Command Red Team

Red Team Challenges
case, closed-minded individuals who refuse to consider any alternatives, and
uncompromising individuals who strictly adhere to preconceived notions or community
positions. Such individuals can serve a positive role by ensuring that more views are
presented, but they may also frustrate efforts to fully examine other alternatives, and they
may cause the group to adopt the position of its most vocal or immoveable member in
order to move on to other tasks. In such cases, the red team may have to use its own
powers of persuasion to broaden the scope of deliberations, taking care to avoid
approaches that could generate resistance. In addition, the red team itself needs to ensure
it does not adopt an approach that might unduly sway the group or constrain
deliberations.
(7) Death by Coordination. With or without red team support, a working
group may consider all aspects of a problem, explore the full range of potential solutions,
and develop a well-crafted draft product. During subsequent coordination, well-meaning
staff officers and section chiefs might make incremental modifications to the draft and
tone down one contentious point after another, successively moderating the draft’s
language, stripping away its key judgments, and watering down its impact. In such
situations, the red team may be able to circulate its own separate product, one that
incorporates all the working group’s key points, but that is reviewed and approved
through the red team’s separate staffing channels. Essentially, the red team can act as the
staff’s backchannel surrogate, bypassing roadblocks in order to present less diluted
assessments, recommendations, unconventional findings, or to propose unorthodox
solutions to key decision makers.
(8) Institutional Inertia. Working groups may decide that existing
assessments are adequate for the purpose at hand, assuming that the OE has not changed
enough to require a new look, or presuming that published community positions already
incorporate all perspectives to the relevant problem. Since a decision to revise standing
plans or products could result in considerable new work by specific members of the
group and would delay progress by the entire group, there is strong pressure to accept
previously published assessments as they are. If the production of the original
assessment was especially difficult or contentious, the pressure against revising it will be
even stronger. Operationally, the group could expend more energy in a futile effort to
execute the plan as written, regardless of circumstances, than would be required to adapt
the plan to meet new requirements or exploit new conditions. The red team mission is to
encourage the group to critically re-examine existing plans and assessments to verify
their validity, and when necessary, point out sections that may no longer apply, and to
offer alternative perspectives that the standing assessments may not address.
(9) Hubris. Overconfidence and complacency can blind a staff to changing
conditions and adversary adaptations. Staffs may assume their analysis is flawless and
any alternative assessments must be inherently invalid or that their plans have anticipated
all contingencies and will be executed exactly as planned, with no unintended
consequences or negative second and third order effects. Red teams were specifically
created to help overconfident staffs avoid such potentially fatal errors, especially staffs
that tend to deny their need for red team support. Staffs operating under the illusion that
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