I've always found this to be a fascinating subject, mostly because it is a paradox. How do you design a bureaucracy with an organic capability to transform itself as required? That is the basic question, because an entity as large as DA or DOD must function as a bureaucracy if it is to accomplish anything at all.

You started the thread with the question of why our units seem to be able to adapt rather quickly to changing conditions but this capacity faded as you moved up the organizational chain. I think the answer is that companies and battalions are more or less self-contained entiities where a single individual can readily influence the whole, and where the culture is far more malleable. We have all seen units transformed by the arrival of a new commander or top NCO. But I think this ability to adapt begins to fade out at the brigade level and rapidly disappears as you move higher. You see the same thing in the civilian world as garage start-ups become successful larger companies.

Once an individual can no longer inspire adaptation, you have to rely on organizations to do so. I have seen several efforts in the Army to 'institutionalize adaptability' or to escape the strictures of a stultifying bureaucracy. In 1999, when Shinseki set about Transforming the Army, he purposefully by-passed the established bureaucracy by plucking a general out of the ether and sending him to Fort Lewis where he was going to operate outside the lines of TRADOC and AMC and the other fiefdoms affected by his project. I actually met the gentleman (whose name escapes me after all these years) when he was literally an Army of One - no aide, no driver, no front office - desperately trying to figure out how he was going to get the job done.

The purpose of this, of course, was to allow the process to go on without being crippled by the endless purgatory of four-star review, and initially it went quite well. The Transformation team produced some stunningly original work...but once they went beyond brainstorming and actually had to start buying equipment, training soldiers, and forming units, they needed to deal with the 'old' bureaucracy. In order to do so effectively, they began to bloat into a doppelganger of the very thing they had been designed to escape. Within three years or so, things were actually worse than they might have been if we had just gone through the normal channels, because now we had two, competing bureaucracies working on the same project.

In an organization as large as the DOD, where the stakes are so high, and where resources have to come from outside agencies (i.e., money from Congress), I don't see institutional change as being effective in promoting adaptibility. Only by creating thoughtful, adaptive, deeply educated leaders do we have any chance at all of staying ahead of our enemies. So I would not worry much about pondering institutional change, and instead focus on how we train/prepare/educate our future senior leaders.

One other note on adaptability, as this posting is becoming bloated itself. This is not a new thing. In the Civil War, soldiers and regiments adapted to the changed conditions of the battlefield after a campaign or two. They began to entrench as a matter of course, to loosen up their tight formations, to rely more on fire and movement, to lessen their exposure to enemy fire. These were all good things at the regimental level, but they were not necessarily good in an operational sense. These adaptations lowered the casualties suffered on any given day, but they also contributed to the increasing tactical stalemate and (some argue) lengthened the war. I have seen units on the modern battlefield 'adapt' to changing conditions in ways that did not make them more effective. Let's keep that in mind.