INERTIA IN ARMED FORCES: CLAMOUR FOR STATUS QUO

When you are finished changing, you are finished.1 -Benjamin Franklin

1. The Indian Army, despite its preeminence as a military ground force, continues to struggle with efforts to improve its doctrine, organization, military education, leadership and infrastructure in order to meet current and future national security requirements. Discussions of force structure, manning, equipment, priorities for training/military education and necessary competencies abound, despite existing Army resolution to transform – indicate serious doubts about the Army‟s potential resilience. Arguments usually revolve around; how much more, what more will we need or how should we restructure?
2. 2. So much has been written about the Army‟s future viability; hence this paper concentrates more on the interrelationship of the Army‟s culture, its traditional organizational characteristics and its contemporary strategic context. Specifically, the attempt is to flag the dissonance and hypocrisy in the Army which creates hidden impediments to change. In his no way is this an attempt to disparage the Army as a dysfunctional organization, but rather to expose some of the underlying explanations for the Army‟s recent difficulties in adapting to the new paradigm. These difficulties are not unique to the Army, nor should we consider them entirely the Army‟s fault. By critically reflecting upon the interrelationship of the Army‟s structure, its culture, leaders can provide a better assessment of the organization‟s ability to reform and effectively evolve.
3. 3. Firstly, there is a tension between flexibility and reliability. While the Army needs to be flexible enough to carry out its tasks in a complex environment, it must be reliable in its subordination to civilian control and its ability to follow orders through an internal command structure. Second, this particular description of environment and resources reflects a classical view of organizations as systems – one of inputs and outputs between
4. 1 https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/18415-when-you-are-finished-changing-you-re-finished accessed on 04 Aug 19.
5. .
6. subsystems within their environments2. This traditional view of the organization reinforces bureaucracy and encourages improvements through additional structures and reporting mechanisms, rather than consideration of a more flexible, open system of operation. Progress, in this model, is usually accompanied by increases in structure and reporting requirements rather than streamlining. Viewing the Army as a complex adaptive system would explicate many sources of resistance to change within the Army and without.
7. 4. While each of the Army‟s subsystems and components are presumably designed to work together in a cooperative manner, they inevitably develop their own self-maintaining properties to justify their continued existence and relevance. Additionally, the environments they operate in become a complex set of milieus as well, characterized by relationships that extend outside the Army‟s formal organization, associated with interests and influences that are not subject to the Army leaders‟ control. The basic fact remains that something as „organized‟ as the Army does not manifest change in a predictable manner. Army‟s bureaucracy has become so entrenched in the larger national administration that it seems unmovable. When people have difficulty fully explaining the Army‟s resistance to change, they often look for something apart from the tensions within the bureaucracy that must be slowing down the system‟s processes. Instead of pursuing a better systemic view of the Army as an organization, they often cite its culture as the culprit for inertia.
8. 5. Often, instead of looking at the impediments inherent in the bureaucracy itself, people assume there must be something common throughout the system that explains its resistance to change. After all its daunting to conceptualize and fully assess the interrelationships between so many sub-organizations, interests, and processes. It would be rather easier if one were to assume there is a common element, one that permeates the entire Army, to which the conservative nature of the Army could be pegged; that element is culture. And while culture is indeed a
9. 2 Robert Lowson, Strategic Operations Management (London: Routledge, 2002), Pg 32.

critically important consideration in understanding the Army‟s response to change, it may not be the most significant impediment.

6. One of the most prominent writers on culture in organizations, Edgar Schein describes organizational culture as a “pattern of shared basic assumptions that a group has learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.”3 Schein‟s description is powerful because it captures the amorphous nature of culture, the systemic nature of coping methods in organizations, and the idea that culture persists. Unfortunately, the Army is ambiguous about its own definition of organizational culture. It may be loosely quantified as a set of shared perennial values, beliefs and practices that typifies what is important and effects the functional behaviour of the organization.

7. Herein lies the problem; many in the Army see practices as a direct path to culture. Such a view represents the same untenable idea that many share regarding the efficacy of controlling Army culture: “we must take charge of our Army culture; set our own path without yielding to external pressures.” The cognitive distinction between beliefs and practices is an important one in understanding culture change. This difference is similar to the contrast between attitudes and behaviors that has occupied so much thought in the field of psychology over the years4.While one could look at it as a discussion of what comes first, the chicken (attitudes) or the egg (behaviors), a critical view of what you can actually observe, assess and influence begins to hint at what leaders who want to affect changes in culture should be talking about. It also begs to question, what does it mean when leaders call for a change in culture but there are no apparent changes in practice?

3 Edgar Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition (San Francisco: Jossey- Bass, 2004), Pg 17.

4 Paula Ford-Martin, Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Group, 2001)Retrieved from http://findarticles.com/ /articles/mi_g2699/is_0003/ ai_2699000381.

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8. Changing culture is easier said than done; the maturity of the Army‟s current beliefs and values creates the first obstacle to changing the culture. The Army‟s beliefs and values are deeply embedded, encompassing: the customs and traditions, norms of conduct, ideals, and values that have evolved over years of campaigns and battles, of shared hardship and triumph. Army‟s culture is a product of centuries of evolution, not something that turns on a dime; it is deeply embedded within an organization and persistent when people are already invested in it.

9. The size and complexity of the Army creates further hindrances to culture change. The large number of personnel and the multiple levels within the Army organization can potentially translate into a large number of personnel resisting change from numerous levels within the organization. Culture at some level becomes a very personal issue; especially when people join an organization and voluntarily adopt its culture as their own; changing culture presents a dilemma about belonging altogether and poses a perceived existential threat to a system as they own it. Unlike many civilian companies that recruit externally for leadership that possess the desired values, the leadership in the Army is internally grown. Current Army leadership must first internalize the more enlightened values and beliefs and become examples before the rest of the Army can change. Any approach to changing the Army culture must first effectively change the embedded beliefs of the current and future leaders. Alternatively, culture needs to experience situations that force a reevaluation of their beliefs before they will consider changing. Without a compelling reason or crisis to alert the Army culture for the need to change, the Army culture will most likely resist change.

10. Furthermore, one should realize the complex nature of interaction between attitude (culture), behavior (practice), and the environment. BG Fastabend and Robert Simpson understood this in writing their article “Adapt or Die,”5 Until the Army‟s leaders make fundamental changes in its practices, they cannot rightly expect a change in culture. Like the rhetoric

5 BG David Fastabend and Robert H. Simpson, “Adapt or Die: The Imperative for a Culture of Innovation in the U.S. Army,” ARMY Magazine 54, no. 2 (February 2004): 14–22.

surrounding „change‟ itself, much of the attention to changing Army culture has been just as ambivalent. Perhaps understanding Army culture is more important than understanding how to change culture, as changing culture is a difficult process that takes a long time. Culture is to an organization what personality is to an individual.6 This analogy captures the essence of the quandary; changing culture is like changing personality. A more fruitful endeavor would be to understand how culture (personality) affects the way the Army responds to change.

11. Returning to a systemic view of the Army, if the bureaucracy is so unmovable and culture is so intangible, perhaps the environment helps to better explain the Army‟s dilemma. This environment represents more than simply the Army‟s position in relationship to other organizations. It represents an exchange of influence, reinforcing (positive) forces and opposing (negative) forces created by convergent and divergent interests. Environment includes potential adversaries and likely allies, current operations and future outlooks. It also includes expectations from the larger community, obligations the Army might be required to fulfill, as well as the resources available to operate. These many things are but part of the Army‟s environment – its strategic context.

12. Today there is a growing number writing about Army‟s unpreparedness for conventional conflict, precisely because the Army has chosen to focus so much effort on current counter-insurgency operations in J&K and North Eastern states. The Army is caught in a paradox, largely because it faces such an ambiguous strategic context. Or does it? Besides potential enemies the Army might face and the locations in which it might fight, part of the Army‟s strategic context is defined by its joint and multi- agency partners. Despite all the talk about improved joint capability and cooperation, these factors are virtually absent from the Army‟s official explanations of transformational change. Apart from promising to bring additional capability to the joint force, the Army – and the other services for that matter – continues to treat change as a unilateral top-down process.

6 Michael Siegl, „Military Culture and Transformation.“ Joint Forces Quarterly, no. 49 (Autumn 2008): Pg 103.

What is best for the Army may not be the best for other interested parties, or rather – what is best for the Army must incorporate the interests and perspectives of other services and agencies. After all, the Army no longer fights alone. The Army needs to change; takes on a different meaning when one considers the many other parties who share a place in the Army‟s operational environment.

13. To others, like the Central Police Force and Para-military, they represent a threat; after all, why does the Army needs more? To still others, like the Air Force and Navy, they represent competition – competition for funding. And to others, like intelligence agencies and partners, they represent concerns about capability, cooperation, interoperability, and often simply consideration. One might ask why the Army is placing so much emphasis on future technology when it has identified ongoing low-intensity conflicts as its primary concern for some time to come. This question gets to the central issue of change in the Army – efficacy. It is how people understand change to occur, either something that they affect or something that happens to them, that underlies the way they proceed about changing.

14. The real question is not whether the Army needs to change, as this is a constant, but whether the Army can transform itself, of its own volition; Change, Adapt, Evolve or Transform. Writers use the words interchangeably, but a critical inquiry into the meaning of each helps to clarify one‟s examination of the Army‟s predicament. For example, change is generic; it can be either passive or active. One can change or be changed. Adapt and evolve can both take on either active or passive meanings but, given their etymology, they usually imply passive change. Adaptation usually occurs in response to something. Evolution is a matter of natural selection, not willful change. Transform is generally active change. One transforms something by one‟s own volition. But the English language leaves room for passive: allowing that something could be transformed. Ultimately, none of these terms are exclusively active or passive.

15. So when the Army‟s leaders say; the Army must change or explain their plans for Transformation, their wording implies; we (the Army) must

change ourselves. Is this really how change works? A central question is whether the Army is adapting, changing as a reaction to its context, or transforming in anticipation of what lies ahead. While this might seem like an irrelevant matter of semantics, the distinction is worth exploring as it exposes a great deal about assumptions regarding efficacy in large organizations and complex environments. When proposing change in the Army, leaders usually speak of future implications. After all, selling change is based on historical contexts. People are always complaining about an Army that prepares to fight the last war. Ironically, however, when one examines most contemporary change proposals in context, their arguments often indicate concerns from the recent past.

16. The Army needs to change. The Army has always been changing. Army culture must change. Army culture has changed, but not deliberately or by anyone‟s decree. The Army is reorganizing to degrees unseen in the past seven decades. The Army‟s divisions and brigades may be organized differently as IBGs, but the larger organization appears very much the same. We are in an era persistent conflict characterized by asymmetric warfare. We are transforming to a capabilities based force of unparalleled symmetric capabilities, ignoring concerns from other services and other vectors of national power have not been part of our consideration. These sentences serve only as as an example of tensions that might best be described as hypocrisy regarding recent changes in the Army.

17. This paper presents a highly contestable and insufficiently researched set of conclusions about tensions within the Army, caused primarily by an apparent sense of hypocrisy, that increase resistance to change beyond what can be explained by Army bureaucracy, organizational culture or an uncertain strategic outlook. These three elements present impediments to innovation in and of themselves; they are already the focus of many studies and assessments. But these are difficult things for the Army‟s leadership to actually affect, despite the rhetoric regarding efforts to do so. The Army‟s leadership can however control their communications regarding these facets of organizational change, providing clarity over certainty, crafting consistent messages that harmonize action with purpose across all three.

18. People in the Army resist being changed when they are not convinced that the proposed change is necessary, appropriate, or adequate – a reasonable response really. They resist change messages when those messages present hypocrisy between espoused values and beliefs and actual practices. These contradictions are most noticeable as tensions between the Army as a profession and the Army as a bureaucracy. As with any complex adaptive (human) system, the Army does not always respond in a predictable manner. This is especially true when any one aspect of the „Army as a system‟ changes apart from other significant parts, or when a force attempts to instigate change in one aspect that is not reflected in others. The „Army as a system‟ tends to counter such perturbations in an attempt to maintain its own equilibrium. The emphasis must be on inspiring change rather than controlling or directing it. This subtle distinction requires the Army‟s leaders to acknowledge that they cannot control transformation, but can only control small parts of the organization, and that transformation will occur only in response to significant shifts within the system or a dramatic change in the environment – not change messages alone.