Thursday - July 22, 2004

Category Image Bogged Down in the BOG


Last month I met a colonel that I once worked with in 1988, when I was a first lieutenant and he was a major. It was less than two weeks, but the experience was so vivid that I recognized him immediately. Now, like then, I am impressed with his quick intelligence, his apparently excellent education, and his strength of presence. We were at a reception following a change of command and he walked up to me and introduced himself. After 11 years of being a civilian, I am a mere major but he still walked up to me to start a nice conversation. I recognized him instantly, he didn't place me of course. After explaining how we once met before and where it was, he jocularly said, "Oh, you must tell stories of what a horror I was as a leader."

Without batting an eye, I said, "Of course." I didn't tell him though, that I'd been telling a story about him for 15 years as how to be a poor leader.

Let me be more clear. I actually admire the man, and I think he is an excellent leader overall. But the two weeks I spent with him have served me as an enduring example of exactly how not to be a leader. Everyone makes mistakes, even the best leaders, and here is a time where he screwed up, may have never realized he screwed up, and his failure caused lots of problems and could have caused a very big problem in a shooting war.

So, I think the story is worth telling again. With all due respect to the colonel should he see this and recognize his role in the tale, I think it's important to learn from mistakes, just as it is important to learn from his other good traits. The colonel appears now, and was definitely then, a very energetic, firm, demanding, and generally fair officer. I would happily serve with, under or near him any day. I honestly like him.

Here's the set up. The exercise was named Freedom Banner, but many of us called it Freedom Banana. It was among the early Maritime Pre-positioning Ship offload exercises and FB88 was the first time that an entire ship's load was to be completely disgorged to the shore, including aviation assets. Upon arriving at the beach, the equipment was further disbursed to various groups that needed the equipment. Since all units needed much of the same equipment, the logistics challenge was to sort it all out to make sure that each group got its full complement without overtaxing them with all their gear at one time. It's a lot harder than it sounds.

My job was to be the Air Combat Element Liaison officer, working in the watch that controlled the offload operations. The major was the watch officer. He was responsible for deciding where all the equipment went after it landed on the beach. He had a small staff, and several liaison officers such as myself, I was with the ACE, there was also the Ground Combat Element, the Service Support Element and various other people. As a liaison officer, I didn't work for the major, I worked for the ACE. My job was to represent the ACE to the watch officer, our subject major. The best advice I got when leaving for this operation was to remember that the ACE is always right. Even if it looked like we weren't right at first glance, events would always bear out that we had everything right, the other groups were much more likely to be wrong. This advice proved very accurate.

There were two watch officers, and as I recall there was a short overlap so that I worked with both each day, but the majority of the time I advised our major. I talked with the Marines in the ACE on what they were doing and what they had and what they needed and kept the major up-to-date on our status.

But every time the major came on duty, everything started going wrong. The previous watch everything went smoothly but after the day watch came on, confusion and out right chaos began to result. Everything was getting bogged down in the Beach Operations Group, or the BOG. Our major didn't cause this problem, it just always happened at the same time he arrived. His response, in contrast to his otherwise intelligent and inspiring behavior, was to yell. He yelled a lot. It was the first time I had seen this kind of behavior since I left The Basic School, and I wasn't impressed. I never really understood this behavior and it certainly didn't help. In fact things just got worse and worse and worse and no one knew why.

I didn't work for him, and yelling isn't painful, so I wasn't bothered at all. But many of the other people there reacted to his yelling by yelling at their people too. Anger grew, resentment built, confusion reigned and nothing got better. In fact it kept getting worse.

I don't remember exactly how it was finally resolved, but I distinctly remember what the problem was. I think the cause was finally discovered by the other watch officer getting out during our watch and walking many miles and talking to a lot of people.

Here's what really happened. In the BOG, there was a team of about 4 to 6 people who had desks and lists and a radio. We radioed instructions to this group and they told the drivers where to deliver the trucks, trailers, tanks, etc. It was all very well planned. The radio operator was supposed to receive our transmission, write it down and deliver it to the rest of the team who carried out the instructions. But instead, everyone but the radio operator was goofing off and the poor Marine with a heavy radio on his back had to run around, receive our instructions, and tell everyone what to do. It was all too much for one person. He couldn't possibly do it all, so he ended up completely ignoring all our instructions and just made up his own instructions.

So the landing craft would offload a HMMWV towing a water buffalo, a Dragon Wagon fifth wheel towing a fuel tank, and a TOW missile launcher towed by another HMMWV, and we'd send them to the ACE, the SSE, and the GCE respectively. But the BOG would send them all to the GCE or whatever he felt in the mood for. In the AAOG (I think that's the acronym for where I was, Assembly Area Operations Group) we would wait for word that the equipment arrived as expected and nothing would be right.

So this is getting long. The point is that the problem had a distinct cause. Yelling at people in an attempt to motivate them does no good if the underlying problem is ignored or unrecognized. In complex systems, intelligence is needed to make things work.

There is a time and place for yelling. There is a reason to provide extra motivation. But in this instance the major failed to understand what he was trying to fix. Rather than investigate and correct problems, he treated us like we weren't already disciplined and enthusiastic participants in this exercise.

Once we found this problem, after a week of agony, we straightened out the BOG and things went much smoother. But the resentment at our treatment by the major lingered and what should have been an excellent training exercise was nothing but misery for those who bothered to take the major's reactions seriously.

As for me, I wasn't bothered directly because I didn't work for him. But I never forgot this story. I can't say that I've never made leadership mistakes, but I hope I never made this one after seeing this.

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