RALEIGH – Just as I didn’t really need to listen to an 18-hour lecture series on China history to be persuaded of the flaws of government monopoly, I didn’t need to read the most recent issue of Military History magazine to know that teams often fail when they focus too much on execution and not enough on defining their goals.
But as I wrote on Monday, it never hurts to gain more examples to buttress your argument.
Many kinds of organizations experience the problem of strategic blindness dooming tactical excellence. For example, many a sports team full of talented athletes has lost a game because the coach didn’t devise a strategy for playing to the team’s strengths and capitalizing on the weaknesses of the other team. In the business world, the bankruptcy rolls are full of firms that excelled at producing goods consumers no longer demanded. And losing political campaigns often raise lots of money and produce professional ads and marketing materials but never figure out a concise, coherent case for why voters ought to elect their candidates.
The cover story (not yet online) of the January 2010 edition of Military History offers the example of 20th century Germany, whose military forces usually punched way above their weight class and frequently exhibited tactical brilliance. At the battalion level, German troops were consistently superior to their adversaries, East and West, until very late in both world wars. Yet the country lost both wars, disastrously.
As the U.S. was on the other side in both wars, and the destruction of Nazi Germany in particular was a moral imperative, one can give thanks for Germany’s strategic incompetence while at the same time seeking to learn its lessons in trying to improve the leadership of more praiseworthy institutions.
In World War I, all the European powers foolishly invested gobs of time and money preparing for a war that, their leaders should have known, was fated to bring ruin on them all. But German leaders were especially guilty of failing to think through the long-term consequences of actions that appeared opportune at the time.
For example, in 1917 they sent the exiled Lenin on a railcar to Russia to cause trouble and subsequently bankrolled his Bolsheviks. This maneuver may have knocked Russia out of the Great War in the short run but created Germany’s greatest 20th century enemy in the long run. German leaders also restarted their policy of unrestricted submarine warfare in an attempt to challenge Britain’s control of the seas, only to make America into Germany’s second-greatest 20th century enemy.
In short, writes military historian Williamson Murray in the article, “the picture of modern Germany military effectiveness is one of battlefield brilliance mixed with myopic vision at the strategic level. That combination ensured that German defeat would do maximum damage not only to the Reich’s neighbors, but also to the German people themselves.”
It’s a lesson that today’s leaders ought to take to heart. If kids everywhere are listening to their mp3 players, it won’t help you to perfect the manufacturing process for cassette tape. And if you are pointed in the wrong direction, it won’t just fail to help you to be the fastest runner in the race – it will actually hurt you.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation