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Midcourse After-Action Review
As we transition from the COVID-19 mitigation phase to the “COVID-19 mitigation” public health and national security consequence mitigation phase (shorthand “Reopening America”), it is appropriate, indeed necessary, to conduct a real after-action review. We need to accurately capture what was planned, trained, and resourced before 2020, and what actually happened because there will be a next time. That next time may be a wild bug or a bio-weapon. Shame on us if we squander this horrifically destructive wake-up call.
The real after-action review was perfected in the Army of the late 1980s as a key tool to outperform the Warsaw Pact with far fewer soldiers. For a brief period, when the stakes seemed highest, politics and careerism were thrust aside and every unit was trained to the point of repeated failure, with a structured after-action review system staffed by the very best sergeants and officers to help or drag the unit to the truth of why their plan or process failed. The expected, the required outcome was improvement on the next iteration, demonstrated ability to learn quickly from mistakes while under extreme pressure.
This training system found its highest expression, for tank and infantry units, at the National Training Center on Fort Irwin in the high desert of California. This was no dumping ground, no career sidetrack. It was a premier assignment for the Observer Controllers (think referee, umpire, and coach with complete tape and audio) and OPFOR, the soldiers trained in a unit to emulate the Russians on their very best day, with operational equipment and without a vodka haze. Indeed, commanders interviewed after they had directly engaged the Iraqi tank units in Desert Storm said that war had turned out to be easier than their NTC training experiences.
We likely need a team of the early 1990s generation “wise men,” retired generals, to come in and lead a whole of government AAR in June, preparing through May, so that we are better prepared to respond to the next threat. These were the OCs at the very highest level, “mentoring” general officers and their staffs through externally evaluated exercises. I propose that generation because they will be least likely to have been contaminated by national and institutional politics since then.
An after-action review might be roughly organized along the following lines:
Planning and preparatory phase: this goes back to the early 1990s, as massive scale bioterrorism was recognized as a threat after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It concludes around the end of January 2020, or perhaps at the point the “15 days to slow the spread” message was published. Focus should probably be post-2001.
- Intelligence: What was our intelligence, our surveillance system? How was it expected to operate? How did it operate? Who had responsibility? Who had resources to perform these tasks?
- Organization: What was our patient to national system of medical prevention and response? Did we have a plan to respond to pandemics? How had it performed in past public health crises?
- Training: What was our training system at the national level for testing plans and procedures against enemies we hoped never to really fight?
- Logistics: What was our logistics posture? What was the organizational structure? How did we plan to have the right equipment, beds, and trained personnel at the right place at the right time?
Containment phase: The early contact-tracing, treatment and quarantine phase, including the travel bans. Again look at intelligence, organization, training, and logistics.
Mitigation phase: Mid-March until at least 1 May 2020. Again look at intelligence, organization, training, and logistics.
This should all be on camera, no agency leader allowed to evade or engage in blame-shifting or avoidance. President Trump should open the first session with a clear statement that we are here to learn for next time, because we believe there will be one or more next times, nature or human-caused. He should point out that the whole of America came together in response, and direct that recommendations look at what has to be federal and what proved better at the state and local level and in the private sector. President Trump should direct that any reorganization recommendations be budget neutral, given the massive government-imposed hit on the American worker and family.
Published in General
That sounds very sensible, if somewhat beyond the immediate crisis.
Separate from this, but perhaps building on its outcomes, might be a look at our preparedness for the other plausible non-nuclear* existential threat, that of an electromagnetic pulse. The devastation wrought by this simple virus is astounding, but still pales in comparison to what’s possible.
* Non-nuclear in the sense that it isn’t atomic bombs landing on our mainland.
I agree, and the mid-pandemic AAR needs to happen by June, not later, as it is necessary to capture both uncomfortable truth and good news that should be applied to refining or replacing processes and procedures and even federal agency organization and tasking. The point is to be more ready this next year, just in case a new bad bug or even a bio-weapon shows up.
Aye, there’s the rub. No agency leader is under the UCMJ and few have been subject to the intense indoctrination to honor, duty, country that contributed to the success of the Cold War military AAR. More recently, under Bush, Obama, and Trump there has been an ongoing naval training scandal, crews being deployed to and executing tours of duty without much of the training necessary to properly operate even their mission critical systems.
The story has bubbled up several times over the last two decades, but the issues never properly resolved. The Cold War discipline that made the AARs you describe a success dissipated even in the military, and was never likely to succeed in the continual avoidance/deflecting Olympiad of Washington, DC. Would that it were otherwise.
Which leaves us with the usual institution we look to to help us hold our institutions responsible, the fourth estate. Which is why the debate for the next year will be why alleged victims of the disease were disproportionately minority, as if the criminal direction from political actors weren’t to attribute every death possible to Covid-19, and even if the disproportion is only arrived at by a very selective cherry-picking of the statistics. If they apply actual statistics and haven’t made them up to suit their propaganda objectives.
In the absence of an effective AAR culture, we need to identify what journalists are capable of the task and imbue on them our desires and expectations that an effective accounting be held and that they play their role. I nominate Michael Yon, who covered the Hong Kong protests and the Wuhan outbreak for openers.
This will not happen accidentally, or in the normal course of business. Vigorous action will be required, by agents not beholden to Big Media, which is too corrupt to serve in any meaningful accounting.
Congress didn’t check Nixon’s Watergate, it was a janitor that reported the issue and reporters who pushed it.
Obama didn’t have a smigden of scandal because the press didn’t report it. I like that Dunham is investigating, but also a little uncomfortable that it looks like the current administration going after the last. The free press should be strong enough to nip crap in the bud. I can’t imagine how Trump will get away with what Obama did.
The press seems oblivious to Joe Biden’s state of confusion.
This is an excellent idea, Clifford. We must identify our mistakes and correct them, as well as plan for the future, with open eyes and commitment.
I think this needs to be more like a military air crash safety investigation. Separate and apart from any disciplinary action, everyone who is interviewed is assured that their statements can’t be used against them and will be non-attributed in the resulting report, but they must be open and honest to the safety investigator. The investigator then collects all the evidence and makes the best effort at describing in detail the cause(s) of the accident and the corrective actions for manufacture, design, maintenance, command and/or training. The attitude was saving future lives is more important than punishing bad actors (if they be). The information collected by the safety investigator was never shared with the criminal or administrative action investigator(s). If there was any punitive action it had to come from evidence gathered independent of the safety investigation.
With this bifurcated system no one had a 5th Amendment right to remain silent to the safety investigator. People were free to be candid without fear of consequence.
Here’s a control marker: If this isn’t addressed in the AAR, the AAR is a whitewash.
If this is the focus of the AAR it will be a DNC/NT smear job. I look forward to the NYT series on decades of pandemic and bio-terrorism talk, compared to actions.
I agree too. Not sure we can be prepared for everything that can possibly happen, but a pandemic is something we should be able to plan contingencies.
A few desultory suggestions:
1) If this is going to take an AAR form, strongly consider enlisting advisory help of someone like Don Vandegriff (no I’m not on commission from him).
2) If this goes more in the direction Rodin advocates (and honestly I lean more towards that), innate pattern-recognition skills will be extremely important — think Tetsuo “Ted” Fujita.
3) We are barely part of an episode deep into our waking nightmare with the Wuhan Virus, until a proven vaccine and/or curative becomes available (if ever); ergo, resist the temptation to fiddle with the focus of such a Midpoint Retrospective (the Action ain’t gonna have an “After” for a while yet) such that the takeaways end up stripped of concrete and Wuhan-mission-specific applicability — the time to abstract out the lessons for other missions will come later.
It shouldn’t be the focus, but the CDC’s performance in the epidemic has been pretty bad.
I suspect that is likely true, along with a whole bunch of alphabet soup entities and credentialed “experts.” The point is to learn, to improve against the next pandemic (natural or weaponized), not fix and avoid blame.
I believe I understand your suggested model, having read a bit around the edges of Army Safety Center publications. The AAR system drove ownership. The unit was central in speaking up, in owning what they thought and did at each phase. Instead of an expert investigator making a finding, the OCs, later OC/Ts (observer controller/trainer) were facilitating self-learning. What you are describing, as it would be applied to the whole of government, is effectively a super-IG, or independent counsel, and we see where that has gone across the government.
AAR is appropriate at mid-course, in the next 60 days, as we can expect new seasons with the same virus, as well at the possibility of yet another “novel” virus bursting out on the world this next influenza-like respiratory ailment season.