Joint Center for Operational Analysis After Action Review on Haiti

Dr. Karl Weick often talks about the tendency of individuals, teams, departments, organizations, and networks to revert to well-learned behaviors when they experience stress.

Over many years, the Southern Command of the U.S. military had worked hard to build an effective interagency organization -- largely influenced by the interagency successes of the Joint Interagency Task Force--South.

However, under the overwhelming stress of the Haitian earthquake of January 12, 2010, and under the leadership of a new commander, SOUTHCOM snapped back into a familiar Department of Defense organizational structure.

The Joint Center for Operational Analysis, part of the Joint Forces Command, recently released a helpful "after-action review" of the performance of the Joint Task Force - Haiti: "USSOUTHCOM and JTF-Haiti… Some Challenges and Considerations in Forming a Joint Task Force."

In the report, Brigadier General David Garza, in comments on the report from July 2, 2010, makes the following statement about the decision to revert to a well-learned Department of Defense organizational structure, instead of continuing to use SOUTHCOM's more-interagency-focused structure in place before the earthquake.

“The in-stride decision by General Fraser to re-align to a J-Code Structure was
a pivotal decision for US SOUTHCOM. This decision allowed us to quickly organize
around a well understood organizational methodology designed for coordinated
planning across essential planning functions necessary for any event on the
spectrum of conflict. This alignment gave us the ability to speak a common
language, quickly facilitate the infusion of the staff augments, employ OPTs
[operational planning teams] efficiently, communicate better internally and with
external stakeholders like the JS, Components, JTFs, JTF-H, other partner
nations, agencies, and the IA. It also had the effect of invigorating the work
force and it gave us better teamwork in support of this crisis. The model we
were under did not survive the crucible of the crisis.”

Three quick points on General Garza's observation:

(1) The White House designated U.S. AID as the Lead Federal Agency for the crisis, yet the organizational charts in the JCOA report portray two separate power bases -- SOUTHCOM and "the UN Cluster," with MINUSTAH (UN Mission to Haiti) in between, and a dotted-line relationship between MINUSTAH and Joint Task Force -Haiti. Nothing in the JCOA document demonstrates that the military at any point believed themselves to be under the leadership of US AID in their response to the Haitian earthquake. If the original SOUTHCOM structure had been maintained, instead of rejected, there might have been a way for US AID to lead the military components of the operation more effectively.

(2) The key word in Garza's quotation is "us" -- "allowed us to quickly organize," "gave us the ability to speak a common language," and "gave us better teamwork." Perpetuating a DoD organization, vocabulary, and methodology might have helped "us" (DoD), but it might have blocked the ability of outsiders (the rest of us) to tie in to the DoD's secret structure, language, and systems in order to produce a "whole-of-government" response, rather than just a DoD response.

(3) One of the words that Dr. Chris Lamb has started to use to describe effective interagency national security teams is that they are "fragile." This case study gives an example of that phenomenon; an interagency system built up over many years of hard work in JIATF-South was swept away "in-stride" by a new commander and his staff who were much more familiar with a traditional DoD system.

Action Item: Congress should allocate $100,000 for staff support to an Interagency Policy Committee at the National Security Staff to study the impasse between the Department of Defense's Combatant Command system and the State Departments Chief of Mission system. This research could investigate the wisdom of creating truly interagency "theater teams" in the unorganized spaces between countries (e.g. country teams) and continents (e.g. combatant commands). Afghanistan/Pakistan is an urgent test case; four segments of the African continent are more "off-the-front-page" test cases.