Here’s Our Sign

US Marines guarding the airport in Kabul. Don’t you love it when a good plan comes together?

We seem to be suffering in this country from a massive pandemic of infectious institutional stupidity. Our institutions — corporations, governments, universities, etc. — are run by people who are usually smart, sometimes brilliant, but whose collaborative output is often just plain dumb.

One recent example: the Capitol Police. I mean no criticism whatsoever of the heroes who fought the mob at the US Capitol on January 6 when I say that institutionally, the Capitol Police handling of that incident was brain dead. They have the size and resources of a mid-sized city police department, and only one job, to protect one building, the Capitol, and they were caught flat-footed. I can never forget the radio call from a police lieutenant, midway through the rioting, saying plaintively, “Does anybody have a plan?”

A larger, more recent example: the fumbled evacuation of American civilians and Afghan allies from Afghanistan. The US military, inarguably the richest and largest on earth, was caught as flat-footed as the Capitol Police by events that were widely predicted for years, yet for which the military apparently had no plan. When the Taliban strolled into Kabul without firing a shot and negotiated the surrender of the government — a transfer of power more peaceable than ours was on January 20 — the US military was left in possession of the airport and nothing else. No way to extract thousands of civilians who suddenly had Taliban checkpoints between them and the airport.  

Gee, nobody could have seen that coming.

If Bill Engvall were still handing out stupid signs he’d be exhausted: to the Air Force, for building the world’s most expensive fighter jet (the F35) only to find that it cannot fight; to the Navy, for building the world’s most expensive (Zumwalt Class) destroyer only to have it break down on its maiden voyage and require a tow out of the Panama Canal; to the Trump Administration, for dismissing the COVID 19 pandemic as just another flu, nothing to e concerned about; the US health care system, for spending more money than any other country in the world and getting the worst results of the 11 richest countries; and on, and on.

How did we get this dumb?

A friend of mine once had a theory about what goes wrong with organizations. They are formed for a purpose — bringing a product to market, winning a revolution or an election, whatever — and at the beginning everybody in the organization is focused on the goal, that’s why they are there, and 90 percent of their energy is directed toward achieving the goal. Over time, however, more and more people spend more and more of their time seeking raises and promotions, maintaining their power, playing at office politics and otherwise pursuing their own interests, not those of the organization. Eventually, said my friend (I can’t remember exactly who) only about 10 percent of the energy available to the organization is being spent on its priorities. At this point, he said, at five or ten years of age, the organization should be terminated and all concerned should reorder their lives around another set of objectives. (He included marriage in the list of institutions that should adopt the practice.)

I think he had a point — although I doubt his solution will be implemented anytime soon — but I think there’s more to this story. I see these institutions as being afflicted with something similar to what happens when a weightlifter becomes muscle bound.

Take the US War Department. (That’s what it is, an imperial war department, don’t let anybody tell you differently.) It’s the biggest and the richest in the world, spending as much as the next eight largest militaries in the world combined, and when it says it wants more toys, nobody ever says no. It has been this way for decades. Yet last fall, in a large, sophisticated war game simulating a conflict with China over Taiwan, US forces were humiliated. Defeated. Quickly. The vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said they “failed miserably.” Here’s your sign.

The weightlifter spent so much time and effort building his muscles that they were eventually too big to work. The US military has put its faith in money, in accumulating highly technological weapons that never seem to work right and always require battalions of technical people to get them to work at all. We can’t fight a war right now, the computers are down. 

Thus the country that has long claimed to be exceptional in its love for and defense of liberty and democracy, exceptional for its meritocracy and creative capitalism, is now more and more known for its exceptional institutional stupidity. 

Here’s our sign.