LESSONS ENCOUNTERED

Lamb with Franco
101
Hadley, interview. Others also note the poor communications between the Pentagon
and the field at this juncture.
102
Bush, Decision Points, 365; Cheney, 430; Rumsfeld, 364.
103
Cheney, 440–441, 449; see also discussion and notes below.
104
Gates observes that the decisionmaking process can be too stark and uncompromising,
and that some consensus is necessary. Gates, 384–385; Clinton, 130, 133.
105
Dempsey, interview; McChrystal, interview. General McChrystal stated that “strategically,
his thinking evolved away from the direct use of military power to a focus on what
was in people’s minds. The winner, he thought, would be the person who understood the
problem the quickest and adapted to it—those who learned fastest.”
106
The quotations and discussion in this paragraph draw upon March and Heath, 205–206,
where they discuss the “Garbage Can Model” of decisionmaking. This model is more
valuable for its descriptive than its explanatory power, in the opinion of the author.
107
There are different approaches to decisionmaking that do not value unified effort so
much. Some practitioners (or “pragmatists”) argue leaders could and should exploit
impediments to unified effort to further their agendas. Still others believe advantages can
be found in the “flexible implementation, uncoordinated actions, and cognitive confusion”
that characterize lack of unified effort.
108
For example, there were noteworthy pockets of interagency success. The Institute for
National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University has published a set of such
studies, arguing they point the way forward for better interagency collaboration.
109
For example, see Bush, Decision Points, 88, where the President relates his frustration
with interagency “squabbling” and how despite his efforts to eliminate it, “nothing
worked”; Rice, 16, 22, where she tied interagency friction to poor relations between Powell
and Rumsfeld and their mutual “distrust,” which led to dysfunction and nearly brought
things “to the breaking point”; Clinton, 24, where she notes, “the traditional infighting
between State and Defense . . . in many previous administrations had come to resemble
the Sharks and the Jets from West Side Story”; Rumsfeld, 525, 527–528, where he blames
failures in Iraq on Rice’s inability to manage the interagency process correctly, explains his
repeated recommendations “that they institute chances to improve the President’s most
important national security body” but states that “there [was] little or no improvement”
and that the dysfunction continued to “undermine our nation’s policies”; Gates, 92, 341,
where he acknowledges “lack of institutional cohesion at the top of the government” and
relates that upon arriving he and his staff found “interagency planning, coordination
and resourcing are, by far, the weakest link” for U.S. operations in Afghanistan; Myers,
301–305, where he asserts that the United States cannot deal effectively with 21 st -century
threats, that good integration in operations is the exception and not the rule, and that no
strategy is “likely to be fully successful” without better interagency coordination; Franks,
375–376, where he notes, “insufficient trust between the departments” of State and
Defense, “deep and inflexible commitment to their own ideas [that] was disruptive and
260