not even on his base. And, as Senor Ferrari in the movie Casablanca said when the shipment always comes up a couple of cases short, “Carrying charges my boy, carrying charges”. There is always “pilferage” of money that was intended for a particular base while the money is enroute.

Same thing is true with improving the physical plant. Changes above a certain financial threshold have to be vetted with the Facilities engineers and over a 200,000 dollars I think, have to be put into the military construction budget-not a quick or easy process.

I guess what I am getting at is that all of this creates an effect that I call  bureaucratic inertia. An object at rest tends to remain so. It takes a lot of push to get the stone rolling and even more so now, because of all the people whose permission have to be obtained.

Plus as was pointed out on the Lou Dobbs broadcast, the increasing movement to privatize many services is a two edged sword. Write a good contract, get a good company, it may be an improvement. Write a bad contract or hire a bad company because of various set aside practices, or outside interference-well the result can be a lot worse than if the civil service had people in charge. I guarantee you the move to privatize building services did not start in the CG’s office at Walter Reed.

I also think that some of this problem stems from the attitude that has been conveyed from the top. Namely that “people are expensive” and that they are somehow a burden on the rest of the establishment. That attitude started at very high levels within the Pentagon and permeated down. Taking care of people as a sacred obligation of service is not very much in vogue any more…to our great regret. People are expensive-because they are worth investing in.

Now it may very well be that none of these factors were at play in the case of Walter Reed-in which case the failure is simply a failure to remain connected to the needs of his Soldiers. However given the “transformational” trends of the last few years, I bet if you dug a little you would find some of the above changes had been made on the Army side of the fence. 

I guess in summary, what I am really saying here is that in the end the CG is still responsible as is the rest of the Army leadership. However it seems to me, that if a guy is going to be allowed to hang himself, he ought to at least have the privledge of tying the rope himself. Instead of having it done by bureaucrats who will still keep their jobs, long after the trap door has sprung.