{"id":498,"date":"2009-04-05T13:25:02","date_gmt":"2009-04-05T13:25:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=498"},"modified":"2009-04-05T13:25:02","modified_gmt":"2009-04-05T13:25:02","slug":"at-the-hot-gates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2009\/04\/at-the-hot-gates\/","title":{"rendered":"At the hot gates: a salute to Nate Fick"},"content":{"rendered":"

After viewing The Wire<\/em><\/a>, certainly the best television series I have ever seen (and perhaps the best ever made), I\u00a0naturally sought out Generation Kill<\/em><\/a>, from the same writing team – David Simons and Ed Burns.\u00a0 Also gripping and intelligent viewing, although (unlike The Wire<\/em>), we only see one side’s view\u00a0of the conflict.\u00a0\u00a0 The series follows a US Marine platoon, Second Platoon of Bravo Company of the 1st\u00a0\u00a0Reconnaissance\u00a0 Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, as they invade Iraq in March-April 2003.\u00a0\u00a0 Like Band of Brothers<\/em><\/a>, we come to know the platoon and its members very well, feeling joy at their wins, and sorrow at their losses.\u00a0 The TV series is based on an eponymous\u00a02004 book by a journalist, Evan Wright, who was\u00a0embedded with the platoon in this campaign.
\nThe TV series led me, however,\u00a0\u00a0to read another book about this platoon, written by its commanding officer Lt. Nathaniel Fick (played in the series by actor Stark Sands). \u00a0\u00a0 The book is superb!\u00a0 \u00a0 Fick writes extremely well, intelligently and evocatively, of his training and his battle experiences.\u00a0 His prose style is direct and uncluttered, without being a parody of itself (as is, say, Hemingway’s).\u00a0 His writing is remarkably smooth, gliding along, and this aspect reminded me of Doris Lessing, on one of her good days.\u00a0\u00a0 Fick clearly has a firm moral centre (perhaps an outcome of his Jesuit high school education), evident from his initial decision to apply to the military while still an undergraduate classics major at Dartmouth.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Having felt a similarly-strong desire as an undergraduate to experience life at the hot gates, I empathized immensely with his description of himself at that time.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Fick’s moral grounding is shown throughout the book, not only in the decisions he takes in battle, and his reflections on these decisions, but also in the way he refrains from naming those of his commanding officers whom he does not respect.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 He also shows enormous loyalty to the men he commanded.
\nAnd Fick’s experiences demonstrate again that no organization, not even military forces, \u00a0can succeed for very long when commands are only obeyed mindlessly.\u00a0\u00a0 Successfully execution of commands requires intelligent dialogue between commanders and recipients, in a process of argumentation<\/a>, to ensure that uttered commands are actionable, appropriate, feasible, effective, consistent, ethical and advisable.\u00a0 Consequently, the most interesting features of the book for me were the descriptions of decision-making, descriptions often implicit.\u00a0\u00a0 Officers and non-officers, it seems, are drilled, through hours of rote learning, in the checklists and guiding principles\u00a0necessary for low-level, tactical decision-making, so that these decisions can be automatic.\u00a0 Only after these mindless drills are second nature are trainee officers led to reflect on the wider (strategic and ethical) aspects of decisions,\u00a0 of decision-making and of actions.\u00a0\u00a0 I wonder to what extent such an approach would work in business, where most decision-making, even the most ordinary and tactical, is acquired through direct experience and not usually taught as drills.\u00a0 Mainly this is because we lack codification of low-level decision-making, although strong fmcg companies such as Mars or Unilever come closest to codification of tactical decision-making.
\nFick’s frequent frustrations with the commands issued to him seem to arise because these commands often ignore basic tactical constraints (such as the area of impact of weapons or the direction of firing of weapons), and because they often seem to be driven by a concern for appearances over substantive outcomes.\u00a0\u00a0 In contrast to this frustration, one of Fick’s commanding heroes is Major Richard Whitmer<\/a>, whose unorthodox managerial style and keen intelligence is well described.\u00a0 A military force able to accommodate such a style is to be admired, so I hope it is not a reflection on the USMC that Whitmer appears to have spent the years since the Iraq invasion running a marine recruitment office<\/a>.\u00a0 Next time that I’m CEO of a Fortune 500 company, I’ll actively try to recruit Whitmer and Fick, since\u00a0they are both clearly superb managers.
\nI was also struck by how little the troops on the ground in Iraq knew of the larger, strategic picture.\u00a0 Fick’s team relied on broadcasts from the BBC World Service on a personal, non-military-issue transister radio to learn what was happening as they invaded Iraq.\u00a0\u00a0 We who were not involved in the war also relied on the BBC, particularly Mark Urban’s fascinating daily strategic analyses on BBC TV’s Newsnight<\/em>.\u00a0 Were we remote viewers better informed than those in the ground in Iraq?\u00a0 Quite possibly.
\nNathaniel Fick now works for a defence think tank, the Center for a New American Security<\/a>.\u00a0 A 2006 speech he gave at the Pritzer Military Library in Chicago can be seen here<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 A seminar talk to Johns Hopkins University’s series on Rethinking the Future Nature of Competition and Conflict<\/em> can be found here<\/a> (scroll down to 2006-01-25).\u00a0 And here <\/a>is Fick’s take on recent war poetry.
\nReferences:<\/em>
\nK. Atkinson et al. <\/em>[2008]: Command dialogues<\/a>. In: I. Rahwan and P. Moraitis (Editors): Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems (ArgMAS 2008)<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> AAMAS 2008, Lisbon, Portugal.
\nNathaniel Fick [2005]:\u00a0 One Bullet Away:\u00a0 The Making of a Marine Officer<\/em>.\u00a0 London, UK:\u00a0 Phoenix.
\nEvan Wright [2004]:\u00a0 Generation Kill<\/em>. Putnam.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After viewing The Wire, certainly the best television series I have ever seen (and perhaps the best ever made), I\u00a0naturally sought out Generation Kill, from the same writing team – David Simons and Ed Burns.\u00a0 Also gripping and intelligent viewing, although (unlike The Wire), we only see one side’s view\u00a0of the conflict.\u00a0\u00a0 The series follows […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,23,27,34,35,40,62,77],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-argumentation","category-decision-theory","category-film","category-heroes","category-history","category-joint-action-society","category-planning","category-team-working","p1","y2009","m04","d05","h13"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}