3 October 2011
LGen Andrew Leslie’s last battle was with Parkinson’s Law. Leslie retired from the Canadian Forces Sept. 5th, 2011, his last assignment being Chief of Transformation. His final report and recommendations, that would reduce DND administrative overhead in order to strengthen the fighting forces, are meeting strong opposition within the Department. Leslie is now retired, but the forces of Parkinson’s Law are girding for battle.
C. Northcote Parkinson was a British naval historian and scholar of public administration. In 1957, based upon his observations of the British Civil Service, Parkinson formulated and published a number of sociological “laws,” which were said to accurately project the growth of a bureaucracy. Among his “laws” were: ‘an official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals,’ ‘officials make work for each other,’ and ‘work expands to fill time available for its completion.’
The growth of administrative tail at the expense of teeth is nothing new to the Canadian Forces. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the cost of administration was consuming so much of the Canadian defense budget that Parliament, led by Minister of National Defense Paul Hellyer, passed the Canadian Forces Reorganization Act in order to free up money that would purchase new capital equipment for the fighting forces.
The problem confronting LGen Leslie was therefore a particular example in 2011 of the sociological law that, left to itself, a bureaucracy will grow spontaneously and indefinitely, absorbing more and more resources until some crisis is reached.
The growth of the defense budget in the 2002 – 2010 era due to the war in Afghanistan provided abundant forage on which the DND bureaucracy could flourish. Leslie’s mission was to propose a means of removing the cancer without killing the patient.
Not all administration is bad. Good administration is one of the ten principles of war. The purpose of administration in national defense is to provide for the needs of the fighting forces. But, when the size of administration becomes excessive that relationship inverts into one in which the fighting forces exist to provide for the needs of the administration.
When that inversion happens, Administration sucks the energy and even the life out of the fighting forces. Regulations multiply. Reports and returns are demanded. Movement slows. Eventually, the fighting forces are sacrificed in order to preserve the Administration. Accounts of all of these malpractices abound in Leslie’s report.
Although the official reception of Leslie’s report was cheery, reports out of Ottawa indicate a strong movement within DND to bury the report, as Leslie himself forecasted and observed as the fate of similar previous endeavours. Retired Chief of Defense Staff, General Rick Hillier, for one thundered that the enactment of Leslie’s recommendations would mean the end of the CF, or words to that effect.
A weakness counting against the adoption of many of Leslie’s recommendations is the quality of writing in the report. The content of the report is protected by thick armoured plating of cliché, making it impossible to read for any length of time. There is practically no sentence in it that is free of cliché or of some hackneyed phrase. Certainly no paragraph. Never mind the arcane and technical aspects of the subject matter.
How can one embrace a report which contains statements like these:
“Not only are we going to have to continue to live within our means and balance our books, we are going to have to carefully reallocate from within to meet the new and emerging defence demands of tomorrow (some amongst many that include the Arctic, more part time reservists, cyber, special forces, and sailors going to sea) that will drive us to be even more agile, more deployable, more ready to respond.”?
That single statement, selected from the first page, contains five clichés - italicized for ease of identification - and two hackneyed expressions. A demand may compel us to be more agile, but too many demands drive us to distraction. The Arctic, more part-time reservists, cyber, special forces, and sailors going to sea do not at first blush appear to be defense demands. ‘Cyber’, absent a terminating hyphen, is not even a word recognized in The Canadian Oxford Dictionary.
Leslie’s treasure chest is full of gems like this, taken from Chapter 4: Design and Theory: Options Development:
The theory and practice of organizational architecture sees public and private enterprises as a manifestation of their various environments. These environments can be physical and literal (such as the geographic, financial, and human resource environments), as well as conceptual (including process, structural and even cultural environments); they influence and in some cases determine the behaviours and outcomes of the organization. In recognition of this, it was decided to pursue an initial design approach that reflected prevailing organizational architecture theory by attempting to address the complexity that characterizes the DND/CF.
Pick any page, sentence after sentence and paragraph after paragraph are replete with execrable terms and quasi-academic phraseology. Trying to read this report from start to finish is like trying to navigate a mental minefield without getting exhausted, or blown up.
The trouble with reliance on cliché and hackneyed phrases is that they express hackneyed thought. Nobody cares about hackneyed thinking. Why should a believer in “combing the tail to magnify the teeth” get behind Leslie’s particular formulation of that process? Absent a rallying cry to battle, Leslie’s potential supporters are left confused and scattered against an Administration sure of its value and intent on survival.
Just to test the alertness of his readers, Leslie could have tossed in a statement like:
- “A madman could rampage through NDHQ, swinging a broadaxe at random, and hit no bone, cut no sinew, and sever no vital artery...”
- referred to superfluous administration as “a fattened herd whose slaughter would feed the fighting forces, in whose capacity the martial reputation of the CDS lies…”
- For sheer entertainment, have measured progress in terms of a bodycount, or in gallons of blood spilt - anything to enliven the subject.
Leslie’s report, another in a continuing series against the forces of Parkinson’s Law, takes altogether too careful an aim at what should be cut, is far too cautious in expression, and drains the worthy enterprise of the necessary emotional edge required to carry it out.
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